Studies look at wireless future
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This is the wireless world of the future presented by three differentstudies released Tuesday, with one study suggesting the number of U.S.wireless Web customers will increase from 4.1 million in 2000 to 96 million in2005.
The studies are yet another indictment of the progress toward "3G," theelusive technology that has long promised to deliver high-speed data ratesto mobile devices but has yet to make a showing. Telecom providers arespending hundreds of billions of dollars to build a 3G infrastructure. Yet,there is just one 3G service out now, in South Korea. NTT DoCoMo is expectedto unveil its own next-generation service in June.
"The more outlandish hopes of 3G advocates are largely unfounded," a team ofJupiter Research analysts, headed by analyst Seamus McAteer, said in areport.
Instead of super-fast connections, the studies point to a radicallydifferent future for a successful wireless industry, one in which thingslike low-tech games or downloading ring tones are offered over a lowerbandwidth network.
The reason? The technology can't support a lofty 3G future in which a movietheater would stream movie trailers onto the handhelds of patrons waiting ona ticket line, Jupiter argues. Most industry experts say that to do so,it'll take a network capable of delivering 2 million bits of informationevery second, which would be an expensive service to offer.
But, as some European telecommunications companies are doing now, thenetwork that survives will offer a wireless network about a tenth as fast,meaning the world will miss out on watching movies over a handheld.
"Mass market video conferencing has remained a pipe dream since the firstvideophones were showcased at the World's Fair in 1960," the Jupiter reportstates.
Many analysts say what is really needed is a single standard type ofsoftware for all mobile systems. But don't count on that happening,according to projections by market research firm Alexander Resources.Instead of the four software packages now vying for domination of thewireless Web, there could be more than 50.
"This extraordinarily large number of choices could greatly complicate andforestall introduction and market acceptance of 3G wireless in the U.S.,"Alexander Resources said.
Jupiter also says the future will be more about "packets," the NTT DoCoMopractice of charging for each piece of information sent to a phone orhandheld rather than most carriers' practice of charging the time spent onthe line.
Location-based services, a nascent industry that lets providers deliverinformation to individuals at specific locations, will also play heavily inthe future. Jupiter believes it'll be a standard service for nearly all theworld's providers by 2002.
A study released Tuesday by Web marketing company SkyGo found that some typesof wireless Web advertising works better than what has been traditionallyused on the wired Web, Chief Executive Daren Tsui said.
To conduct the study, SkyGo outfitted 1,000 residents in Colorado with acell phone and service. Local and national businesses paid to haveadvertisements sent to the users.
Tsui said the company found that for every 100 ads sent to a single device,there were about three purchases. The same ratio for the wired Web is lessthan one.
Ads that featured trivia questions worked the best. One ad, for example, wasfrom a local Kinko's and asked users to guess how the company got its name.Participants who guessed right got a coupon for free service. More than halfof the 1,000 played the trivia game. The same "click thru" rate on the wiredWeb is 0.7 percent.
An advertisement that contains a poll, with the same promise of a free itemfor participation, got a 40 percent click through rate, the survey found.
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