Glitches are becoming to phones what muscle spasms are to track athletes-confirmation that travel to the next generation of technologies will experience limps along with leaps.
Most of the big name phone makers including Sony Corp., Nokia Corp., L.M. Ericsson, NEC Corp. and Matsushita Industrial Co. Ltd. at one time or another have sent anxiety into operator circles as software glitch after software glitch crippled their phones.
“Software glitches are normal with technology migrations,” cautioned Ozgur Aytar, analyst with the Strategis Group.
She said many of the problems developed with GSM-based third-generation phones because manufacturers wanted to capitalize on their earlier success with second-generation GSM products. GSM technology will migrate to the wideband CDMA protocol for 3G networks.
“The decision to opt for W-CDMA offers economies of scale for European countries, especially if the demand for these services is high,” she remarked.
She said the manufacturers built the GSM phones on the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands, but W-CDMA will work at 2.1 GHz, so more technology challenges should be expected.
“Operators and manufacturers will experience some technical challenges as manufacturers had to start from scratch to design, build and test the system,” she said, insisting that the problems could not be overcome overnight.
Analysts say GSM phones took up to four years to establish. 3G phones also are posing problems because of multimedia ambitions to provide a device that is a wallet, a diary, a database, a Walkman, a TV and a camera.
“Another problem,” noted Aytar, “will probably be related to getting the handsets to switch spontaneously from 3G to GSM.”
But when Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo, which had inspired much enthusiasm about its migration readiness, recalled 230,000 Java-enabled 3G phones in February, industry experts began to wonder if third-generation dreams with all the promise of multimedia and breakneck speed were fiction.
The February recall followed a replacement of 103,000 other handsets, which also were bug-ridden.
Sony, Ericsson, Hitachi Kokusai Electric and Matsushita are some of DoCoMo’s handset makers.
The Japanese firm stood its ground, claiming it was unfazed in its drive to launch its phones in May. But barely three weeks ago, the company announced that May was not realistic and put off the launch of its 3G services until October.
In the first quarter of the year, bugs became constant pests in the phones. And within the past two weeks, the bugs have swarmed back.
NTT DoCoMo suspended sales of its i-mode-enabled phones because of glitches that would have made it possible for third-party providers to view some data stored in the handset. The company said Sony S0503i phones would return to the market without disclosing a timeframe.
The company claimed that about 420,000 such handsets had been sold.
“Voice communication and other functions of the phone work without problem,” claimed DoCoMo in a statement.
British Telecommunications plc also put off the launch of its services for at least three months on the Isle of Man because of faulty handsets.
Manx Telecom, BT’s subsidiary on the tiny island located north of England, said the phones lost connections once the caller moved from one cell to another because the software made it difficult for a network to pass the call to the radio mast of the other cell. This was particularly frustrating to the British operator, which was in the middle of securing $8.4 billion from institutional investors. BT also wanted to launch its 3G services ahead of DoCoMo. Both Carriers use NEC handsets.
The problem is not restricted to GSM-based phones. Last week, Japanese carrier KDDI said it would recall 126,000 Sony “C101S” phones because its software could not handle the operator’s new 144 kilobits per second high-speed communications service.
Problems developed in Nokia’s 2100, 5100 and 6100 phones when synching software made the handset to register itself with CDMA 1x networks. The phones, which Nokia promised to fix, were used on Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS networks.
