>From West to East?

What part of the world is the proving ground for wireless technology? Is it still Europe where wireless penetration in countries such as Finland exceeds 60% of the population and where a single 2G standard prevails? Or is it shifting to Japan, predicted to be first in the race to launch 3G commercial service?

Japan is pursuing 3G for a number of reasons, but the saturation of its capacity is one of the biggest drivers, according to Dan Artusi, Motorola vice president & general manager of the networking computing systems group and acting general manager of the wireless division.

NTT DoCoMo is the largest Japanese operator, and 3G is being 100% driven by DoCoMo in Japan, Artusi said.

Artusi noted that Japan, with its PDC standard, was left out of all of the other standards outside Japan. Now it wants to enter the world market and is trying to do so by pushing wideband CDMA.

This puts Japan between a rock and a hard place, according to Gary Montgomery, Motorola general manager of network computing systems group, Japan.

"They need 3G in order to add more phones," Montgomery said. "But they don't want a standard that is unique to Japan, so they have been working hard with Europeans, with the UMTS standard, trying to get agreement."

NTT DoCoMo plans field trials of 3G in 2000 and commercial deployment in 200l. But being first doesn't necessarily mean being the leader.

Marty Cooper, ArrayCom CEO, said not only do we not know what the 3G technology winner will be, we don't even know how useful 3G will be.

"By the time the rest of the world has it, year 2004 or 2005, there are going to be a whole bunch of other solutions out there, and the other solutions might be better," Cooper said.

Andrew Cole, Renaissance Worldwide analyst, believes that Europe is still the place as far as wireless is concerned.

"Europeans ... are aggressively pushing wireless data, even more so than the Japanese. They are focused on 21/2G and on getting that right first, as well as rapidly looking to 3G," he said.

Cole suggested U.S. carriers will pay lip service to 3G, but will milk their existing networks as long as they can. What may speed the process here is if some international carrier, such as Vodaphone, gains a coast-to-coast foothold. He said if that carrier introduces 3G, the others will follow suit out of fear.

Although the United States may not be the leader in the wireless arena, it is the center of gravity as far as the Internet is concerned, according to Steven Spencer, Lucent Technologies director of wireless Internet applications.

"You get one piece of the puzzle from each of the three markets," Spencer said in reference to the United States, Europe and Japan.

"We're learning from Japan the potential of consumerized advanced data services," Spencer said, describing NTT DoCoMo's colorful 10-yen mail device, which can send a 2,000-character message via the Internet for 8 cents and is all the rage with Japanese teens.

Europe has the penetration and the history, he said. There the wireless phone is a direct primary communications device. It is the future of other markets.

It is in the United States where you find most of the innovations of new business models for the Internet, Spencer said. Many involve adding a mobility dimension to the Internet where you create services that don't exist in the wireline world, he said.

The bottom line is producing products that cut across all technologies and markets, applications that work in the United States as well as they work in Japan, Spencer said.

"Japan will be an excellent test case," Artusi said, adding that what Motorola learns there will apply directly to any 3G system with which it works.