How the Mobile Broadband Battle Lines are Shaping Up
January 8, 2007, 2:33 PM
Scott Fulton, BetaNews: Talking now with Carmi Levy, who's helping us follow CES developments all this week. Carmi, I’m seeing a lot of press releases about WiMAX versus what’s now called UMB versus next generation of EDGE, and I’m wondering, these are technologies that the general consumer isn’t necessarily familiar with yet, and I’m wondering if you might be able to describe for this general consumer what it is these technologies are about, what distinguishes them, and why are those distinguishing facts important?
Carmi Levy: Whether you use a wireless laptop, a cell phone, converged device, smart phone, BlackBerry, this is going to fundamentally determine what you are capable of doing on your future wireless device of any type. Clearly this is probably the biggest battle that’s shaping up in the technology space now, this battle for wireless supremacy, and right now it’s still not clear which technology is going to prevail, which technologies will succeed and which ones will fail. We’re very much in the early phases of sort of a WiMAX vs. 4G battle right now for the next generation of wireless technologies that go beyond WiFi, and it’s still not clear what ultimate technology is going to prevail.
WiFi is a local high-speed wireless broadband technology. What WiMAX and 4G technologies like EDGE networks do is, essentially, take that high-speed capability that we’ve all become used to with WiFi, with our localized hot spots, and extend them out to a metropolitan or regional focus or regional scope similar to what today’s 2G and 3G phone networks can deliver. So essentially what they’re doing is, they’re taking ubiquitous, high-speed wireless connectivity and they’re making it available wherever you are, such that you are not stuck to a wireless hot spot.
Scott Fulton: Well, I can see a situation gearing up where, if it appears that Sprint is going to be backing WiMAX and then you have Verizon backing UMB and Cingular going ahead with EDGE, all of them have certain technological claims over one another with regards to theoretical throughput and performance, but I would think that what would eventually decide the victor in the marketplace, as you pointed out, wouldn’t be the technological superiority as much as what are the killer services that sell the phones that make these things work?
Carmi Levy: Exactly. Consumers don’t really care about the technological underpinnings of a given networking technology. They don’t understand the subtle differences between them. And it frankly doesn’t make much of a difference for the typical consumer, slight differences in bandwidth versus slight differences in throughput or power capacity or anything like that. Ultimately, what matters is, does your carrier support your services that make a difference to you, your life, and your business? That’s ultimately going to be the determining factor, because that’s what the consumer can see. The consumer can’t see the technical spec sheet that the engineer considers when he or she specs out the transmission tower, for example. So if you are a Verizon customer, and Verizon puts together a package with the right services at the right price with the right level of coverage that supports the right devices, you’re going to go in that direction even if Verizon service is, for whatever reason, slightly slower than Cingular’s.
At the end of the day, it’s what does the consumer see? And what the consumer sees is the service, the package, the price. It is not the technological spec sheet. That might matter to a networking manager at an IT shop, but in the end, what the end user and the consumer cares about is the service and nothing else.
Scott Fulton: Well, with that said, it looks like these three major players are going to battle with one another naked, in a way, because they’re touting the technology but they don’t have the service.
Carmi Levy: They’re drawing the lines in the sand now, and they’re very hard-line. Essentially if you back the wrong horse, you could essentially be driving yourself into a corner. Pity the vendor or the carrier that picks the wrong wireless technology at this point in time, because ultimately they will be nowhere if that technology dead-ends in a few years’ time.
But clearly these are some very large bets. To commit to a next generation metropolitan-area networking wireless technology is a multi-billion-dollar decision, in terms of building out the infrastructure, margining it, commiting to the device support, commiting to the service support. Obviously all of the major carriers have made their decisions based on what they think their client base wants, what services their clients are going to want in the years to come, and each one of them very strongly believes that they are not going to fail. So it might very well be a case that no one technology has to fail; the market might very well be large enough for all of these technologies to allow the carriers to make a profit by delivering services on top of them. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a carnivorous scenario.
Scott Fulton: Glad you're keeping up with all of this. Thanks, Carmi.
Post a Comment