A new study by marketing research firm BWCS claimed that more than 90 percent of U.K. business travelers with laptops are interested in using wireless local area network (WLAN) services at airports, while 40 percent of those surveyed said they have no interest in accessing the Internet in cafes or restaurants using the same technology. BWCS said its study indicates the reason cafes and restaurants are less popular WLAN hot spots seems to be that only 34 percent of those surveyed have at least 10 minutes to sit down every time they visit these places. The company warned potential third-generation (3G) operators that more than 60 percent of respondents state they would prefer WLAN at 11 Megabits per second (Mbps) in major airports, hotels and restaurant chains to 3G access speeds of 384 kilobits per second (kbps) that they could access anywhere.
The GSM Association reported more than 600 million people around the world use GSM phones, and it expects to exceed 630 million users by the end of the year. The association noted GSM networks are currently operational in 171 countries, with more than 55 General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) networks commercially deployed.
A broad spectrum of technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Comverse, Intel, Microsoft, Philips Speech Processing and SpeechWorks International, formed a forum to develop a platform-free standard for multimodal and telephony-enabled access to information, applications and Web services for personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other appliances. The forum, called Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), reportedly will extend markup languages such as HTML, xHTML and XML, and make it easier and faster to create, deploy and use applications and services.
Formed in September 1999, the joint venture between Ericsson and Microsoft to co-develop mobile Internet software will now be absorbed into Ericsson’s global services unit. The venture never released any significant applications. Microsoft, which failed to take up its 30-percent share in the company, said the mobile e-mail product that had been co-developed is already in use by three cell-phone operators, and the company expects to continue to work closely with Ericsson on further mobile projects. The break-up is thought to have occurred after Microsoft realized it was too closely aligned to Ericsson given Nokia’s number-one position in the cell-phone market. To counter Nokia’s growing dominance of the wireless market, Microsoft has been negotiating with various mobile-phone operators in Europe, such as Telefnica Mviles and Vodafone, in an attempt to forge closer alliances not based on a particular cell-phone vendor.
