Our life is becoming more and more wireless. For voice calls, we now see mobile replacing fixed-line phone usage with less of us having a home phone, and the days of the payphone perhaps numbered.

Charles F. Moreira

The relative ease of subscribing to mobile and the competitive call cost have made it the logical choice for new users, particularly for young people. This is borne out by the figures which show over 80% penetration for mobile, compared with just over half that for fixed-line.

It would be interesting to see how many new phone subscriptions are purely to facilitate subscription to ADSL broadband services. Even in this arena, it is now becoming quite common for us to place a wireless router on our Internet connection to give us flexibility and mobility in the home or office. This trend has prompted the Singapore government to make it an offence to connect to the Internet by squatting on someone else’s wireless connection.

So what about 3G? 2006 was the year which saw widespread availability of 3G internationally, with the public image and awareness of the technology gradually improving.

However, this has not resulted so far in a mass migration of users over to 3G.  Figures for numbers of 3G subscribers in Malaysia are hard to come by and one may ask how many 3G users are actually taking advantage of the new services available, or is it still the case that it is phone calls and SMS that are driving the market.

Another guess would be that the migration is partially fuelled by people buying the latest model phone which happens to be a 3G one!

So why are we so slow to adopt 3G?  Sadly I feel it still comes down to cost as a main driver. In Malaysia, the vast majority of us are prepaid subscribers, accounting for 85% of the local market.

For postpaid users, 3G offers some very attractive packages with flat monthly rates for unlimited access. This opens up 3G as a broadband service with the dual benefits of mobility and ubiquitous access, albeit rather expensive in a roaming context.

However, for prepaid, the pay as you go bandwidth charges are still prohibitively high for all but small downloads. With the increased speed over GPRS, it is made very easy to consume large amounts of credit in a short period of time.

The end of 2006 saw the launch of 3G HSDPA services by both of the incumbent 3G operators. HSDPA or High-Speed Downlink Packet Access offers a much increased capacity for downloading of up to 3.6 Mbps.

While users would find it difficult to achieve this current maximum speed in practice for extended periods, it does now put areas of the mobile network on par with fixed-line Internet access in terms of both cost and speed, with an evolution path to being able to offer nearly 15 Mbps of data rate.

Aimed really at the laptop user, the first devices are data cards and the service is offering something in principle quite similar to the much hyped WiMAX. To follow is HSUPA with the ‘U’ standing for uplink, which will make similar improvements in the uploading throughput of the network.

And what of WiMAX? Well, although there has been a lot of talk regarding it, thus far there is little action, particularly on the device side which is key to a mass adoption of the technology.

Intel say they are still committed to WiMAX and intend to give it similar treatment as they have already done for WiFi in their Centrino chipset, but as yet they have not given a definite time frame to this deployment. I’ve read a prediction made in 2000 and for that Intel would incorporate WiMAX into their laptop chipsets by 2006!

I would not anticipate much movement on WiMAX in Malaysia this year. Compared to 3G/HSDPA, the technology is still a way off yet from serious commercial implementation.
The focus of both of these technologies however is on providing access rather than content. This is appropriate for the market we have now, but in 2007 we should see the market being driven more and more by the content, as wireless access becomes cheap and widely available.

2007 – the year of mobile services
2007 should see an accelerated adoption of 3G in Malaysia and hopefully toward the end of the year we would see more interesting use of the network for delivering content and applications rather than merely providing access.

3G should believe in leveraging on those advantages it possesses over the Internet, such as user location and presence for service personalization, push services as well as the fact that we as users have the device in our possession all of the time.

We should see 3G applications emerging that we would use at home or in the office, even when we have alternative Internet access through a PC.

In Malaysia the penetration of broadband Internet access is still relatively low, particularity when compared to mobile. Therefore there is a huge opportunity to offer a range of data services to mobile users who are not heavy Internet users. This echoes the global picture where GSM usage alone outnumbers Internet two to one. Internet penetration is more of a European/U.S. phenomenon than an Asian one.

Throughout this year, I would predict that three different service/technology areas should begin to take off regionally, enriching our mobile experience.

The first is mobile TV. The technology is ready and there are a few markets such as South Korea where this is already growing rapidly. Mobile TV is really a complementary technology to 3G. Users watch TV on their mobile device; however the channels are broadcast separately from the mobile network and a dual receiver in the device picks up both networks.

The value-add arises from being able to interact with the TV viewer. The classic example is watching a music video and being able to download the song or ringtone at the click of a button.

For success, I feel that more content suited to mobile will appear. Rather than watching a two hour Hollywood Blockbuster, what we need is short five to ten minute films with either personalized or topical content perhaps following the peer-to-peer sharing model.

The second is location based services. These offer the facility of being able to locate a user in the mobile network to approximately 15m accuracy.

To be meaningful of course, this information needs to be cross referenced to a database to align it with what is at that location.  Longitude and latitude coordinates are no use; we need to correlate this with something like Suria KLCC, or Bukit Bintang.

With mandatory requirements for a positioning system in mobile in the U.S. already in force, and coming in Europe by 2008, content providers should start incorporating location-based services as they become available to make mobile subject matter more relevant.

I do urge some caution here as providers need to self regulate to protect our privacy.

Advertising is likely to be the first major application area, however rather than see this as a negative thing; we should look to some advantages where information services can be offered to us for free with the cost being borne by the advertiser.

The third area is fixed-mobile convergence where we will see an erosion of the barriers between what we have now as separate mobile and fixed line networks.

Service and access bundling will become more commonplace with devices able to connect to the network through a variety of technologies, with the prominence being placed on the content they are accessing rather than which technology is used to transfer their information.

Dr. Jeffrey Bannister is a senior consultant with Kuala Lumpur-based regional telecommunications consultancy, Orbitage Sdn Bhd (www.orbitage.com)