In a forthcoming Yankee Group report I’m going to accuse mobile operators of adopting a herd mentality. I will argue they’re all following the herd (some more blindly than others) by pursuing almost identical mobile data strategies – and consequently they are in danger of neglecting traditional mobile services and alienating some profitable customers.

However, in one aspect of their mobile data businesses these same opeators are more like chickens. Have you ever tried herding chickens? Or is it cats? – I can never remember. Let’s go with chickens.

What am I talking about? I’m referring to the terminology operators have adopted to describe their mobile data revenue streams – and specifically to distinguish between handset-based data and laptop-based data. Everyone is doing their own thing. Here’s a quick sample:

• Vodafone keeps things nice and simple – it uses the terms Mobile Internet and PC Connectivity.
• Orange gets us all confused: it uses Mobile Broadband to encompass all 3G and EDGE users, and it uses 3G Dongles (as a subset of Mobile Broadband) to refer to, well, 3G dongle users.
• Telefonica uses Mobile Broadband Connectivity as an umbrella term for Big Screen and Small Screen Connectivity (nice to see Telefonica adopting Yankee Group’s Big Screen/Small Screen terms – we assume the check’s in the post).
• Telecom Italaia uses Mobile broadband, and, like Telefonica, segments it by Big Screen and Small Screen
• T-Mobile doesn’t get specific, preferring instead to talk at a high level about mobile data/internet, but not disclosing any helpful details.

So, they might all be pursuing almost dentical mobile data strategies, but when it comes to terminology, we certainly can’t accuse these guys of following the herd.
In an industry whose lifeblood is standards amd interoperability, it’s somewhat surprising to see such diversity.

But does language matter? Should we even bother tying to herd these chickens?
It would certainly make comparisons easier. The financial community, regulators, and of course us analysts would welcome it. How about you? Do you care?