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To: S100 who wrote (114502)	2/26/2002 1:34:43 PM
From: S100	Respond to of 152472

No Cannes Do By Tim Kridel Another GSM World Congress, another set of complaints about next-gen wireless. Anybody notice that GPRS shares four letters with the word "gripes?" Judging by the way carrier executives keep complaining about the next-generation wireless technology, it's tough to argue that it's mere coincidence. GPRS really stands for general packet radio service, an upgrade for GSM networks that promises data rates of up to 168 Kbps — at least in theory. And that seems to be the latest gripe: At last week's GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, executives from Australia's Telstra and the U.K.'s One2One complained that, so far, GPRS musters only about 20 Kbps, on average, in the real world. It's easy to fixate on data rates and miss the more important issue — applications that users are willing to pay for — but some execs warned that, without a bigger pipe, they won't be able to deliver compelling new applications that have a better shot at generating revenue. At past GSM World Congresses, carrier execs complained about delays in getting GPRS phones in volumes large enough to launch commercial service. At the 2000 show, for example, George Schmitt, who had just stepped down as CEO of Omnipoint, handed out buttons that said, "God Send GPRS Mobiles." That logjam finally broke just in time for the 2001 holiday shopping season, but the kicker is that these first-generation GPRS devices are limited by design to about the same rate as a dial-up wireline modem — circa 1996. It's too soon to write off GPRS — not that investors would allow it — and some perspective is in order: First, GSM wasn't built in a day. That technology took the better part of a decade to achieve the levels of coverage, reliability and applications that most Europeans now take for granted. In North America, it took years for carriers and vendors to get enough real-world CDMA experience before that technology started to deliver on its promise of umpteen more capacity than analog. It's baffling why anyone would assume that GPRS also wouldn't have a long gestation and difficult birth, but gripe they do. If GPRS flops and takes a lot of carriers' market caps with it, carrier execs will be partly to blame. If anything, delays in getting GPRS phones were an opportunity to strengthen the business case for next-gen by making sure that when the service launched, a wide range of compelling new services also were ready to convince users to pony up. Judging by European consumers' lukewarm interest in GPRS, carriers squandered an opportunity to improve the chance that GPRS would be a hit straight out of the box. Some North American carriers started launching GPRS in fourth quarter 2001, and in January, Verizon Wireless launched 1XRTT, the next-gen version of CDMA that, like GPRS, is struggling to live up to its billing. It's too soon to say whether North Americans will embrace next-gen, but it's difficult to see how they will, when they'd basically be paying a premium for slightly faster access to the smattering of text-based services that have been available for years on current-gen networks. "The carriers say, 'We've got GPRS now,' and the public says, 'So what?'" a One2One exec reportedly complained during his speech at the show. "Phones don't offer any interesting experiences at the moment. It just looks like WAP that's a bit faster." theneteconomy.com