• Investment World
• eWorld
• Catalyst
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest

Krishnan Thiagarajan

Geneva , Oct. 15

THE problem facing the telecom industry have been its attempts to force-fit applications to the technologies created, said Mr Martin Cooper, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the US-based Arraycom Inc. He is considered the father of the cellphone who did pioneering work on the cellphone technology as the project manager at Motorola in 1973.

Addressing the forum session at the ITU Telecom World, 2003, on the future of wireless, Mr Cooper said he would go so far as to suggest that the "telecom recovery will not happen because there are deeper problems than economics." The monopoly legacy, be it AT & T, BT or Deutsche Telecom have only led to market domination and created a host of competing technologies which are in search of applications. This `one size fits all' approach has to go, he added. This will change only when the industry starts to understand what the consumer wants in the form of applications and then builds technologies to address that need.

Citing an example to reinforce this point, Mr Cooper pointed to the first commercial deployment of iBurst high-speed wireless technology, developed by Arraycom, which is set to go live in Sydney by the end of this year. This was a case of an application - high-speed Internet access, which was optimised by technology, provided by his company, he said.

In marked contrast, speaking on the same theme, Dr Myung Sung Lee, Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer, Network R & D Centre of the Korea-based SK Telecom, shared a completely different vision of the industry. According to him, the cellular and wireless LAN (local area network) are coming together to create what he calls, a "portable Internet". Basically, the portable Internet will marry the strong features of cellular which is a high mobility but slower Internet access service with Wireless LAN which is a high speed service but with low mobility.

Mr Lee said that contrary to the slow take-up of 3G in Europe, in South Korea 3G has been a big success. Using a third generation mobile standard, which is different from Europe, SK Telecom has built up a subscriber base of 18 million and a 54 per cent marketshare in the CDMA market. Despite 75 per cent mobile penetration, both the ARPU (average revenue per user) and minutes of usage have been rising.

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
India can double BPO pie share in 2 years: Corbett

Copyright © 2003, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line