BREW's Farm Team

As employees of a wireless carrier serving rural communities, the folks at Midwest Wireless are used to being neglected by suppliers while big-city carriers get all the attention. For example, after a 300-site CDMA 1xRTT overlay buildout, Midwest executives were ready on June 1 to launch data applications based on Qualcomm's BREW application development platform — but their handset manufacturers delayed the plan. One had an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless that precluded Midwest from selling the same phones. And other handset suppliers wanted guarantees of high sales volumes before committing to Midwest. So the rural carrier had to wait two more months after its targeted launch date to roll out BREW.

Midwest's customers didn't take nearly as long to adopt the new technology. As it turns out, rural subscribers in southern Minnesota, northern Iowa and western Wisconsin buy a lot of the same apps their big-city counterparts do. M-commerce staples like ringtones and games are some of the most popular applications for Midwest users, but the carrier's two weather-information apps are also in high demand (priced, accordingly, at $3 a month — among the most expensive on the list). That's likely due in part to the high percentage of farmers among the 32,000 Midwest customers with 1x-enabled phones (a third of which have BREW-enabled devices). Midwest executives said the rest of the carrier's 308,000 customers might upgrade to BREW devices more quickly if developers took the time to create more apps focused on rural users.

“There's a huge market out there for rural applications that hasn't been tapped,” said Tom Riley, Midwest's vice president of customer operations. Some of Midwest's customers in the farming industry already use text messaging to send grain prices to customers on a daily basis, he said, and similar applications are only waiting for developers to create them. The only barrier is the misconception that farmers are technophobes who avoid new gadgets.

“You'd be surprised how advanced farm equipment has become,” Riley said. “That group is as technologically savvy as many of the kids out there.”

For example, farming co-operative Heart of Iowa uses text messaging to transmit work orders to its petroleum truck drivers. But the co-op could do more with richer apps, said its IT director, Brian Gates. When orders change for its lime-sprayers in the field, someone has to run a CD with an updated field map to the sprayer.

“U.S. Cellular is coming out with a PC-card telephone that would let the sprayers just download a map instead,” Gates said.

To further accommodate rural markets, Riley said local news and sports scores could keep users in touch with their own communities — another application Midwest has already proven with text messaging. The possibilities are limitless, he said.

In the future, Riley said, hardware and software vendors alike would be wise to view Midwest's network as a better technology and application test bed than the networks of some of the major wireless carriers. It took Midwest only a year to upgrade its entire network to CDMA 1x, Riley pointed out.

“Give AT&T Wireless that same task, and I assure you it would take them at least three years — if not four,” he said.

That's one of the problems inherent in big-city life: Everything moves too slowly.