Revolution Calling
The Age
Thursday March 8, 2007
The communication juggernaut will find you, writes Garry Barker.
MOBILITY is now the mantra of the communication revolution - connection to anything, anywhere, any time: up a mountain, in a car, at home, in the air, in your office or trekking across the Sahara.Soon, you may find that sitting with a scuba tank 10 metres down in a Pacific island lagoon is the last peaceful refuge in the face of this juggernaut. But even that may ultimately be breached. Two buzz words point the way: broadband and convergence. Broadband means faster communication that is always on, so that you can access services such as the news, your bank balance, email and weather warnings.Convergence means that information - what this revolution is all about - is now digital, global and on the internet. All sorts of devices will have access, from a computer to a monster screen at the MCG, your refrigerator, car, home security system, an LCD in your living room or a panel on your airline seat. But most of all it will affect the mobile phone.Apple boss Steve Jobs caused a sensation when he announced the iPhone early this year. It is a mobile phone and an iPod, displays text, videos, TV shows and movies and accesses the internet to deliver news, emails, live cricket and more. The iPhone was not shown at the recent 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, a meeting of 60,000 delegates from the global mobile phone industry, but makers such as Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, LG and ZTE all showed handsets with similar, if less elegant, ambitions.But handsets are no longer a big deal. Most competition is now about content. In Europe, as in Australia, GSM is the dominant mobile phone platform, but a challenge is coming from WiMAX, described by Motorola's Dr Ray Owen as "wifi on steroids". Its range is measured in kilometres rather than metres and its speed is almost as high."Fixed" WiMAX, operating similarly to wire-line systems, is available in many countries, including Australia, but the trend is towards mobile.Systems are being developed to allow your handset to operate outside, switching seamlessly once inside your home or office to your cheaper - and probably faster - fixed network.Motorola has trials running in Australia and elsewhere and local WiMAX carrier UnWired plans to go mobile as well. Data rates as high as 10 megabits a second are forecast.Music remains the "killer content" for mobile phones. Apple's iTunes Music Store is still dominant, but competition and higher fidelity are coming soon. Phones using EDGE technology, available in Australia on Telstra's networks, can now produce CD quality.US industry watchdog iSuppli suggests more than 800 music-enabled mobile phone models will hit the world market this year and that more than 600 million will be sold - about half the 1.5 billion mobile phones expected to be sold this year.Another development is huge databases that allow mobile phone users and content suppliers to share almost anything digital, privately or publicly. Think of YouTube and MySpace, games and other interactive services, access to private digital mailboxes and data, personal and business. Governments and financial institutions will also get involved. In some countries mobiles are used as electronic wallets for small purchases, such as train fares and parking meters (Telstra has run such a trial) and as a component of an ID system - information from the phone's SIM card, plus a password.It's all happening at the speed of, well, the digital network.
© 2007 The Age
