General Packet Radio Service technology is a powerful proposition for Global System for Mobile communications operators anxious to comb in the huge revenues packetized wireless Internet access promises. That’s why they want GPRS handsets this year.
Product delays have been part of the wireless industry since its inception, and it doesn’t look any different for GPRS handsets. Many European and some North American GSM operators were hoping to introduce full-blown commercial GPRS networks this year.
“Base-station technology is ahead of handsets,” said David Island, vice president of sales for wireless in the United States with Alcatel, which three months ago decided to focus on the U.S. GSM market. “That will be the gating issue to GPRS deployment.”
George Schmitt, president of GSM operator Omnipoint Corp. in New York, passed out buttons at this month’s GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, that said, “God Send GPRS Mobiles.”
“I want GPRS terminals in sufficient quantities this year,” he said, outlining his wish list for vendors. “The onslaught of packet data will only come if we can get GPRS handsets.”
Why are operators in a hurry? Carriers believe offering GPRS handsets integrated with the Wireless Application Protocol, the technology that allows handsets to download Web pages, will be compelling for their customers. GPRS technology is designed to offer high-speed packet data services, which will allow customers to always stay connected to e-mail and the Web, paying just for the data they send and receive, not the airtime.
European GSM operators see GPRS technology, the first step toward third-generation systems, as a tremendous revenue booster for their businesses as they face a saturated voice-service market. Wireless data should drive usage, funnel new and potentially tremendous e-commerce revenue into carriers’ pockets and reduce churn if carriers customize services correctly.
North American GSM operators hope a quick deployment of GPRS systems will mean they can gain an advantage over their Code Division Multiple Access and Time Division Multiple Access counterparts by offering packet data services first.
“North American operators are telling me that GPRS is a strategy to get GSM North America in the forefront,” said Alcatel’s Island.
GSM carriers already are frustrated over the lack of WAP-enabled handsets and worry the same scenario will be repeated with GPRS handsets. The industry has come to jokingly refer to WAP as meaning, “where are the phones?”
“Operators are getting frustrated on WAP and GPRS because nothing is happening on the handset side,” said Marten Vading, associate director of research with Warburg Dillon Read in Stockholm. “They can’t get any volumes of WAP phones here.”
Carriers want to offer WAP-enabled handsets via circuit-switched data connections to whet the consumer’s appetite for the mobile Internet. While WAP browsing gateways are in place, early versions of the WAP standard are causing interoperability problems between the handsets and the gateways. This should be corrected in the next release of the WAP standard. As a result, WAP services probably won’t take off until the later half of the year.
“My big fear is that GPRS will be just like WAP,” said Edward Kingman, chief executive officer and managing director of EuroTel, a GSM operator in the Czech Republic. “WAP was ready six months before the handsets were available … Manufacturers need to be kicked for not having the handsets in sync with the equipment.”
Commercial GPRS service offerings aren’t likely to gain significant inroads until 2001, say analysts. The design for early base-station equipment is done, and infrastructure providers are in the process of interoperability testing today. Some European operators like Finland’s Sonera already have their GPRS infrastructure in place and are waiting for the handsets.
Motorola Inc. will likely be the first to introduce a GPRS handset by the second quarter in medium volumes. One of its customers, BT Cellnet, announced it will begin offering commercial GPRS service in mid-2000.
But the phones likely will offer data speeds of around 9.5 kilobits-per-second, the company said. GPRS technology is designed to use up to eight allocated time slots in the GSM time frame. Motorola’s handset will use one time slot in the uplink and two in the downlink.
What data speeds GPRS handsets will offer initially and migrate to is questionable. Standards makers envisioned GPRS technology to offer speeds up to 115 kbps, but that is unlikely for some time, say many vendors.
Initially, GPRS handsets likely will be limited to Class 8 performance, which uses standard radio-frequency parts, and offers four downlinks and one uplink, which will result in data speeds about less or equal to circuit-switched data speeds today on the uplink part. Further down the line, manufacturers hope to offer a maximum of four slots in both directions, offering speeds faster than wireless modems can offer.
But technical problems remain. Reports out of last year’s International Telecommunication Union Telecom show indicated severe heating problems associated with the experimental handsets manufacturers used to showcase GPRS technology’s high-speed capabilities for extended periods of time. Those problems remain today, and manufacturers are trying to figure out a way to manipulate the RF components to accommodate the additional time slots.
“With a one-slot uplink, there are no heating problems,” said Rainer Lischetzki, Motorola’s technical marketing manager for GPRS. “The heat is generated with two or more time slots in the uplink direction. This should be addressed in the new layout of the final RF stage.”
Lischetzki said Motorola should have a number of multi-slot GPRS phones available in the fourth quarter that will allow speeds of around 60 kbps. L.M. Ericsson, which has said it won’t release a commercial GPRS handset until the first quarter next year, demonstrated a full GPRS system using a handset capable of one time slot in each direction. It’s testing multiple time slot phones today. Nokia Corp. has said its handsets will be available late this year or in early 2001.
The initial slow data speeds GPRS will provide won’t matter, says the GSM community. It is quick to point out that the value of GPRS is not necessarily the high-speed data access, but the always-connected feature. Manufacturers and analysts also note that Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo’s iMode data service only supports speeds of around 9 kbps, but it is wildly popular among the Japanese.
“The set-up time is gone, and GPRS’s click-away access will make many people decide to use the phone for data, even in an office environment,” predicts Eurotel’s Kingman.
“Speeds are not going to matter much,” said Bob Egan, research director with The Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn. “When we look at market growth in North America, wireless data goes north of 3 million today to 36 million in 2004. About 90 percent of those are much more time-bound than they are bandwidth bound. Web surfing doesn’t apply in this market.”
In North America, Omnipoint, which hopes to finalize its merger with VoiceStream Wireless Corp. this quarter, isn’t waiting for GPRS handsets. By July, it hopes to offer GPRS services via PCMCIA cards, targeting the telematics and business markets with 53-kbps service. By 2001, it plans to introduce high-speed GPRS handsets. Omnipoint announced in December that it began trials of Ericsson’s GPRS technology.
“We’ve almost completed
PCMCIA card negotiations,” said Chris Resavy, senior director for technology with Omnipoint. “Everyone’s looking for the killer application on the handset. With our success in telematics, there is a market niche there.”
Omnipoint recently debuted its Wireless Advanced Vehicle Equipment system at the North American International Autoshow. The W.A.V.E. unit includes GSM wireless connections to the Internet, e-mail and corporate local area networks
, as well as a telematics unit for remote monitoring, entertainment and emergency services.
