When Internet-ready cell phones hit the market a little more than a year ago, U.S. users responded overwhelmingly–with a collective yawn.
Undaunted, phonemakers are taking the next logical step to cure mobile callers’ Internet apathy.
The industry’s answer is called 3G, short for “third-generation” cellular technology, and its promises range from true, graphics-rich Web surfing to two-way videoconferencing, all from a device no bigger than a pack of cigarettes.
But hang on to the streamers and confetti: Although 3G technology works well enough in the lab, some experts are casting doubt on its real-world viability.
As was the case with previous generations of mobile-phone technology, standards wars are holding up 3G deployment.
Cost could pose another impediment. It remains to be seen how much phone companies will have to charge for the enhanced services to recoup their large capital investments.
And then there’s the question of the technology itself: Will it be good enough, and addictive enough, to hook fickle and demanding consumers?
The world will begin finding out in May when Japan’s NTT DoCoMo rolls out 3G service in Tokyo.
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In addition to allowing voice calls, the DoCoMo system will allow graphical Internet browsing and the transmission of pictures and streaming video. The system should promote mobile commerce, or “m-commerce,” business deals conducted via mobile phone, according to DoCoMo.
U.S. users, meanwhile, will have to rough it with monochrome text screens and other innovations of yesteryear until later this year when 3G-like technologies should become available.
Mindful of the backlash that can drag overhyped products into oblivion, some phone industry cheerleaders already are backpedaling on 3G’s hype.
Take this disclaimer found on the Nokia Web site: “The 3rd Generation vision presented on these Web pages [is] just to highlight some possible future visions, and Nokia cannot take responsibility for, nor be liable for, the actual future commercial availability of these services and solutions.”
Still, phone manufacturers and their vendors offer an exciting vision for the emerging services.
“Let’s say you’re in L.A., and you want to see the traffic from the office that you have to go to,” said Sasson Darwish, head of U.S. operations for Geo Interactive Media Group Ltd., an Israeli phone technology firm.
Instead of waiting for the radio traffic report, you could dial up a traffic service on your phone and see the camera feed of your choice from the highway.
A Geo-built Emblaze chip provides the video brainpower behind Samsung’s SPH-X2000, a palm-size mobile handset that can receive that kind of streamed video.
The Samsung phone purportedly delivers video as fast as 15 picture frames per second–a bit jerky but viewable. That is on existing 2G and 2.5G phone networks, with their data transmission rates of 9.6 to 14.4 kilobits per second, far slower than the transmission rates provided by the typical 56 kbps computer modem connected to a landline phone network.
Movie- and television-quality video requires about 30 frames per second, which may be achieved when true 3G networks become reality.
Geo has agreements with foreign cellular carriers and is negotiating with major carriers in the United States to use its system for carrying streaming video broadcasts. Video-capable handsets could be available in the United States in six to 12 months, Darwish said.
Among the companies that will supply video to the Israeli company are The Associated Press, CNET, Hollywood.com and Playboy.com.
Still, solutions such as Geo’s are seen as stopgap measures while scientists hash out technical details of future cellular networks.
The technical haggling and jockeying for market position could make things harder for consumers looking to sign up for the new services.
Wireless consultant Herschel Shosteck said the fragmentation of standards in the United States ranges from “disastrous to chaotic to disastrous.”
Although companies can upgrade to make their networks compatible with other technologies, it costs more than if they all started with the same network.
Industry observers lament the billions of dollars spent on competing standards, money that consumers could have saved if there were more cooperation by cellular competitors.
One 3G goal is “global roaming,” which will allow a user to make a call from anywhere in the world that has cellular service. Yet Shosteck said there likely would be an industrywide technology shootout, and consumers who back the loser could be stuck with orphan systems that work only in certain geographical areas.
In addition, Shosteck indicated unhappiness with the way manufacturers are merely jazzing up 2G technology and then slapping a “3G” sticker onto it. Either that or “the capabilities of 3G are being deflated,” he said.
“They were promising full-motion video over your cell phone,” Shosteck said. “They’ve demonstrated it in the lab, but in the real world it’s altogether different.”
Pumping video through the airwaves quickly will overwhelm the portion of the radio spectrum assigned to cellular carriers, Shosteck predicted. He also believes that carriers would have to triple or perhaps quadruple their towers, an enterprise costing many billions of dollars and fraught with environmental and public relations perils.
And with the investment community currently dissing telecommunications firms, “there’s not enough money around to support this,” Shosteck said.