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To: Eric L who wrote (10316)	4/4/2001 6:05:49 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

re: Telstra: GPRS Early Adopter on Implementation Complexities >> Ericsson Backs Telstra View That GPRS Is The 'Hardest Thing We Have Ever Done' Mike Pickles Senior Research Editor Asia-Pacific Region EMC Cellular April 4, 2001 At IIR's GPRS Summit held in Sydney, Telstra OnAir's Manager Product Strategy, David Kaye, said that Telstra OnAir's launch of its GPRS network after two year's hard work, was the 'hardest thing Telstra had ever done'. Personnel from Ericsson, the supplier of the network upgrade in Sydney and Brisbane, agreed with this view. Nortel has supplied Telstra's GPRS network in the 1800MHz band in Melbourne and other major cities. By April 2000, the GPRS network had been completed in Sydney and Melbourne and by November 2000 the network roll-out had been completed in all major cities. Then followed a period of trialling of available handsets until on 19 March 2001, Telstra finally felt able to announce the commercial launch of GPRS with just one handset, the Motorola Timeport, said to be available at selected outlets in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin and Hobart []. However, attempts over two days to obtain prices for the handset from the two Sydney outlets proved fruitless. Telstra expects the consumer market to be mainly concerned with WAP and PDA access and has formed key alliances for sourcing PDA devices. Bandwith optimisation techniques have also been foremost. For the corporate market, Telstra has also formed key alliances but found that early adopter customers are using Lotus Domino Everywhere, Entellec Outlook, Mobilesoft and others, so has decided to take a technology independent path with IPSEC. While Telstra regarded GPRS as having the potential to boost WAP services, 'it is an enabler and not a solution,' Kaye said. He went on to reveal one of the main reasons for Telstra taking so long to launch the service was that 'Mobiles now make all the decisions - a mobile now decides which cell it talks to...incredibly challenging in terms of processing power... no wonder manufacturers have difficulty in getting it together.' As data is error intolerant, frequency hopping (as used effectively in primarily voice networks) is detrimental for GPRS and can result in an increased number of drop-outs necessitating a restart for the user. Telstra has nevertheless achieved typical 'ping' times of 2 seconds and speeds of up to 40Kbps receive and 20Kbps transmit, depending on the handset. Despite being such a challenge to implement, Kaye had no doubt that GPRS would be better for browsing, better for battery life and would prove essential for establishing the architecture for future 3G networks for which Telstra has yet to find a business case which makes some sense. 'To date,' said Kaye, 'vendor 3G business models do not add up.' Mark Elliot, data marketing manager for Vodafone, said his company was currently trialling GPRS and was very close to launching a nationwide service. He thought that it would mainly interest the business market. Vodafone did not believe the average private customer would be willing to pay 'realistic' rates for the service. He believed email would be the 'killer application' from the start and that the limitations of GPRS would become apparent once the initial hype stage had ended. << - Eric -