On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Giorgio Andreoli wrote:
> I don't follow you: in countries where 90%-like penetration has been
> reached, the common prescription to increase traffic is to stimulate
> more data services usage....
That may be the common perscription, but keep in mind that replacing
fixed-line with mobile is just starting to take off in the consumer
market. I completely dropped fixed-line service in 1999, but I doubt
that many "average" consumers sit down and do a cost analysis of their
telephone usage, and even so they tend to have rather more voice minutes
than I do. But I can provide at least anecdoctal evidence that it's
beginning to happen: I now have friends who have no real interest in
keitai and relatively little need for mobile communications relatively
who have reached the point where they realized that, if they were going
to have a keitai at all, they might as well drop their fixed lines.
> ...but this reflects
> different usage patterns and behaviours (shorter calls on the move,
> elder people using the mobile only for emergency etc.). I don't see
> how to modify these usage patterns in the short term.
It's very simple: convince these people that, if they are going to own a
mobile at all, it's cheaper and/or easier to drop the fixed line and use
the mobile as their home phone as well. People are cluing into this at a
steady rate.
That, again, pushes the need for greater capacity, as Benedict pointed
out. It's really the fixed-line providers who need to be looking
at getting data traffic in the long term, as there's currently no
technology in sight that will allow radio to compete with wire for
bandwidth. (The wireless folks can't even give one person in my
neighbourhood 24 Mbps service, much less everybody in my neighbourhood.)
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
Received on Tue Oct 7 20:00:49 2003