Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Beyond the mobile frontier

Beyond the mobile frontier

The wider adoption of high-speed mobile Internet is being spurred by new broadband technologies hoping to deliver what 3G promised.

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The Internet crossed a watershed in 2005. The underlying technology of the web finally caught up with the over-hyped, dot-com expectations, as access to high-speed connections became the norm. Figures from the International Telecommunications Union show the level of Internet users with home broadband running at over 90% in countries such as South Korea and Israel, and other estimates put penetration in the US at over 70%.

But there is a large piece of that picture missing: the mobile Internet. While fixed-line connections have become fast and affordable, web access from mobile phones, PDAs and other mobile devices is still far from common.

Now, however, a set of technologies (see box, New broadband technologies) are being developed to speed up existing mobile Internet networks, provide enhanced geographical connectivity and add capabilities suited to those devices.

CALL WAITING
Although its mass adoption makes the mobile phone the most obvious channel for the mobile Internet, the first high-speed incarnation of such a service, 3G, promised much but delivered little. There are a number of reasons for this: providers are yet to find successful ways of marketing the proposition; it costs too much and the content is not compelling to consumers.

The fact that there are two incompatible and competing 3G technologies does not help either: Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), the standard for Europe and Japan is up against Code-Division Multiple Access2000 (CDMA2000), mainly adopted in the US and Asia.

Adoption rates vary. Only 35 million of the world’s two billion mobile phone users subscribe to the former, although analyst firm Forrester Research predicts that by the end of 2007, 33% of mobile users in Western Europe will be using it.

Advocates for CDMA2000 claim it has at least 200 million global subscribers. However, critics argue that this figure is misleading; countering that only those networks that have been upgraded to the 1xEV-DO (Evolution, Data Optimised) standard get the promised 3G experience. This, they say, puts the true number of subscribers closer to 18 million. Even combined, this is nothing like the number of 3G subscribers originally expected by network providers.

Few research findings, however, mention just how many subscribers actually use 3G services, and those that do paint an even darker picture. A survey of UK 3G subscribers by online market research company Harris Interactive found that 41% stuck to text and voice capabilities, forgoing anything else.

“There’s a danger in 3G being given away without effectively marketing the services to consumers,” says Derek Eccleston, technology research director at Harris Interactive. “Service providers are seeding the market with the product and then relying on above and below the line marketing to generate momentum for key services.”

3G AND BEYOND
The public is clearly unimpressed with 3G so far and providers are hoping that forthcoming upgrades will help improve adoption rates, arguing that greater speeds and applications will finally whet consumer appetite.

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