Are the garden walls starting to crumble?

It's been one of the main gripes against telcos (at least here in Australia) - that the walled garden approach to controlling the customer is too restrictive and has hampered the uptaked of mobile content and services. So too has been the over pricing of these services in am emerging market where lower consumer costs might have helped the small number of 3G users actually try and get more from their devices.

But it seems that at least one Aussie telco is starting to move towards a more open and competitive mobile playing field.

It's long been the opinion of many of my colleagues that once the walled garden approach to customer control .. uh .. relationship management .. comes down, then we'll really start to see some of the promise of the 3G networks realised. I'm sure there are plenty of Flash Lite developers out there who would like to see the carrier cut out of things a little more, since they're reticence to adopt the Flash Lite platform has been a major hurdle to the development of the next generation of Flash mobile applications.

Time will tell of course, but perhaps we're moving in the right direction. Read more here