The Hindu Business Line : Mobile’s second avatar

If the Web is into version 2.0, can telephones be far behind? Anand Parthasarathy was at the Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, to witness the portable phone’s broadband breakthrough.

Visitors listening to the key speeches might be forgiven if they mistook this for an India-China summit.

(Picture by Anand Parthasarathy)

Notebooks with mobile phones

Bharti Telesoft’s 2.5G video solution drew a lot of interest at the Macau Mobile Congress.

Just think about it. How really useful is your telephone? Only as useful as the number of friends and relatives and traders who also own a telephone. Which is why the world’s galloping mobile phone industry’s favourite ‘mantra’ is Metcalfe’s Law, which states: “The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of that network.”

The Qualcomm Vice-President, Jeff Belk, paraphrased this for lay persons: “Our ability to connect to advanced networks with advanced devices increases the ability of all of us to connect to one another and stay connected to the world at large.” In other words, the one billion of the world’s 2.8 billion mobile phone users who are able to experience the advanced, high-speed services generally referred to as 3G or third generation are not a privileged and elite group. Their increasing numbers merely bring nearer the day when all of humanity can connect and communicate .

It was an interesting argument, much bandied about, at the region’s biggest annual telecom ‘mela’ — the Mobile Asia Congress — which attracted a record 9,000 delegates to Macau, earlier this month. It was organised by the GSM Association, the apex body representing over 700 service providers worldwide, who offer the Global System for Mobile Communication, the technology, 20 years old this year, which fuels 80 per cent of all mobile phones used worldwide.

Its international nature notwithstanding, visitors listening to the key speeches might be forgiven if they mistook this for an India-China summit — such was the towering numerical strength of the mobile phone industry in these two nations. As the GSMA Chairman, Craig Ehrlich, stressed, India and China, between them, added 10 million subscribers every month. And 80 per cent of new subscribers come from emerging markets like these — at the rate of 1,000 a minute. Yet 53 per cent of the world’s population still remained unconnected, still earned less than $1,500 a year. The ‘gee whizz’ aspect of so much that was on display in Macau was tempered by this sobering statistic.

Manoj Kohli, CEO of Bharti Airtel, an honoured speaker at the event, reminded delegates that India was the world’s most competitive telecom market — with seven wireless players; the one with the lowest tariffs: less than 2 cents a minute; the region with the highest phone usage: 500 minutes per customer per month; the market with the least spectrum per operator — and the highest taxes and levies. Yet with only 17 per cent telecom penetration of its billion-plus population, India remained an attractive territory — for those who could innovate to survive. The target of 500 million connections by 2010? ‘Doable’, Kohli felt; Airtel alone hoped to serve 125 million by then.

Airtel’s development arm, Bharti Telesoft, attracted a lot of attention by asking: Why wait for 3G, when you can deliver an entire spectrum of 3G services using existing 2.5 G infrastructure? It provided instant proof — by beaming full broadband video content, live from India, using 2.5 networks. Telesoft is also a key contributor to GSM’s ambitious plan to roll out a mobile money transfer programme worldwide, by early 2008, harnessing the network of Western Union. Airtel in India and Smart in the Philippines are the two early movers in this programme. Why India? Because we top the list of the world’s 10 receiving nations for remittances from its citizens from abroad.

The Macau Congress also saw Indian companies showcase compelling technologies that would appeal to mobile providers in emerging and price-sensitive markets. Subex Azure, which first made its mark as a fraud management expert, displayed a slate of offerings for interconnect billing, revenue assurance and risk management. Roamware, a US and Mumbai-based leader in mobile roaming solutions, showcased a full gamut of solutions for voice, SMS, multimedia and advertising. The Bangalore-based Jataayu Soft featured end-to-end solutions in various messaging regimes; its sister concern Integra Microsystems, took the GSM Association’s top award given away at the event, for innovative mobile applications in a vertical market with its financial applications terminal for rural banking, a device that exploited mobile networks and radio frequency identification technology.

But for a casual visitor, the central message at Macau was the promise and potential that lay beyond 3G... as mobile met scorching broadband speeds and used it to morph seamlessly with the Internet.

Indeed, a few weeks before the Mobile Congress, the world’s biggest handset maker, Nokia, used its own developer event in Bangkok to suggest : If the Internet can move to Web 2.0, it was high time for the telecom world to proclaim Mobile 2.0. After all, Web 2.0 was all about the Internet as a platform for hosting services and communities that harness the collective intelligence of participating users who control their own content . And its mobile ‘avatar’ was about user-defined one-click access from a mobile device to Web-based content, collaboration and contribution.

Nokia pointed to handsets that could access rich music, information and video content on the Web through two-way broadband connections. It has launched phones optimised to receive Mobile TV (services have been started by BSNL in India) and navigator-phones beefed up with Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite technology which exploited the burgeoning demand for location-based services. Traditional players in the ‘satnav’ space such as Garmin and Magellan, had to contend with mobile phone makers who had integrated GPS tracking into handsets at a small incremental cost — or offered less accurate, cheaper alternatives doing triangulation with the existing cellular network to, pin point user locations.

All this needed a fast connection to the Internet; and the big debate today is: which way to mobile broadband? The GSM industry suggests that HSPA or High Speed Packet Access is the way to go. It dismisses the competing technology, WiMax.

On the last day of the Macau Congress, a panel of experts from Microsoft, Ericsson, Qualcomm and others said provocatively: the HSPA ‘train’ has left the station". As proof, the conference released findings of a study by Pyramid Research ( http://www.gsmworld.com/documents/mmb/mass_market_notebook_report.pdf ) sponsored by GSMA and Microsoft, that showed a huge untapped demand for 70 million notebook PCs with built-in mobile broadband. By next year, notebook owners will be offered plug-in cards that will provide access to a broadband mobile phone connection in the region of 4 MBPS. But notebooks with built-in HSPA were on display — from vendors such as LG, Samsung and Dell. Another study by Arthur Little took a more sober view of the achievements and limitations of both competing technologies and did not try to predict what would happen, down their evolutionary path. (http://hspa.gsmworld.com/upload/news/files/10052007144445.pdf )

Indeed, it was a very wise man or a very foolish one, who would attempt to suggest at Macau, what techno-twist the mobile industry would take, what will prevail as the preferred solution — and who would fall by the wayside, as the industry embraced the world’s three billion humans who were yet to join the ranks of the ‘connected’.

Searching, on the move

Found it! Trying out Yahoo’s oneSearch tool. for cell-phones.

Why would a pure Net player such as Yahoo woo the gathered mobile mughals at a show like the Macau congress? Because the world of the wirelessly mobile is the Next Big Thing for the Internet. When five mobile phones are sold for every personal computer, Cyber-providers such as Yahoo see in the mobile space an opportunity to sharply escalate the footprint in its chosen turf — Internet Search.

Yet, as Steve Boom, Yahoo’s Vice-President ( Mobile and Broadband ) told this writer, desktop and mobile search are as different as apples and oranges. The mobile phone is not just a shrunken version of the PC monitor. Phone users have different, sharper needs. They require search engines to anticipate and interpret their queries in the light of who they are — and where they are. Which is why Yahoo re-made its search offering, bottom up, before launching a mobile version, oneSearch (with significant R&D done at its India centres). It must have got it right: 20 operators world wide, including Aircel, BPL, BSNL and Idea Cellular in India, have partnered to push oneSearch to its Net-enabled subscribers. A Chinese version was announced in Macau — and Indian language editions are on the roadmap. Search is just one desk-centred Internet service that is having to enlarge or adapt itself for the mobile boom. The tail may soon wag the dog: In ten years, mobile Internet will have overtaken fixed services, Boom says.

HSPA or Wimax?

HSPA — High Speed Packet Access — is a set of technologies that provides the migration path for the GSM phone to attain speeds beyond the so-called ‘3G’ or third generation. The theoretical downlink speed is a peak 14.4 MBPS but most commercial deployments today don’t go beyond 3.6 MBPS, while 7.2 is expected by 2008. This represents a five-fold improvement over the fastest 3G networks also known as WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access). HSPA is the cellular route to true broadband beyond 3G.

WiMax is a competing broadband access technology whose peak data rate is around 17 MBPS. WiMax was not a mobile technology to start with; but a few weeks ago, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approved WiMax 802.16 as a 3G standard for mobile applications. This provides mobile service providers with an alternative migration possibility, particularly those who have not yet deployed cellular 3G and are, in effect, poised at a fork in the road to broadband.

Who will go which way? Wait and see!

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