There is a great disconnect in the wireless industry. Whether it’s mismanagement, industry hype, flawed law, Wall Street greed-or some combination of the above-is unclear. But it doesn’t matter. The losers will be consumers, rank-and-file investors and pension funds.
To illustrate this disconnect, take a look at a couple of stories last week in The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report.
The Post piece highlighted the difficulty of locating distressed 911 mobile-phone callers. The near-term outlook doesn’t look good for getting a system in place that enables 911 dispatchers and police to find mobile-phone subscribers in need.
What makes the problem particularly acute is 40 percent of all 911 calls come from mobile phones. Some in the public-safety community have accused carriers of dragging their feet.
A Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association spokesman told the Post, “The technology is not in place yet.” But at least one major wireless phone developer-Qualcomm Inc.-says this is not true. Indeed, Qualcomm is lobbying the FCC to reject a push by VoiceStream Wireless-whose merger with Deutsche Telekom AG is being scrutinized by Congress and reviewed by government regulators-to relax 911 location requirements for the nation’s top GSM mobile-phone company.
As a related aside, VoiceStream’s GSM technology is tailor-made for a wireless emergency alert technology standard blessed by the Telecommunications Industry Association. But VoiceStream Chairman John Stanton, honored for his leadership by CTIA this year, has not responded.
The bottom line: 911 wireless location and wireless emergency alert features are nowhere near becoming a reality for the nation’s 100 million subscribers.
In U.S. News, digital columnist Randall E. Stross added his voice to the growing drum beat of those who fear mobile Internet-American style-is headed south.
The reasons are complex, varied and possibly intractable. New third-generation wireless spectrum is occupied at every turn by either the military or fixed broadband wireless carriers or TV broadcasters. There are competing digital standards among the largest wireless service providers. Some say WAP-based Web phones embraced in the U.S. are inferior-downright clunkers-compared with the wildly popular IP-based Web phones sold by NTT DoCoMo in Japan.
Despite all this, hype surrounding mobile Internet in America is sky high. It’s reflected in bullish wireless data stocks and in the cottage industry of conferences and seminars.
Thus, on the one hand, wireless carriers and manufacturers here are expending huge sums of financial and PR capital to develop and tout an m-commerce future that could turn out to be a big dud. At the same time, wireless safety enhancements are evolving at a glacially slow pace. This house of cards will not stand forever.
