I'm not sure whether we should laugh or cry at this point?
"The helpful Lucent engineer advised me to take a few steps back because: "We've discovered that with W-CDMA there is a blind spot immediately below the antenna." Then he advised me to take a few steps to the side because: "We've discovered that W-CDMA doesn't go round corners too well."
Friday 1st March 2002 3:50pm
3GSM Review: Ovum on vendors' flight from hype
The industry focus moves to problem solving - which has got to be good news
Major infrastructure vendors are making serious efforts to reign in the hype that has characterised the industry for the last few years. Jeremy Green, Ovum research director, Wireless Group, here shares what was revealed to him - much of it good - by the industry's big names.
The 3GSM World Congress in Cannes was an odd hybrid of party and hangover rolled into one. Attendees who were expecting a more sobre, kinder, gentler mobile industry must have been disappointed by the all too familiar flotillas of yachts, the stilt-walkers, the rickshaws and the shrink-wrapped 'exhibition ladies'.
There were, as ever, a multiplicity of exciting new devices, perhaps most notably the FOMA handsets on the NTT DoCoMo stand.
But beneath the bustle and frenzy there are clear signs that vendors - particularly the major infrastructure vendors - are making serious efforts to reign in the hype that has characterised the industry for the last few years.
There seems to be serious recognition that it is time to get real about 3G. Most of us have seen enough PowerPoint slides on whizzy potential applications to last a lifetime, and now we want to see stuff actually doing something. The exhibition, and the associated conference, was dominated by what might be called 'the flight from hype'.
Nokia
The reality-deprived got plenty to feed their cravings. A high point was an analysts' visit to the Nokia 'Reality Room'. In previous years anything labelled a reality room was almost duty bound to feature demonstrations of the sort of things that would 'very soon be part of our everyday reality' - you know, like pocket video phones (rather like the ones actually on display on the DoCoMo stand, to be fair).
But this year's reality room was really... real. The assembled analysts were treated to a look at a collection of grey metal boxes. These proved to be several different base station units, of the sort that could really be screwed to walls or poles. Another real grey box was a radio network controller unit, with real blinking red and green lights and real cables going in and out.
Most exciting of all was the preview of the user experience - a chance to listen to the voice quality on an actual W-CDMA telephone call. The call was already established, so I couldn't enjoy the excitement of the call set-up process. It was also to a GSM phone, so obviously I couldn't tell what a real W-CDMA to W-CDMA call would sound like. However, the call sounded, well, just like a telephone call really. But I was assured that the voice quality on W-CDMA would in any case be 'no worse than GSM'.
Subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) measurements backing this up were available, though no one had them to hand.
Lucent
The Nokia Reality Room was a flight of sheer fantasy compared to the dose of reality available on the Lucent stand. Like the Nokia stand, I could experience a real, yet already established, W-CDMA voice call, though this time it was to a fixed telephone.
This time the level of reality was almost too hard to bear. The helpful Lucent engineer advised me to take a few steps back because: "We've discovered that with W-CDMA there is a blind spot immediately below the antenna." Then he advised me to take a few steps to the side because: "We've discovered that W-CDMA doesn't go round corners too well."
The call might have been equivalent in voice quality to GSM, although it didn't sound like it to me. Funnily enough, the engineer didn't have any MOS scores to hand either, though he said he'd have a look around for some when he got back from the show.
Nortel
The demonstration on the Nortel stand was the piece de resistance. I was treated to the unedifying spectacle of a wired demonstration of a wireless connection - a 3G application running on a PDA which was connected to a 3G base station via a piece of cable. This was, of course, "to protect the demonstration from all the noisy radio interference in the area".
Thankfully, Nortel managed to complete a voice call demonstration - without the need for cabling - to much the same level of quality as those of the other vendors.
Vendors, particularly the 2nd and 3rd tier, were applying liberal doses of reality to 3G launch schedules. They pointed out that operators might have 'launched' commercial service by the end of 2002 (or more likely 2003) but that, either way, there would not be any measurable uptake by customers until 2004.
2.5G
There was reality in spades for 2.5G, about which some vendors were less than kind. One operator told the conference that it didn't have enough "grunt" to be useful for any kind of serious application. Others told us that it certainly wasn't fit for corporate users, for whom the narrowness of the pipe did not allow IP security layers to be run alongside the applications themselves. We heard a lot less about how 'always-on' was going to solve every problem anyone had ever thought of.
Problem solving, not paradigm shifts
This isn't to say that there wasn't any sparkle at Cannes, or that it felt depressing to be there. There were application developers aplenty and innovative designs for terminals. There were also a number of companies offering billing and service management solutions that claim to solve some of the problems that, as business model issues, have plagued the early years of wireless internet services.
Operators were more open to constructive dialogue about new ways of working and sharing revenues - and less ready to claim sovereign rights to 'own the customer'. This is why this year's conference was so different from past conferences. The focus was much more on problem solving and less about paradigm shifts.
The market is recognising that it has staked out enough territory and now it's time to think about how to settle it.
Welcome back reality, we've missed you.
Related Ovum research: Mobile@Ovum Advisory Service.
Ovum Forecasts: Global Wireless Markets 2002-2006
For more information email info@ovum.com or visit www.ovum.com
For more information email info@ovum.com or visit www.ovum.com
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