Ray:
I just posed a 'short story or fable' on the Last Mile thread that I found amusing and related to our
mult-mode discussion. You might want to look at it, as it answers a point below.
Message 14587881
As regards your view that the diverse standards in use in the US has driven innovation, I'm
not quite certain that I find this to be the sort of innovation that I care for. To me,
it is more of a tower-of-babel solution than anything else. Plenty of work for engineers, no
doubt, sorting out translations of content from one standard to another. I'm far
more inclined to the sort of innovation in the development of content and consumer services that
I see occurring in Finland with the SMS or in Japan with i-Mode. The
multiple standards game as played in the US seems to be more of a navel-gazing exercise
among engineers that doesn't adequately address the ultimate goal of providing
innovative and inexpensive services to the customer.
Well, it is now "free" from radio shack according to my story referenced above, at least multi-mode
is, so it couldn't be that difficult to engineer.
Actually, I have found again and again that most companies pay a lot of attention to level 2 and
perhaps 3 areas, and ignore everything above, including services; embedded hardware is where the
high volume high margin business is until you reach the commodity appliance level. So if we can get
the 'which mode, which frequency' problem out of the way by transparently handling it in the
handset, and the handset becomes a commodity appliance, services will be the next differenitator.
Now, to shift gears to the current situation in Europe, I see the UMTS crowd in Europe
taking a step back with the lastest round of auctions. What the vendors like
Vodophone, DT, Orange, FT and others are going to be forced into is offering expensive
premium services to an elite customer in order to justify the huge costs of licensing
and infrastructure. I don't see the business case, at all. Currently, the WAP services that are on
offer are cumbersome, slow and expensive. If this predicts what we can
expect from 3G systems, we're in big trouble. A recent article in one trade publication brought
out the "WAP is crap" argument convincingly. The writer, while experimenting
with a WAP phone found that he was able to send an email and due to network sluggishness,
was charged $4 for the effort. I'll guarantee you that there aren't enough
customers on the face of the planet to sustain a service provider who is that far off the mark on
efficiency and cost. I see a real Catch-22 coming for the 3G service
providers, who need to cannibalize existing customers and get them to use a vastly more
expensive service in order to pay for the service. Ain't gonna happen. We've all
become far too spoiled by the Moore's Law model.
Here here. Good points. In fact, in telecom, Shannon's Laws are more important that Moor's
Observation. I refuse to dignify Moor as a law! This means that bandwidth of noisy air is limited.
Also, I read somewhere that the software for WAP in a handset is 10 times the size of voice only-
I'm surprised it is only 10.
However, a PDA will likely be able to use WAP.
However, I looked at WAP in details a couple of times, and I'm not sure you can create web
pages on the fly by looking only a HTML syntax.
However, again, I will bet you that many web site authors will create a 'text only' or 'wireless'
version of their page if they see a buck in it.
However, again, the service providers may want to generate services and may restrict access to web based services.
We live in interesting times.
Basically, I feel wireless web is worth a shot, but not a lot of investment
$.
Just another opinion. :)
Is this imitation, flattery or satire?
justone opinion |
