OK, but what's so bad about streaming video? The only reason people
won't use the phone for everything they do on a desktop *and more*
is if it's a great pain in the ass or too expensive.
Politicultural/technomarketing smokescreens to the side,
a cellphone's just a networked computer with no hard disk +
a small screen and keyboard. iAppli hammers this point home
wonderfully, with microsoft about 3 minutes behind.
Michael's right enough, we can work with what's out there,
whether it's broadened GSM or 3G. You can bet that when the
first big-business-compatible video streaming solution emerges
Sprint, Xingular, Orange and the rest will be screaming about it
from shareholder summits to Sunday supplements.
[shudder] well at least we'll have Dragon's Lair.
-chris
Benedict Evans wrote:
>
> Michael, there's a rather basic problem with your arguemnt: Operators
> *didn't* buy 3G to do streaming video!
>
> If you *listen* to them, they say that 3G is about voice capacity for the
> first 5 years at least, with data the icing on the cake, not the cake
> itself. It's all very well to say that you can add capacity to GSM, and
> indeed so you can. But that route has been taken as far as it will go. GSM
> was designed at a time when people thought there was a market for at most 4M
> mobile subscribers in the UK - there are now over 40 million.
>
> That is, there is a point at which it is more economical to build a new
> network - even if you have to buy a licence - than continue adding capacity
> to a netork that's already handling ten times the traffic that it was
> concieved for. That point, for the leading operators, has now been passed.
> 3G is cheaper than struggling on with GSM.
>
> Now, it's perfectly true that consumers show no interest in mobile
> multimedia services. If you'd asked, they'd have shown no interest in the
> internet, either, but that's by the by. But they do rather like mobile
> voice, I think you'd agree. And 3G gives operators the ability to do *all*
> voice by mobile - to completely replace a country's fixed voice network.
> _________________________________________________________________________
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--
Christopher Lowery - software designer - ephemerist
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Received on Thu May 17 13:10:26 2001