Gold Rush

Computing industry experts offer nuggets of wireless-data wisdom.

Wireless carriers have become mired in licensing uncertainty, infrastructure costs, capacity constraints, coverage holes, billing barriers — the list goes on — while struggling with the wireless-data bugaboo. As one insightful executive put it, wireless data is hard to mine. Yet the mother lode is there; the problem has been getting to it. What's it going to take to reap wireless data rewards that seem just beyond the industry's reach? Several experts from the computing world took a stab at the million-dollar question. Their answers ran the gamut, from software to middleware to hardware.

Some keyed in on essentials such as more complete coverage and sensible, innovative apps.

“The only thing that really matters in this business is the service portfolio and how innovative can you be,” says Mark Milazzo, Cisco Systems' mobile wireless group director of marketing (www.cisco.com). He says a lack of integrator focus on corporations is slowing down the industry. Systems integrators will help drive wireless data delivery.

Paul Hiles, Compaq iPAQ mobile solutions architecture manager, (www.compaq.com) suggests that carriers concentrate on the basics first; work on becoming excellent in delivering wireless data plus voice service over next-generation networks.

“Get all of that right and get all the billing stuff sorted out before you turn too much attention to trying to figure out how to get money from all of these extra services,” he says.

Proof in Partnerships

That's where partnerships with ASPs are critical. Find out what companies have the best ideas and commission them to handle the services behind the scenes, Hiles says. However, other partnerships are equally crucial. For example, according to Ed Suwanjindar, Microsoft mobility division (www.microsoft.com) product manager, fulfilling the promise of mobile data is about partnerships between handset providers, carriers and software companies. He adds that apps need to take a higher profile in the wireless data space to make it successful.

“We understand our entering this market is a partnership effort, but the new piece to the equation is the software,” Suwanjindar says. “When you are moving data, software matters.”

Apps or software? Or middleware? Jacob Christfort, OracleMobile CTO (www.oraclemobile.com), maintains that the industry needs a more viable mobile infrastructure. He shuns the quick-fix middleware “magic boxes” that companies plug in to existing apps to extend them to the wireless world. He says the biggest problem with wireless data is that those in the industry are trying to oversimplify app mobilization.

“There's a concept that you can repurpose existing apps and run them over wireless networks and on mobile devices in general, and that's not true,” he says.

In other words: No pain, no gain. The bad news is that there's no quick way to make a wired app wireless, Christfort says. The good news is that wireless data's potential truly exists.

Handset Woes

Tony Sica, Intel (www.intel.com) wireless communications & computing group marketing director, maintains that wireless data's weak link is on the client side, and the limitation is proprietary silos. The answer? A separation of church and state.

“Each solution is its own solution,” he says, adding that solutions need to open up proprietary platforms and establish standards wherein the computing and communications elements are separate entities. This, he says, will allow content and services to flourish similar to the way they've grown in the PC space.

With current handsets, Sica explains, hardware is tightly integrated. When manufacturers design a device and get it approved by carriers, they aren't willing to make changes. The apps already are embedded.

“To change one bit of code in a software stack that is that tightly integrated, you can be sure you're going to run into a bug,” Sica says. “So there is no way to freely add apps or upgrade apps in existing handsets today, and that's a dilemma.”

Intel accomplishes the separation of computing and communications by providing processors to do specific tasks: A communications engine focuses only on communications, and a processor engine focuses only on computing. The two talk over an Intel interface. In this design, software can grow or migrate on the platform without affecting the communication engine itself. Carriers can provide special content and services under their brands and deploy services at will.

Although Intel's personal Internet client architecture, PCA, is not technically an open architecture, it's a royalty-free R&D situation.

“One of the reasons we're not driving this to a standards body is we're trying to move quickly on this,” Sica says.

Hype, Hype, Hurrah!

Expecting to move quickly may have exacerbated the wireless-data conundrum. Some computing experts suggest the wireless industry is a victim of its own 2G success. Milazzo says wireless data has suffered not so much from technical malfunctions as from a case of unrealistic expectations, both in what technology could deliver and a realistic timeframe for delivery.

“If you look at Telecom Italia Mobile (www.tim.it), Omnitel (www.omnitel.it) and even Sprint PCS (www.sprintpcs.com), you can see data revenues become material and growing quickly,” he says. “Is it these massive histograms of revenue that everyone has hyped? No, but if you look back on other market entries such as frame relay, private line and VPN, is it growing in the same sort of curve? Yes, it is.”

Despite disagreement on how much attention to focus on network upgrades and 3G vs. here-and-now apps or the client space vs. software, one concept is clear: Regardless of changes that need to happen and work that still needs to be done, it's just a matter of time.

Perhaps Christfort sums it up best: “The fundamental value of mobility is absolutely valid. The things that are written about the potential of this technology are absolutely true. It's like a gold mine that we have had trouble getting to. It doesn't mean there is any less gold down there. That's important because some people are starting to question whether the gold is there.”

Jensen is a freelance writer based in Lawrence, KS.