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Wireless emperor has no clothes? - sceptical report into messaging

"Everyone talks about wireless data as the next big thing," said Ron Smith, senior vice president of wireless communications at Intel, at the opening session last Monday of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) show in Orlando, Fla. "(But) right now it's 30 clicks to get to a few lines of text."

The quote above comes from an excellent report from the Seattle Times after last week's wireless hype at the Orlando exhibition. It should serve as a wake-up call to misty-eyed dreamers.

The report, by Sharon Pian Chan, says that the potential is there.

"The rest of the world has already shown that subscribers are willing to pay for data. NTT DoCoMo and its i-mode Internet service had 31 million data subscribers at last count,"

But, it warns, the US still doesn't have the infrastructure: "Data revenue in Europe reached $10 billion last year while U.S. revenue has yet to break $1 billion. Also, several international carriers at CTIA reported that as their subscribers adopted data usage, they also increased their voice usage," writes Chan.

What has failed (the report concludes) "is the attempt to reproduce the PC Internet experience on the phone. One earlier effort, centered on a technology called wireless application protocol (WAP), was an attempt to reproduce the experience. A wireless subscriber clicked through several menus to access generic text-based Internet content such as news, stock quotes and weather. What the carriers discovered is that users want to pull specific information, not surf the Internet. They're willing to use WAP to find movie times at Pacific Place, but they aren't going to shop on Amazon.com on their phones."

An excellent summary; read it!