From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Wireless Industry Looks Beyond Phone (NY Times on the Web
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 14:40:59 -0600
December 20, 1999
Wireless Industry Looks Beyond Phone
By SETH SCHIESEL
Over the last decade, cellular telephones have evolved from oddity to
indulgence to everyday accessory. Eighty million Americans now use them.
That is not so shabby a track record, but many communications experts now
want to move on. They want you to stop talking about wireless phones.
In fact, discuss the future of wireless technology with leading
communications executives and the words "phone" and "telephone" may not be
used at all. That is because they see the future of wireless technology as
having little to do with talking and everything to do with putting the
Internet into pockets and purses around the world.
To be sure, people's need to talk on the phone will continue to provide the
financial lifeblood of the wireless industry. Some wireless executives even
see the promises of technological wizardry as overblown. Andrew Sukawaty,
chief executive of Sprint PCS, one of the nation's biggest wireless phone
carriers, predicts that old-fashioned voice transmission will remain the
biggest part of the business, with as many as half the nation's phone calls
being made without wires by the middle of the next decade.
Nevertheless, in just a few years, the mere wireless phone may very well
seem as dated as a rotary dial. The conventional wisdom -- the orthodoxy
even -- in the communications business is that in its place will be a new
generation of mobile wireless devices that function not only as telephones
but also as Internet terminals, radios that can be customized for personal
tastes, and perhaps even customized television.
Call it a smart phone, a personal digital assistant or merely a wireless
device. New wireless technologies to be deployed over the next few years
promise to pump the flow of digital information to hand-held wireless units
from trickles to torrents. By 2002, wireless subscribers could have access
to as much as a million bits of digital information each second -- just
about enough for a television-quality videophone and about 20 times the 56K
connection speed supported by today's fastest home modems.
The idea is to unplug the wired world of computers and phone jacks to allow
people to communicate and gain access to information when they want, where
they want, how they want. In much the same way that computers that link to
the Internet have been credited with releasing people from some constraints
of time and space, the next generation of wireless technology may release
the Internet from computers themselves.
"Now we will be able to focus on getting the individual his or her own
information, no matter how they would like to receive it," said Phillip T.
Redman, an analyst for the Yankee Group, a technology consulting firm based
in Boston.
"Wireless offers the ability to extend a user's communications, their
entertainment system, their commercial transactions to an anytime, anywhere
paradigm," Mr. Redman said. "You no longer are going to be tethered to a
computer at home or at work or have to plan your shopping around when you're
going to be at the mall. All of these will be targeted to you whenever or
wherever you want to use it."
This may all sound a bit familiar, of course. The hype about wireless data
services has continued almost unabated for years.
But the technology to support futuristic wireless services is beginning to
be put into place, so those services now seem set to move beyond e-mail on a
phone.
"The wireless industry has been promoting this year being the year of
wireless data for the last five or six years now," said Scott Goldman, chief
executive of the Wireless Application Protocol Forum, an industry group that
has developed systems to deliver Internet services to hand-held devices.
"Now, if you poll wireless experts you will find people in concert saying,
'Yes, 2000 is the year.' "
One reason for optimism is that the big companies that make wireless systems
-- like Ericsson, Nokia, Lucent Technologies and Northern Telecom -- have
begun to foster expectations about the data capacities of their products.
They have seen start-ups like Neopoint produce revolutionary phones that can
link to the Internet.
"The information will be localized, will be personalized and will be
timely," said Haroon I. Alvi, director for business development of Nokia's
wireless handset operation,
"Imagine you're a soccer parent," he said, "and you spend two to three hours
a day taking your kids around town to school, sports events and other sorts
of family events. As that soccer parent, you want to know about road
conditions, traffic and weather conditions in the vicinity where you're
located and at that instant.
"So if you're going to get into your car and take your kids to a soccer
match, you may want to look at your phone to see if the venue has been
changed. There might be an alert saying, 'We've changed the location because
the field was waterlogged.' "
Even e-commerce, the much-vaunted selling of goods over the Internet, could
be revolutionized by the next wave of wireless technology, through phones or
personal digital assistants, known as P.D.A.'s.
"It's not just important that I can purchase a product through my phone or
my P.D.A.," Mr. Redman said. "But my phone or P.D.A. knows where I am, and I
can get a deal because there's a special going on near me as I'm driving and
I'm alerted to it."
For all the noise around wireless data services, however, voice telephone
service will continue to be the fundamental economic driver of the big
wireless carriers' business. That is largely because data services may well
be priced along the "all you can eat" model of Internet service providers,
but phone calls are still likely to be priced minute by minute.
"We're in a technology business, and so people get focused often on the
wrong thing," Mr. Sukawaty of Sprint PCS said. "Data is coming, no doubt
about it, but the bigger revenue for wireless is that probably 50 percent of
the voice traffic is going to go on wireless networks in the next three to
five years. Given that it was at 6 or 7 percent two years ago, that's
incredible."