Very interesting comments!
Curt, I'd love to talk to you "offline" about this significant cost
savings. I've never heard this before.
So it seems like the issue here is customer "ownership" vs. customer
"freedom". Same old story...but I think with a twist.
To Arno's point regarding GSM, do you all feel that wireless carriers will
begin to compete not on one type of wireless technology (GSM, GPRS, W-CDMA,
CDMA 2000 1x, WiFi, etc...), but that they will be forced to develop access
"pyramids", and begin competing on the robustness of these pyramids and how
effectively they meet the usage patterns of their customers?
For example, even though KDDI's CDMA 2000 1x may only give 144Kbps access
speed, needing a costly EV-DO upgrade (if I understand this correctly) to
compete with DoCoMo's 384Kbps service, if they begin integrating WiFi for
highest speed access, Soma (www.somanetworks.com) or FWA for wireless
broadband access, CDMA 2000 1x/PHS for "normal speed" wireless access, and
maybe Bluetooth and/or a consumer WiFi solution for wireless in-home
access, providing a "smart" device that simply finds the most appropriate
access, will that completely change the landscape of how access providers
compete? I've read the hype surrounding 4G, and no disrespect intended,
but could it be that these types of service "pyramids" do away with any
real need for 4G (assuming that these smart devices can speak between CDMA
and TDMA systems as well). Or am I being naive?
I've yet to hear any research that suggests that consumer or business users
of wireless technologies need constant broadband access....
Thoughts?
Philip
At 07:19 PM 5/14/2003 +0900, Curt Sampson wrote:
>On Wed, 14 May 2003, Giovanni Bertani wrote:
>
> > The "smart" capabilities of switching from a network to another
> > are sometimes described as part of the 4G.
> >
> > This is great is theory but can we expect the JP operators
> > pushing telephones (Designed by them) with this feature
> > if could jeopardize the traffic revenue?
>
>The first switching systems we're probably going to see here are
>wireless cards that switch between PHS and WiFi. In this case, it's
>actually enhancing traffic revenue, because the contracts are flat rate
>for unlimited data. So moving a user off of PHS and on to WiFi means
>that the carrier uses the (presumably cheaper) WiFi network to ship the
>packets around rather than the more expensive PHS network.
>
>(By cheaper, I'm not just referring to the costs of moving the packets
>through the air, but also getting them to the Internet once they've hit
>the base station. I do know of certain circumstances where this would be
>a huge cost savings to the carrier, but unfortunately I can't give out
>the details here of exactly why this is.)
>
>cjs
>--
>Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
> Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
>
>This mail was sent to address psidel@iuj.ac.jp
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Philip Sidel
Assistant Professor of Marketing
The International University of Japan
Graduate School of International Management
Phone: 81-(0)25-779-1400
Fax: 81-(0)25-779-4443
Email: psidel@iuj.ac.jp
Received on Thu May 15 05:27:42 2003