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To: Rajala who wrote (96107)	3/23/2001 8:19:38 PM
From: David E. Taylor	Respond to of 152472

Rajala: Well your post talked about data transfer rates in "kbs/s", Mb/minute, and Mb/hour, all of which are "bit rates", but when you're talking about file sizes and phone memory, both are usually expressed in "bytes" - unless when you were talking about a "phone with 64 Mb of memory", you really meant 64 "Megabits", in which case that memory could only accommodate an 8 Megabyte file. Will people want to send large files upstream? Sure they will, and sooner than you seem to think. For example, my daughter in San Diego already takes digital photos of our new baby granddaughter and e-mails them to us - at her end at 56 Kbps max on a PC with an analog modem that can be quite a drag if there are a number of photos to send, at my end with a 1.5 Mbps cable modem they download in a snap, and I can shoot them on to great grandparents in the UK in a snap as well. You're right that she can hit "send" for the e-mail and then wander off to clean the house or something for a while, but that doesn't do much for the old "instant gratification" syndrome - "Did you get them yet Dad?" "Nope. Still uploading". (Apologies for plagiarizing Cablevision's commercials). Transfer that scenario to say her first visit with her little girl to the San Diego Zoo (for which I hope to be present in person), and a snap-on digital camera on her cell phone or PDA, and she has the capability to send a bunch of digital photos of the experience almost in real time. Digital photos by cell phone now, digital movies soon. I'd hate to think how long those kinds of things would take on a pokey slow 20 Kbps GPRS uplink. But, hey, whatever floats the old riddled-with-holes-and-sinking-fast Euro GSM/GPRS boat. And as for there not being "too many GPRS mobile video phones in the market", like the repeated press reports of 144 Kbps capable GPRS phones, they will never exist. I'm not saying that there won't be useful applications for GPRS enabled cell phones and networks, since the "always on" nature of GPRS will presumably enable useful additional services that aren't that feasible on present GSM networks. Moreover, the 9.6 Kbps i-mode service in Japan shows that you can provide useful and popular services at low data rates - if that's all that's out there. But how popular these will be when there are competing services available at data rates several orders of magnitude higher is another question entirely. David T.