NEW YORK-Third-generation technology is completely unnecessary for taking advantage of data opportunities, which are growing even though widespread consumer adoption may be years away, according to speakers at the recent WirelessWednesdays “Killer Mobile Applications and Opportunities” seminar.
“The widespread belief that you need 3G to do meaningful things is untrue because you can do a tremendous amount with existing networks. BlackBerry runs on a paging network. I-mode, which runs at 96 kilobits per second, is hugely popular despite competitors that are orders of magnitude faster,” said Omar Javaid, chairman and co-founder of Mobilocity.
Particularly given the state of wireless networks in the United States today, the most successful wireless solutions will be those that use capacity least by taking advantage of synchronization, store-and-forward and bursts of information, he said.
“We are looking at newer entrants like Stick Net, a Dallas company that uses a vector-based format on the mobile side. There will be better phones in the United States as Japanese phone makers make a push here,” Javaid said.
“On the applications side, the notion of whether or not 3G is implemented doesn’t matter because the 802.11b wireless LAN offers much higher bandwidth than 3G and has the potential to be disruptive to 3G.”
Short message service, instant messaging and other forms of communication similar to e-mail are the killer applications for wireless data, said Frank Zammataro, chief marketing officer for w-Technologies and Bryan Colby, co-founder of Scan Inc.
“Motorola gave away to opinion leaders its (Talkabout) T900 pagers. It saw a niche and exploited it well. AT&T Wireless is pushing the feature-rich Nokia 8260 phones to get a market jump on easy-to-use SMS,” Colby said.
“Not to pick on one carrier, but the way Verizon (Wireless) is trying to market two-way text messaging, which is near and dear to my heart, doesn’t show its utility … (On the other hand,) the Kyocera Palm phone Verizon is pushing to business elites is a nice device.”
Although traditional paging carriers have been quite slow to “realize the threat from cell phones,” they are engaged today in an aggressive effort to transition their subscribers to two-way messaging, Colby added. The paging companies’ strongest suit is their networks, rather than their devices, in his view.
Motient Corp., which just gained United Parcel Service as a customer, is one example of how “the fall-off in consumer demand is being replaced by business demand,” Javaid said. Similarly, a company like Research In Motion Ltd. has tremendous value from its many corporate installations, which are a base for leveraging additional application sets.
“Content is not king or even queen. People have paid and will continue to pay a lot more for peer-to-peer connectivity, more even than for the broadcast model on which WAP is based,” Javaid said.
Nevertheless, there may be a bright future for WAP, despite its bad reputation of late.
“The new Sun-Nextel-Motorola Java client, a universal thin client resident in the device, is getting a lot of attention. Java could be to WAP what Windows was to DOS,” Zammataro said.
“There is a huge future for wireless, not this year but a four-to-five-year play for mobile computing and mobile wireless to mature. The good news is it took the Internet 20 years,” Zammataro said.
In the medium-term, the enterprise customer will remain the sweet spot for wireless data, so it is not surprising that today there are at least 250 middleware companies offering mobile device connectivity to corporate databases, Javaid said. Big corporations like Sun Microsystems, Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp. are positioning themselves to acquire and consolidate the middleware players, Javaid said.
“There will be a heyday for the IBMs and Oracles of the world because they will be able to buy intellectual property cheap and bolster their positions,” he said.
