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To: DaveMG who wrote (11691)	6/22/1998 3:03:00 PM
From: Caxton Rhodes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

M1 Chief Says Politics Will Torpedo 3G Success Note the comments on the superiority of cdmaOne! Caxton By Jeremy Scott-Joynt Commercial third generation services have little chance of either hitting the target introduction date of 2002 or of being anything like as popular as their proponents would suggest, according to the head of one of Asia's most successful mobile operators. Neil Montefiore, the ceo of MobileOne - Singapore's second mobile carrier and one of a select band of operators offering both GSM and cdmaOne services - said that most of customers' needs would be met by the evolution of existing systems. "The way GSM and cdmaOne are developing their data applications, most people will be pretty well served by them," he said. "The killer applications for the kind of speed that 3G is about haven't materialized, and there are very few applications that will need that kind of power." He went on: "You have to ask: What are these multimedia applications? Is speed really that important? What's the killer application that has the mobility aspect? There are all sorts of rather whimsical applications, like video-on-demand, but would you really pay a premium for them? Our experience suggests you wouldn't." By the end of this year, he said, M1 would have high-speed circuit-switched data (HSCSD) available on GSM. This would take data rates up to 38.2 kilobits per second - four times faster than basic GSM's 9.8kbps. The problem with that route is that HSCSD boosts the transfer rate by absorbing extra timeslots, thus cutting into total capacity. One way around that, he suggested, was to use 1800MHz GSM services solely as an overlay for data use, rather than for voice services as Singapore Telecom, M1's competitor, has done. As for cdmaOne - which M1 started commercially at the beginning of this month - handsets had plenty of processing power in reserve, and smart phones would begin to appear in a year or so. And following the lead of the UK's Vodafone, the company was investigating the possibility of operating the cdmaOne air interface - whose spectrum efficiency and voice quality definitely exceeded that of GSM, he said - over the GSM network, thus cutting out the need for two separate Intelligent Network systems running side by side. Aside from customer indifference, the other main problem was that the political jockeying over standards for 3G was leaving operators cold, he said. "3G has been driven by politics, rather than by the markets, and that's unlikely to end in a happy result. The way it's going, most operators will stand back and watch, and show a distinct lack of interest." The conflict of cultures between ETSI in Europe, ANSI in the US and NTT DoCoMo and its allies in Japan - as well as the depths of the vested interests at stake - was handicapping the entire process, he said. M1, owned jointly by Cable & Wireless, the Keppel Group and Straits Times proprietor Singapore Press Holdings, began service last year, and has already captured more than a quarter of the mobile market with over 200,000 subscribers. According to an ING Barings report, Singapore's total subscriber base in March 1998 was 849,000, a penetration of about 27.5% and a doubling over the year before. Its predictions suggest that by 2003, penetration will top 60% at about 2 million subscribers, with M1 taking over 750,000 of them and new entrant StarHub - which has won both fixed and mobile licenses from the year 2000 - on 131,000. The rest will be taken by Singapore Telecom, the survey estimates.