The wireless meltdown

Thursday 1st November 2001

A year ago we seemed to be heading for wireless nirvana. Now Palm's wireless plans have collapsed, along with its share price, while the first souped-up, net-savvy cellphones are thwarted by anaemic networks. Chris Keall asks: Wazzup?

Manning Internet Magazine's stand at the recent Auckland Home Show, I get tetchy. It's a four-hour shift. Can I go that long without my email? Or without checking our website to see if my cohorts have posted a story about the latest virus outbreak? My body aches for a decent wireless internet access device. I can understand why US and UK business people have gone bananas for the BlackBerry, Canada-based company RIM's thumb-keyboard device that lets you remotely check your email, and syncs it with your office account, too. Wouldn't mind a Palm VII, either. Such wireless wonders have, alas, passed New Zealand by. Will the brave new world of GPRS and CDMA make things any better?

Of course, it's been annus pretty bloody horribilis for all tech companies. But for handheld PC makers it's been especially pitiful. Compaq's boast that its iPAQ is close to becoming the top personal digital assistant (PDA) by reve-nue is, alas, more a measure of how far market leader Palm has fallen than how much the iPAQ has grown.

In its fourth quarter, Palm's revenue fell 65%, from $US471 million to $US165 million - a breathtaking reversal of fortune for the previously fast-growing share market darling. Palm's latest dive has been precipitated by the botched rollout of its new series of wireless internet-capable models. Its main rival, HandSpring, has suffered a parallel fate. At least Palm has a wireless service offering to upgrade in the US. In New Zealand? Not happening. Vodafone hinted and hinted it was going to offer a service based around Psion handhelds, but we've waited and waited for more than two years … and now it'll never happen, because the UK PDA company has just announced it's quitting the hardware business. Never mind. Now Vodafone says it's keen to partner with HandSpring (whose Visor PDAs run the Palm OS). Forgive me if I don't hold my breath.

The great WAP hope

What happened to WAP (wireless access protocol), the technology for reading cut-down, text versions of websites through a WAP-enabled cellphone (or PDA with a modem attached)? Last year it looked like the Next Big Thing. This year it's become apparent that:

People are used to free website access, and won't pay for WAP content.
You have to buy a new cellphone to upgrade your WAP browser, yet Kiwis are used to buying phones whose true cost is masked by 12- or 24-month plans.
Really useful WAP phones - the top-shelf models that can sync with desktop PC email and address book programs like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes - are big, clunky and priced in the prohibitive $1500 to $3000 range.
The saying "WAP is crap" is just so damn catchy.

For all the above reasons, only a tiny handful of people bought WAP phones, so few created WAP websites and services, or bothered with a WAP version of their website (including us; it's on our to-do list for 2005). So here we are today.

Over-promised and overpriced

Now we have so-called 2.5G (read: second-and-a-half generation) mobile phones. Telecom's 2.5G product is based on CDMA technology (used by new CDMA-capable cellphones issued with 027 numbers). Vodafone's rival 2.5G service runs on GPRS technology. (CDMA stands for code division multiple access; GPRS for general packet radio services.)

Promotions for 2.5G phones hint at a brave new world of streaming multimedia. Presumably, such marketing is meant to be taken in the same metaphorical vein as the Telecom ads featuring the romping wrinklies at Jenny Gibbs' Piha bach - whose video-conferencing bandwidth miraculously exceeds any fast internet connection available in New Zealand, let alone wireless options on the wild west coast.

Because, in fact, the speed of the first 2.5G phones is pathetic. They suck down web pages and email off the internet at 14 kilobits per second (Kbit/s). That's better than the 9Kbit/s achieved by a regular digital phone, but pales at a time when bung old dial-up modems on desktop PCs approach 56Kbit/s, and users of fast internet solutions like JetStream and Ultra regularly hit 10 times that speed or more.

Worse, the pricing makes you gulp. Sure, 2.5G phones do have the benefit of being always connected to the internet if you're in a coverage area, and you pay according to how large an internet download is, not how long it takes to download it. But ouch, those download charges. Vodafone stings you for $30 for 1 megabyte of data; $45 for 2MB and $65 for 5MB. If you don't have a voice plan, then you have to add a $30 monthly "access fee" on top of that.

Telecom is cheaper, relatively speaking. Its monthly CDMA plans include a $25 for 12MB deal for PDA users, and a $45 for 25MB deal for PDA or smart phone users (a voice call plan costs extra).

Vodafone spokeswoman Alison Sykora says 1MB is equal to 16 web pages, or about 100 emails. She notes that websites optimised for WAP will sleekly slip onto your GPRS phone. Sadly, most websites aren't and, worse, make you wade through a number of web pages until you find what you want. Yup, you'll be paying to download all those banner ads and other bonehead graphics.

Not that web surfing at 14Kbit/s is fun on any device. For the moment, text messaging remains the killer app for mobile, and you don't need a 2.5G phone for that.

So far, 2.5G's main function in life is the boring but useful ability to allow networks to accommodate more people doing plain old text messaging and voice calls. The situation is analogous to digital TV: you can use the extra bandwidth for a few razzy interactive channels, or stuff it with hundreds of normal channels.

There are other benefits of 2.5G, including better security, better voice-call quality (similar to that of a landline) and services like two-way text messaging.

You can also use a 2.5G network to wirelessly transfer files to or from a PDA or a laptop hooked up to a CDMA- or GPRS-capable cellphone. But zowie, better go and have a cup of coffee while you wait for that 2MB spreadsheet - and you'd better hope it all comes through without a glitch, since the first megabyte might cost you $30.

Faster phones on the way

At an unspecified time - possibly before the end of the year - both Telecom and Vodafone will upgrade their 2.5G networks to accommodate internet connection speed of up to 150Kbit/s (Telecom calls it CDMA1x).

"Up to" is the key phrase here. You'll get a 150Kbit/s connection if you happen to be standing right by a transmitter and have a clean connection to a website with a fast server. If you're in the wrong place, you could be back in 14Kbit/s-land. That's no fun.

"Around 2003" (read: 2005) both Telecom and Vodafone are promising upgrades to full-blooded third-generation (3G) networks. Third-generation phones will be able to access the net at 300Kbit/s or faster. Enough for interactive gaming and music and video streamed to your phone in real time.

The problem with 3G

But even with 3G, my broadband mobile nirvana could prove elusive. Okay, while in many countries, over-enthusiastic telephone companies paid far too much for the necessary spectrum, New Zealand spectrum was hocked off relatively cheap. (Some commentators carped about bad timing and government incompetence, but the net result is that Telecom, Vodafone NZ and others didn't have to shell out big bucks - costs that would have to be shouldered by cellphone subscribers in the end.) Nevertheless, 2.5G and 3G networks are still expensive things to build, especially in a country with a small, widely distributed population - so don't wait for those prohibitive 2.5G prices to fall anytime soon, or anticipate that 3G will be any cheaper.

Another problem: how do you watch video on your 3G phone when it's pressed to your ear? (No, the answer is not a Mr Spock-style Bluetooth wireless earpiece, because it makes you look like a dick.) And another: 3G cellphones and transmitters produce much higher emissions than today's cellphones and transmitters. Whether the increased level of radiation is harmful is debatable, but it will definitely multiply the political problems inherent in placing new transmitters around schools and the like.

George Jetson never had problems like this. But there you go: icky reality.

Chris Keall
chris_keall@idg.co.nz

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