The 3GSM Conference in Cannes featured a lot of flash, a lot of optimism, even some good writing.

But Cannes is a place of fantasy, a willing suspension of disbelief. It even has Las Vegas beat in this regard. Hey, the French thought the Maginot Line would hold. Some of them no doubt think smoking is good for you. When a diet of red wine and goose fat leaves you without heart disease you'll believe anything.

What drives the optimism is what is happening in the developing world. Beyond the desktops of the Internet, mobile phones represent everything positive about the future. They're telephony and computing in one hand-held package. They have driven technological change in Africa as nothing before has, and they're just getting warmed up.

Still, if mobility wants to succeed in the developed world -- and the 3G explosion is all about Western markets -- it does have to compete. And most carriers are not yet willing to.

Obstinacy, over-expansion, and hubris killed the National Hockey League, killed it deader than Maurice Richard. They can kill 3G too.

Like the bird? It's from Canadian coverage of the NHL lock-out today.

As with hockey, so too with cellular. You can see the possibility of failure most clearly in the U.S., where carriers like Verizon think crippling features like Bluetooth and forcing users to move photos over their network is going to work. It won't. There are too many alternatives, tiny cameras with tiny disks or drives you can plug into a USB port and send via WiFi from a laptop.

A few months ago I didn't believe it was possible that the mobile providers could have a bad year in 2005. With phones becoming PCs, with real broadband coming onstream, how could they lose?

Well, they can. Carriers need big revenue from 3G to keep moving forward. Yet they lack the channels and the flexibility needed to compete in the Internet world, and they're unwilling to adjust until forced to.

Only bad results will force them to.

So bad results they may get.