Hello Juergen, Teo, Benedict and the List,
I've been following the list for about a year now, as a non-active member.
Having a VC background, I am not much for tech but consider myself to be a
business person with some tech understanding. Yoroshiku.
To attempt to answer "Whats wrong in Europe?" is difficult -> EVERYTHING?
Again from a business point of view, the thing that really did it here were
the UMTS licences. This is when some of the decition makers lost it.
Everyone had to have a UMTS licence and many did not really weigh the
consequences. A bunch of operators were close to bankrupcy after this. The
only thing that has somewhat saved them are traditional voice calls and
increasing amounts of conventional SMS as well as "new" uses of SMS.
Examples new uses are: TV as a source and SMS as the mobile back channel
(kind of like Digital TV except your keitai is your remote), telematics
(machine 2 machine SMS communication) and the not so new logos, ringtones,
sms news etc etc.
As for what Teo said about Vodafone: "the 3G licenses were not such a huge
investment". I do not see how not. Last year alone Vodafone spent
approximately 21,000,000,000 euros (2,271,654,000,000 yen) only on UMTS
licences. That is a lot of numbers either way you look at it. This year they
were planning to spend another 8,000,000,000 euros on actually making
something out of their licences until last Friday they came out with an
announcement that they will cut back on their UMTS spending because thay
believe that UMTS handsets will only be readily available by 2003. I wonder
if this has anything to do with a tightening of the Voda budget.
These shifts affect everyone. This one in particular affects Ericsson and
therefore the Ericsson's. It's a chain reaction. This is why some of
Juergens buddies are looking for jobs. Some of mine are as well.
Delay UMTS -> Delay Networks -> Delay Handsets -> Delay Software -> Delay
Applications -> etc. etc. etc.
Biggest boy -> Bigger boy -> Big boy -> Wannab big boy -> Small boy -> Even
smaller boy
It definately seems that everyone has forgotten that iMODE was supposed to
come to Europe. The closed thing so far is iTIM (because of the
name?)http://www.tim.it/inglese/itim/index.html which sometimes makes me
want to laugh.
The transform will be from GSM to GPRS starting now...the first GPRS
handsets from Ericsson and Motorola are out already. Nokia is coming out
with their versions in September. I have been playing around with their
soon-to-come handsets - and they seem to work fine (in Finland). However,
there are no luxuries what so ever. The GPRS phones are pretty much like the
GSMs, only faster and packet ready.
As for the switch from GPRS to UMTS is concerned, it will happen when the
giants like Voda say it will happen. And right now they are saying 2003 is
when it all starts. This could mean that Europe only gets really going with
UMTS 2003 - 2004.
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Tue Jul 24 14:53:05 2001