The Reality of Next-Gen Mobile Phones
The current collective big think at the ITU Telecom World 2006 forum in Hong Kong goes something like this. Mobile phones are destined to evolve into all-purpose digital appliances (think veritable computers in your pocket) that will pack awesome processing power and operate at blistering data speeds that will seamlessly connect to the Internet and handle such tricks as video streaming on 30 or more channels.
The optimism comes from the fact that 3G, wireless, mobile-phone technologies seem to have reached a tipping point. The number of 3G users more than doubled between 2004 and 2006, topping 260 million users at the start of this year. Some 60 million of those subscribers, mostly in Japan and South Korea, use handsets that run on high-speed networks with capacity of 256 kilobits per second using the W-CDMA or CDMA 1X EV-DO technology standards.
However, there is a problem — a big one. The global telecom industry is nowhere near a consensus on what sort of network standard or combination of them will support, in an efficient and cost effective manner, the kind of whiz-bang functionality now being predicted. On top of that, most of the real growth ahead in the mobile telephone industry will be in emerging markets, where high-end handsets and data services make little economic sense.
Upgrade, or WiMax?
A recent report by Gartner forecasts emerging markets will account for 87% of the additional 1.5 billion in worldwide mobile-phone subscription growth predicted by 2010. (Worldwide, there are about 2.1 billion mobile-phone users now.)
And that raises the question of whether operators will really want to throw additional investments into new “super 3G” network upgrades, or look at alternative wireless-access technologies such as WiMax (short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) that have been lauded by Intel and others as a cost-effective way to reach developing-world…
