11/29/99 - OPINION: Wireless Brings Web Out of the Dark Ages
Nov. 28 (The Boston Globe/KRTBN)--Even if you didn't want it to, the Internet has quickly become a bigger part of our business, social,
and shopping lives than we ever imagined it might.
The next big Net thing is widely expected to be the growing use of wireless telephones to connect to the World Wide Web, not just by
plugging the phone into your portable computer, but literally by using the phone as a Web-surfing and e-mail collecting device.
Someday, I expect and hope I will be able to tell my disbelieving grandchildren that I was there for the gramophone era of wireless Web
access, when we had all of about 100 picture-free sites to surf, screens of barely 40 letters, and had to "dial" e-mail over the number
keypad.
Over the last two weeks, I have had a chance to actually get paid to play with the new wireless Web phones now being heavily
promoted in the Greater Boston market by Bell Atlantic Mobile and Sprint PCS. (Some other local carriers, particularly Omnipoint, have
some similar services or are rolling them out soon, but it seems objective to say that Bell and Sprint are hawking them most
aggressively, just as the holiday shopping season arrives.)
Creeping onto the Southeast Expressway one afternoon, I downloaded the latest New York Times Co. stock quote. Standing outside
the Kendall Square T stop, I sent my editors an e-mail straight from the phone assuring them I was "working."
I searched a reverse telephone directory to find out who had left me a page. I got a five-day weather forecast for Cape Cod to see if it
might be a nice weekend to visit. I checked with Delta Air Lines to see whether my mother-in-law's flight home from a visit would leave
on time. Sadly, there was no hope she would get to stay with us longer.
And finding myself in Harvard Square one morning, I even got the phone to give me directions for driving all the way to my in-laws' home
in Atlanta. I got pretty accurate and sensible step-by-step directions, including, south of Richmond, "bear right on ramp to I-85 and go
southwest for 492.2 miles," although the phone gave me a wrong turn once I got a quarter-mile from my wife's family's house.
While there are obvious shortcomings and gaps and it is a big pain to have to type in 22 666 7777 8 666 66 to spell "Boston," my road
tests with Sprint PCS Wireless Web and Bell Atlantic Mobile Web Access convinced me that, as William Shatner might say: This is
going to be big. Really big.
Indeed, most indications are that wireless data is going to explode. By early 2002, the Yankee Group in Boston predicts, there could
be 25 million wireless data users nationwide. By 2003, other industry officials see 600 million Web-browsing wireless phones in
operation around the world, their users spending $33.5 billion annually for the service.
By the end of next year, the Yankee Group estimates, 30 percent of big North American corporations will be providing employees
wireless access to their intranets, internal information and e-mail networks.
One big reason is the growing availability of digital wireless networks that provide much more reliable connections than the old analog
systems, on which various attempts were made to add data capability with spotty success. "Wireless Internet, after 10 years of fits
and starts, is finally getting ready for prime time," said Sprint's Rick Pearl.
Executives at Bell Atlantic and Sprint think that, for now, their biggest market will be selling the phones as modems for laptop
computer owners to get access from anywhere to the World Wide Web or their electronic mail. To do so, you need to buy an $80 or
$100 cable and spend a few minutes configuring your laptop.
Currently, the best you can do over a wireless phone is a download speed of 14.4 kilobits per second, which is pretty torturous for Web
surfing but adequate for collecting and sending e-mail. And it sure beats 0 kilobits per second.
But I was considerably more curious about what you can do just using the phone itself. The happily surprising answer: a lot.
The first thing I did was to ignore the instruction manuals and see how inherently intuitive the Qualcomm phones are to use. Both
passed the test handily. In seconds, moving up and down buttons and entering numbers, I was reading e-mails I had asked my siblings
to send me, scrolling through the latest national news headlines, and making an inventory of where to get my horoscope and Boston
Bruins scores.
As a fan of $9 date books and 30-cent pens, I have never quite grasped the point of personal digital assistants. But devotees may be
pleased to know Web-equipped wireless phones generally include schedulers, address books, and organizers that send you a chirpy
alarm when an appointment is about to begin.
Both Bell and Sprint connect to specially designed Web sites that are written in what is called HDML, handheld device markup
language. Basically, it is an extremely bare-bones system that gives you no pictures, just things including news briefs, weather
forecasts, and answers to questions such as what is the current price of a stock and what is the weather in a given ZIP code.
While it's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg question -- which comes first, more wireless Web sites or more wireless Web users -- it
seems easy to believe that within months, hundreds of HDML sites will be popping up every week.
Sprint, which offers access to an @SprintPCS site and a Yahoo! site from the phone, has built-in space for a future wireless Web
portal, a shopping site, and a "community news" site targeted at different groups of people.
It's easy to imagine banks adding services so that you can use the phone to get balances or transfer money between accounts, or
Amtrak or airlines letting you buy a ticket over the phone, or hotel chains allowing you to reserve rooms by entering a destination ZIP
code and credit-card number.
One obvious question is whether the existing services are really worth the roughly $100 up-front cost of getting a Web-ready phone,
plus a bigger calling plan to handle time spent on Web surfing and e-mail or a $10 monthly add-on to pay for data access.
Given the painfully slow method of composing outgoing e-mail, spelling out letters by pressing each number one to four times while you
eat up your monthly minute allotment, it also seems profligate, but fun, to use the phone to send e-mail when you could just call the
person. (Nokia and Ericsson make phones with tiny keyboards on the back; these are just starting to become available in this country
and could make e-mail from the phone vastly easier and more popular.)
"We're not going to spend too much time on cool for cool's sake," said Larry McDonnell, Sprint's Northeast public relations director.
"It's got to be useful."
There are also some birth-pang glitches here and there. When I asked Bell Atlantic Mobile for a weather forecast for the 02459 ZIP
code, it gave me five choices: Newton, Newton Center, Newton Centre, Newton Ctr and Newton Cntr. Then on a Monday, the five-day
forecast was for the period beginning Saturday.
Three of the eight destinations on the Sprint PCS home page are "coming soon." Go to the help menu on the BAM phone, and it
warns, "No help available here." Sending e-mail from the Bell Atlantic Mobile phone is far easier than from the Sprint phone, which
requires you to set up a My Yahoo account.
But these are all whiny nitpicks. We need to focus on the bold, liberating future promised to humankind by wireless technology.
In the interest of equal time, we should mention what other carriers have or plan to offer:
AT&T Wireless announced this month that this winter it will begin selling two phones with access to ABC and Bloomberg News, ESPN
scores, and the Infospace telephone directories.
Cellular One last week announced a $10-a-month strictly one-way service that delivers to your phone preselected news headlines,
weather forecasts, sports, lottery results, stock quotes, and soap opera updates. It is basically a souped-up version of the information
some paging companies will now deliver to your beeper. It will offer Web surfing and e-mail here early next year, according to company
spokeswoman Marcia Schiavoni.
Nextel, which is best known for phones with two-way radio capabilities popular with tradespeople and fleet drivers, will unveil its data
network in Greater Boston "sometime in 2000," according to company spokesman John Redman. "We want to have ours completely
ready."
Omnipoint, whose American networks use the same GSM system that dominates in Europe, making it popular with business people
who want to use the same phone on both sides of the Atlantic, gives access to weather, stocks, horoscopes, and other information,
plus e-mail sent to (the phone number)@omnipoint.net.
Omnipoint also is testing, in New York, a new system called General Packet Radio Service that should allow download speeds of 1.5
megabits per second, comparable to cable modems or Digital Subscriber Lines. This service, Olson said, may become available in
Boston within the next two years.
Added Olson, "Wireless Internet access is huge, and it's certainly where we think the future lies."
By Peter J. Howe
-0-
To see more of The Boston Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to boston.com
(c) 1999, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. BEL, PCS, NYT.A, QCOM, YHOO, T, NXTL, OMPT,
END!A$19?GL-INTERNET
|
