To: foundation who wrote (8411 ) 3/10/2001 5:37:04 PM From: Eric L Read Replies (1) | Respond to Benjamin,"I do not believe that 2.5G systems are dead. GPRS and even CDMA2000 1X are considered to be 2.5G systems and both are coming on strong. The issue is going to be one of applications and end-to-end solutions . Providing higher speed networks simply so that users can "surf" the Internet is not going to work. We need applications that permit users to get to the information they want and need quickly. News, weather and sports is not going to make this happen. Speed of the networks are not as much the issue as what the networks permit users to do with data, what they can gain access to and how valuable that access is to them ." "is 1xEV hype or the real deal" he says, "it is a real deal -- in tests -- several sites etc--but until it gets deployed, I won't give it a "it is really real" stamp of approval . * GPRS is key enabling technology . Applications, which were developed for WAP over GSM will start to generate revenues only when GPRS is widely available in the mass market (by mid 2002 ). The top revenue-generating services will include mobile multimedia messaging, mobile games and mobile brokerage. Packet-switched GPRS is the key technology enabler for mobile IP and provides a significantly more compelling user experience than existing GSM. The subsequent migration to UMTS will initially add only more spectrum to allow a greater number of users and will later provide more capacity.* WAP will be successful after all . We believe that WAP will eventually emerge successful in Europe despite initial difficulties in generating active users. However, WAP ’s success will lie primarily in the GPRS presentation layer for more phone-centric devices. By contrast, PDAs will be connected to the internet not via WAP but via a conventional HTML-browser.
