COMMENT: GSM momentum threatens to wipe WiMax out
November 21st, 2007 in CommsDay ASEAN | add new comment | email this story
By Grahame Lynch
commsday.com
The choice of venue for the GSMA’s Mobile Asia Congress last week was fitting. Just as the GSM industry seems to constantly invent new superlatives, its Macau venue was suitably …. big.
Indeed, Macau’s Venetian Hotel & Casino is the second-largest building in the world after the Boeing factory, features 3,000 hotel suites, 300 retail outlets, the world’s largest casino floor and, by my thinking, what must be the world’s longest walking time from room to reception (I lost 2.5kg last week!). This behemoth shrine to instant gratification provides a wonderful metaphor for what is the world’s technological shrine to instant gratification and communication—the 2.5 billion GSM phones out there and the sub-set of hundreds of millions of HSPA phones that, according to Ericsson, are now the standard broadband medium (yes, ahead of DSL).
Another year and another GSM fest provided more evidence of its “ecosystem’s” desire to remake humanity as we know it.
Apparently just 17% of the world population has a bank account. Considerably more have GSM phones. Last week we heard quite a lot about the plans of the GSM fraternity to do something about that courtesy of technologies such as Near Field Communications and a little help from the likes of Mastercard and co. The Pay-Buy-Mobile Initiative in its initial phase involves carriers with a mere 1.3 billion customers. It sounds more than promising.
Then there is the plan to join with Western Union and facilitate international money remittances by mobile. The way they told it at a press conference last week was that this would encourage considerably smaller transactions and open up a whole new market worth billions.
Last but not least, there were stern words from the GSMA and Microsoft, courtesy of Pyramid Research findings, claiming that the entire notebook industry and their pet analysts such as Gartner had got things wrong, dramatically underestimated demand for wireless-enabled notebooks and better get cracking with busier production lines and embedded HSPA chips, lest they let the rest of us down. This might see a lazy extra 30 or 40m notebooks sold annually if the advice is heeded.
Even the carriers were getting in on the act. Telstra took somewhat of a gamble a few years ago and decided to shutter CDMA for the then untested 850 HSPA. Now it is claiming vindication, speaking of how it also provides fixed broadband substitutes in rural areas and how with a bit of standards tweaking and imagination, the industry might be able to take 100% penetration to 1000% penetration.
As night fell and the Bailey’s Irish Cream and Carlsberg started talking, the plans for world domination became even more apparent. Your correspondent heard of plans to combine the mega GSM shows with the even more mega ITU shows into yet even more mega mega overall shows—presumably global telecom shows for all of us but with a decidedly GSM slant to their content and lead exhibitors. Daylight and a Google search revealed that this was more than the frenzied imaginings of clipboarded conquistadores with technological armies: indeed, GSMA types have already found their way onto ITU director boards and the two actually signed a MOU for “developing world markets” co-operation earlier this year.
So the GSM lobby is likely to achieve what the Comintern never could in decades of trying. World domination.
Still, I can’t help but feel a bit of déjà vu.
Back in my American telecom media days, I used to have a lot of fun baiting American readers with my prediction that GSM would wipe CDMA as a standard off the map—something that didn’t resonate too wildly with Americans who saw CDMA as a beautiful creation of homegrown ingenuity and GSM as a vaguely socialistic and suspect creation of committees and pompous, conceited Frenchmen.
I was, for better or worse, proven right but to get there GSM has also changed its complexion to a more Anglo-American entity. Indeed, it's now the likes of Qualcomm and Microsoft and Yahoo who are orating from the lecterns about the beauty of HSPA ecosystems and such. GSM didn’t just kill CDMA, it effectively swallowed it, alive and whole. To wit, the GSMA’s currently hiring in Atlanta, not Brussels!
But if GSM was the monkey on CDMA’s back in the year 1999, in the year 2007 it is the veritable 800 pound gorilla. And I just can’t help but thinking that poor WiMax—despite its valiant redoubts in such diverse geographies as Saudi Arabia, the US, Australia and Malaysia—is about to experience its own unwitting and messy infanticide. |
