Babel part 2
Mark Kelley, chief technical officer for Leap Wireless International Inc. in San Diego, said: "The Europeans hit a home run with GSM. They made one band, one technology. It helped Pan-European business and technology and politics." Europe's strategy grew' from need, not innovation. The continent was decades behind the U.S. in wired phone systems, says Elizabeth Harr Bricksin, vice president of Strategis, a market research firm in Washington, D.C. "It's a pretty common belief that they did it the right way and we did it the wrong way," she said. "Having one standard to begin with definitely makes it better for everybody. " Bureaucrats Vs. Entrepreneurs But the cultures on the two continents were and are different. The political movement to unify Europe spilled over into wireless communications. So politicians and bureaucrats made the wireless rules in Europe. . Entrepreneurs forged the path, or paths, in the U.S. "Europe depends more on government to lead," said .Jeffrey Kagan, an analyst in Atlanta. "People in different countries don't think about wireless communications the same way." What are some distinctions? Sirakides says that in the U.S., wireless firms want to differentiate themselves through their technology, Each claims to have the superior product. But in Europe, with a common system, vendors must differentiate some other way. That usually means service or price. Meanwhile, Japan set its Standards behind a cultural wall, Kelley says. Uniform in thought, culture and consumer trends, Japan embraced the wireless system NTT built. "They control the whole market, so they tell Panasonic and NEC to make the devices. They do the same thing with the infrastructure guys and the application developers. It's a closed system and boom, it takes off," Kelley said. Almost 16 million Japanese use I-mode wireless devices. In China, where a communist government dictates the wireless standard, it also dictates what people may or may not see on the Net, notes Harr Bricksin. But China promises to be the world's biggest single market, and what China decides will ripple around the globe. U.S., Europe Irony Authoritarian or free enterprise, which has been better for wireless development? "Through letting the market decide, we've ended up with fractured standards," Sirakides said. "We have a patchwork quilt of different technologies and different standards -CDMA, TDMA, GSM," Kagan said. He finds it ironic that the U.S. speaks so many wireless languages when it has one common language, unlike Europe. More, Americans have just one national government making regulations. Europe has two dozen. Kagan says the need in the U:S. is to stitch all wireless systems together to give U.S. consumers seamless service. "The same is true on the global level," he said. "All the world's systems need to be stitched together." That leads to the much-touted 3G. Short for third-generation, it's the next big step toward making all those gadgets in all those countries break through the babble. The third generation of wireless technology is a long way from being a world standard. But 3G is supposed to make it possible for any wireless device on any system to connect and communicate with any other device, wired or wireless. If it works, the world won't need a single standard. That's what the industry calls interoperability. "People are working toward a family of standards so that, no matter what you adopt, it will be compatible around the world," Harr Bricksin said.
One component of wireless' future will be multi-standard wireless devices, starting with dual and trimode phones from several makers- " As long as you have inter-operability between standards, it won't be necessary to have one worldwide standard," Kagan said. "3G could be a doorway through which they would all communicate." Global Economy Needs Would 3G interoperability become a de facto worldwide standard? "We get all wrapped up in this whirlwind of globalization. Not everything is necessary," Kagan said. "For there to be a global economy; you don't need to have a global wireless standard. Interoperability is more feasible than trying to force all the different countries and all the different agendas into one mold they'll never agree on." |
