They sold out of wifi-enabled iPad mini tablets at 8.30am this morning at the flagship Apple store in Regent Street, London. It has been a similar story every day this week. The nice Apple lady in the shop told me that the queues were now starting at around 6.00am.

I always vowed never to write a piece based on my own personal experience as a telecoms consumer. But I am excusing myself just this once because two things happened to me in the last week that have caused me to question whether operators really are committed to improving the customer experience. And just to be clear, I am adopting a broad definition here of customer experience rather than the narrow big data and analytics part of the equation.

The thought of Apple becoming an MVNO and offering its customers IP voice and messaging services as a cheap alternative to conventional voice and SMS is one that keeps many mobile operator CEOs awake at night. It is not just the loss of voice and SMS revenues that alarms operators. It is the risk that the operator would lose so much of its retail business. Network operators would become invisible to many of their (previous) customers.

When the mobile industry became aware of the potential of HSPA to offer high speed mobile broadband services more than five years ago, the key protagonists – mobile operators and network infrastructure vendors – decided that this would inevitably mean the end of the public wifi business model.

It’s hard to imagine an industry that generates US$200 billion in global revenues – a figure that’s growing 35% a year – as anything other than an outstanding success story. But for some time there has been a widely held view that the mobile content sector is failing to live up to expectations, 3G has disappointed and mobile operators have thrown away an opportunity to develop a revenue stream that could ultimately surpass the voice business.