The Price of Paradise

If the implications of this year's 3GSM World Congress bear out, count on a new world coming. Get rid of the laptops and desktops as you access information from your PDA or other wearable devices. Dump the plastic that clutters your wallets.

Exorcise the boredom and tedium that accompanies downtime with games, instant messages and individualized karaoke. Forget about maps, photo albums, dictionaries and language, because the intelligence will be resident in the device that accesses the mother ship of rich data: the Internet.

If the hue and cry for openness are answered, the panoply of services will make every human with a next-gen mobile device a virtual fount of knowledge and capability. Interoperability among carrier systems will extend this capability beyond each carrier's region or each continental land area.

While there is truth in this vision of seamlessness, the U.S. must address one fundamental business and behavioral flaw: Because we pay to send and receive calls, Americans don't readily share their contact numbers. Buddy lists for short messages and instant messaging are rigidly controlled. Further knowledge base and database access is limited. All applications are constrained by the controlled circle of contacts deemed worthy of financing the calls.

Until the U.S. implements a calling-party-pays model for voice and data, all that rich content will be stuck out there in cyberspace. Carriers will be stymied in producing the kinds of penetration rates their Asian and European counterparts generate. And the application and service capabilities will be just some cool stuff to talk about at trade shows.