3G and WAP move slowly
Despite hype, third generation of wireless
offerings progress slowly
By John Frederick Moore
June 7, 2001: 2:51 p.m. ET
cnnfn.cnn.com
NEW YORK (Business2.com) - The hype surrounding 3G wireless
services has gotten so bad
you'd think Microsoft (MSFT, info) was behind the whole thing.
Telecom companies have
talked plenty about all the benefits the third generation of
wireless offerings will provide--most
notably high-speed data transmission, which will let users
receive video and music and play
multiplayer games over cell phones. Until now, however, 3G has
been a classic case of
vaporware.
Although NTT DoCoMo moved forward Wednesday with its trial run
of 3G mobile phones based
on its i-mode service in Japan, the company has delayed the
launch of its 3G video phones
because of a software glitch.
The company already had postponed the full commercial launch
of its 3G service--scheduled for
the end of May--until Oct. 1.
Last Friday, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper reported that
the country's Posts and
Telecommunications Ministry postponed approval of the October
launch because of concerns
about transmission quality.
Although these events mark yet another roadblock in the
long-awaited arrival of 3G services,
analysts say the NTT DoCoMo decision might not be such a bad
thing.
"What this means is a return to sanity," says David
Chamberlain, research director for wireless
Internet services at Probe Research. "There has been so much
hype and so many promises made
and promises broken."
Broken promises and missed deadlines are nothing new to the
technology sector, but the
problem seems to be particularly acute when it comes to the
hype surrounding 3G. So why are so
many companies making pledges they know they can't keep?
"The financial markets are still in charge, and people are
going from quarter to quarter instead
of looking five years down the road," Chamberlain says. "Why
announce 3G when you can't
install it? To make sure you have enough money from investors
to build it out a few years from
now." There's also the question of demand. In the United
States, at least, the need for
full-motion video on a screen slightly
bigger than your thumb isn't readily
apparent to most people.
What's more, it doesn't look as if the
companies responsible for building out
wireless services will be the ones that
figure out how to create that demand.
"The postal service didn't invent
Federal Express," Chamberlain says.
"The wireless carriers are trying to invent applications for
the wireless Internet, and I'm not sure
they're the ones to do it. I don't know who it will be, but
I'm pretty sure it won't be Sprint or
Verizon or AT&T Wireless that will figure out what
applications are going to drive demand."
Unlike 3G, it's not hard to see what the demand is for WAP
services. WAP, or Wireless
Application Protocol, is the de facto standard for delivering
such features as e-mail and text
messaging over wireless networks.
As people become less tethered to desks, they need access to
information normally handled on
PCs. While it would make sense for WAP services to thrive for
this reason, they really haven't.
Ease of use and display interface problems have dragged this
technology down.
A pair of studies released last week said most users of
WAP-enabled cell phones don't use the
extra features because they're either too difficult to use or
too slow. The Meta Group (METG:
down $0.07 to $2.76, Research, Estimates) reported that
between 80and 90 percent of
corporate WAP customers use their cell phones for voice
communications only and indicated a
"wholly unsatisfactory experience" with using the extra
features.
Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research (FORR: down
$0.60 to $23.91, Research,
Estimates), notes that many of the problems associated with
WAP will be addressed by 2.5G
technologies, which offer data rates of up to 53Kb per second.
"You won't have to dial up and the bandwidth will be higher,"
Golvin says.
Along with higher bandwidth, 2.5G also promises to bring
better devices for consumers. "We're
going to get better phones with better screens and better
navigation capabilities, so we can offer
people applications and data that they can actually see and
interact with," says Jack Gold, the
Meta Group's vice president of Web and collaboration
strategies. "It won't be just about phone.
It will be about wireless devices--Palms, PocketPCs, a screen
in your car, it won't matter."
Gold and Golvin note, however, that 2.5G services won't be
widely available until 2003.
As for 3G services, Chamberlain expects that it probably will
be another five years before we
should expect a significant U.S. rollout.
"I wouldn't look at [the NTT DoCoMo delay] and say 3G is going
to crash," Chamberlain says.
"But people are pushing good technology too hard for bad
reasons. It's hard to push patience to
an impatient market." |
