Alcatel’s recollection of 1995, the year of the last Telecom show, was of GSM coverage being patchy in most European countries, with network designers basing their plans on handsets with power outputs of 8 watts, which appears very strange in comparison with today’s situation. Jean-Michel Gabriagues also recalls predictions of 400 million cellular users worldwide by 2002, while it now looks like the industry will reach that number this year, three years ahead of the forecast.
However, the forecasting game has never been easy in cellular, and Gabriagues admits the widely predicted number of 1 billion cellular users by 2003 is fraught with uncertainties.
“We see the growth curve of cellular slowing down by 2003, but only by a small amount. This is most likely the forecasters being conservative and unclear over the take-up of 3G products,” he said. “This 3G area is very hard to predict; we’re three years away from commercial launches, and we don’t know the take-up of data services. In 1995, we forecast that in 2000 there would be a major liftoff for data. Now it’s looking more like 2002 for mass adoption.”
According to Gabriagues, every cellular operator has the same problem of how to predict what services will be successful. “We are trying to provide them with as much capability as possible, which is why we believe [Internet Protocol] is the best route. We clearly see the mobile office application as bringing the operators the largest quantity of new revenues. It’s a niche market, but one where the user will access all sorts of applications, such as location-based services and mobile e-commerce.”-Paul Rasmussen in Oxford, United Kingdom
