Third-Degree Turn

In 36 months, 3G services will be switched on in geographic pockets across the United States. Seems as though the cheerleading for the service has begun awfully early. You might think we need to create the groundswell now to get people ready to pay for all of those fancy-schmanzy services in three years.

In fact, there's no need to wait until 2004, for most of the so-called 3G services and capabilities are here now. New technologies breed lots of false expectations, and 3G is no exception. People both inside and outside the industry mistakenly believe that 3G will give birth to miraculous capabilities such as SMS, MMS, video postcards, m-commerce, real-time entertainment, and on and on. In fact, 3G will not bring these specifically, because you can do most, if not all, of them with today's technology and networks. So much so that Hans Snook, Orange CEO (www.orange.com), suggested the power of today's wireless technology risks breeding a population of truly lazy people:

• Want to see your mother? Dial her up and have her appear on a monitor. Saves that pesky 45-minute trek across town and the in-person hug.

• Want to wake up the kids for school? From the warm cocoon of your bed, you can use the technology to open their blinds, order them out of bed and even view other parts of the house to make sure the pitter-patterers have made it to the kitchen for their Cheerios.

• Someone at the door? Instead of tiptoeing over, eyeballing through the peephole to make sure it's not a door-to-door salesman selling vacuum cleaners or that glad-handing neighbor coming to collect for his kids' candy bar/cookie/trash bag/toothpaste drive again, you verbally can command your communicator to show the front-porch area and respond according to your whims.

According to Joe Barrett, Nokia (www.nokia.com) head of 3G market relations, it's not about bandwidth in 3G; it's capacity. It's about the networks supporting devices with high bandwidth.

As these types of capabilities are offered, millions, if not billions, more voice and data commands will be crossing the networks coming from current and future subscribers as well as current and future appliances. Capacity will be critical.

At this month's Wireless 2001, many fashionably wireless speakers as well as exhibitors will be prefacing their future-vision comments with, When 3G is available . But think about it. What of today's wireless data applications demand the speeds often associated with DSL or cable that you get at home? None if you ask some 6 million NTT DoCoMo subscribers, who are delighted with the 9.6kb/s delivery of SMS, cartoons and jokes.

If you think about it, all of the services we hear about today and credit to 3G tomorrow likely will come to market well before 2004.

Location-based services, the hoped-for killer-app messiah, launches in November. One, if not all five, of the major carriers no doubt will begin offering location-based services to regain capital expenditures made on behalf of their E-911 commitments.

Bluetooth will begin appearing in devices by the end of this year as well, providing tremendous excitement by subscribers, but also proving by MIT standards what a disruptive technology truly is.

Both of these capabilities will begin feeding the dormant m-commerce monster. Each capability will feed the next.

The constraints on 3G services are not created by the network technology. In fact, there are other inhibitors to these advanced services, and they don't necessarily have anything to do with WCDMA or cdma2000. They have more to do with the availability of devices, product commodization by the carriers, killer-application search and find, and just plain old evolution.

Nokia's Barrett keenly pointed out that it takes roughly three to seven years to change behavior in a society. This theory proved true in 1983 when cellular service first launched and tried to change a nation's notion of telecommunications, only to finally hit its stride in 1988.

Maybe that's the key to 3G as well and perhaps central to the 2004 target date. If we start talking about 3G today, maybe society will be ready for the cataclysmic change wireless to the third degree will make on our way of living and doing business, even though the change starts today.

Comments? Write to rhonda_wickham@intertec.com.