What's the Next Killer App? It's Personal

What's the No. 1 New Year's resolution for carriers in 2003? Finding the next killer app, of course — that magical solution that will drive gobs of revenue to their fancy new networks. And while Giga Information Group may not have the killer app, wireless analyst Brownlee Thomas at least has some advice for a few sensible apps.

For starters, anything that will help enterprises and consumers customize their wireless data services should top carriers' wish lists this year, he said. The reasoning is simple: High-speed data isn't really all that fast in the age of GPRS and cdma2000 (see figure below), and customers won't have the patience to fiddle with their phones to get at their data.

As long as speeds are slow, the only services that will sell are intelligent and personally customized features such as online shopping, electronic newspapers and targeted streaming content for consumers, and VPN and unified messaging services for enterprise customers. You want to offer Web surfing and file downloading? Then you'd better get those speeds up above 56 kb/s.