Picture an international conference with over 2,000 participants, all of them chief executives, heads of state, famous writers and artists, top scientists, and media and entertainment figures. It takes place in a small mountain resort, a place compact enough for these people to meet and connect easily - in the conference centre, of course, but also in hotel lobbies, restaurants, or just walking down the snowy "promenade".
While this creates a highly conducive environment for random encounters, without some serious technological support the speed and intensity of the event (which logs 330 sessions in five days, working lunches and dinners, and thousands of private meetings) could hamper more effective and focused networking among participants. With people scattered around in so many venues and activities, how can one hope to find a specific person just by randomly scouring the conference centre's corridors?
One possible answer: wherever you are - even in the middle of one of those sessions - take out your wireless handheld computer and zap an email: "can we meet in the lounge at 3.30 p.m.?".
The event is the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, which takes place at the end of January in Davos, Switzerland, and is widely regarded as the most important global gathering for business and politics. As they picked up their badges and conference bags, participants in the January 2001 meeting were also given a Compaq iPAQ handheld computer fitted with a high-speed wireless connection.
Sleek, colour-screen pocket devices that retail for 700 euros and at that time almost impossible to buy (demand was twenty-five times higher than expected, said the manufacturer), the iPAQ came across as a generous present. But as the conference unfolded, that piece of electronic equiment made the Davos attendees arguably part of one of the most advanced mobile Internet experiments to date.
That audience is not famous for being technically savvy. Many have a low level of familiarity with wireless technology (beyond the mobile phone) and computer devices. And they faced a very hectic schedule at Davos, with little time or inclination to become acquainted with the full functionalities of a new wireless handheld device. Still, more than 1,800 participants picked up their Davos Companion, as it was called and started using it.
Founded in 1971 by Professor Klaus Schwab, the Forum has been making use of cutting-edge technology for some time, to help people find their way around, use their time more efficiently, and connect with each other. In the past, the conference organizers put together a 2,000 page, postcard-sized book, a sort of very exclusive Who's Who containing the profiles, pictures, and contact information of every attendee. Additionally, a binder held the detailed agenda.
More recently, computer terminals (known as "Kiosks") were installed around the congress centre and in the hotel lobbies. They didn't replace the booklet and the binder. But participants could now access up-to-date information, design and print out their personalized agenda, sign up for sessions, send and receive emails (the most effective way of setting up meetings), and of course search each other's profiles. People queued up at the Kiosks to check their mailboxes between sessions.
Not this time. In January 2001, nearly everything the Kiosk could do was available in everybody's pocket, using the iPAQ computer. The plastic jacket wrapped around the slim device and the wireless card it contained made it bulkier than its 170 grams, but many participants left the 2,000 page directory in their hotel room and the Companion caused a sharp drop in email usage at the Kiosks. According to the statistics, 20,000 emails were sent using the iPAQs, during the five days of the event. This compares to 12,000 that went through the Kiosk, 50 per cent less than the previous year. (These figures do not include group mailings, such as agenda updates or special announcements).
"If you consider the difficulty in writing on the small iPAQ screen versus using the terminal's keyboard, these figures are really impressive", commented André Schneider, the Forum's Director of Technology.
The cost of the whole operation can be estimated at about 3.5 million euros (1,900 euros per user, including the cost of the iPAQs). The immediate question is therefore: would one pay for such a service? André Schneider doesn't have an answer, probably no one does at this stage, and of course as the wireless Internet grows up, cost brackets will go down. For the companies involved - all of which were American - the investment was also aimed at demonstrating that the US is not that far behind Europe when it comes to wireless technology, and that was brilliantly achieved.
From the World Economic Forum's perspective, one thing appears likely: there may well be fewer Kiosk terminals next January at Davos. And the system might be extended to cover a larger area, and possibly include benefits like a GPS locator ("how do I get to that hotel?") and personalization features. A network upgrade may even allow for watching the sessions remotely on live video, or downloading snippets of them. All of which opens up a whole new set of questions about the overall impact of wireless devices on the way people experience such an event and interact.
Is that all there is? Pretty much yes, this is the current status of the wireless Internet. Sure, wireless data has been around for a while, and there are hundreds of other examples that could be told. Publisher Burda in Munich is testing a solution similar to that used at Davos. Merrill Lynch in New York is doing the same, adding a wireless modem that can keep people connected even outside the building. FedEx couriers have been carrying custom-made wireless terminals to record deliveries for over ten years. Handheld devices are used in some restaurants to take orders, in automotive warehouses to track parts, in car rentals to expedite returns, in hospitals to record a patient's condition - not only saving money and boosting productivity, but also enhancing customer service. Companies like Omnisky and YadaYada in the United States sell some form of wireless data access, including access to the Internet. In Europe, phones based on wireless application protocol let people search for online information, albeit in a very limited manner. Each of these systems is built differently, has its own functionalities and requires users to learn a specific interface. Some may be as sophisticated as the Davos Companion, but that's all there is: outside the research labs (and the marketing strategists' minds), this is today's wireless Internet.
These all are no small achievements, though. Because wireless means trouble. Over 700 million people in the world use a mobile phone. You and I number among them, and we experience every day the realities of wireless communication: interference, weak signals, lost connections, limited range, incompatibilities, lost data and short battery life. At the same time, over the last couple of years, we have been invaded by a whole new set of acronyms and a flurry of terms related to wireless communication technology. These include UMTS, GPRS, WAP, SMS and 3G, as well as Bluetooth, i-mode, BlackBerry, and m-commerce. Along with them came the promise, heralded in multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns, of bringing the Internet to your pocket, and giving us access to anything, anytime, anywhere through simple palm-size devices. Wireless operators in Europe have committed over 120 billion euros to buy the right to use airwave frequencies from governments, to provide these life-changing wireless services.
The Davos Companion marked something of a turning point. It showed chief executives, bankers, top politicians and media leaders alike what was really possible by mobilizing the resources of the most important business and political club in the world. The device itself was indeed impressive, a real breakthrough, but nowhere near the sci-fi visions touted in the previous months by the manufacturers' promotional videos.
The aim of this book is not to debunk the wireless Internet. It is rather to temper the over-enthusiastic promises made in 1999 and 2000, the expectations these set, and to explain how things really are. As you will see later, I don't have much confidence in market forecasts and technology predictions. But I've no doubt that we've entered a long-term trend towards ubiquitous connectivity, and that wireless will redefine many corporations and recreate significant portions of our physical and social reality. Without question, there is a huge latent demand for mobile communication and information access. I'm a believer in the power of mobility and connectedness. I think that in the long term we will be all amazingly networked - we will actually no longer log on to the Internet, but we will be part of the Internet, we will be a node of the network.
However, at present, the wireless Internet is in its infancy. It is taking shape as you read this book. The basic idea is straightforward: instead of passing information (voice or data) through wires and cables, wireless uses radio waves to carry it. Beyond this point for the moment there is mostly a fog of confusion. A chaotic mixture of parallel and competitive developments and a vast diversity of technologies and designs are introducing a new complexity. Until faster networks and better devices come to market, this will increase the level of frustration with technology, and make sustainable business models very difficult. For a long time, voice will remain the killer application of mobile telephony, only joined by messaging. The whole industry is in flux, and there is a lot of change ahead. The operators face formidable engineering challenges, service rollout problems, financial pressure and increased customer expectations. The mobile sector as a whole faces continued consolidation and, most likely, some visible bankruptcies, not only among dotcoms. Applying the technology commercially may be as long and arduous as developing it - research on third-generation telephony started ten years ago.
The wireless Internet is not "the Internet made mobile". The first reason is obvious: by design, handheld devices do not (and never will) offer the same rich user interface and connectivity as the computer. Secondly, wireless networks have severe limitations compared to fixed networks. While it is always possible to expand wireline bandwidth by adding more wires, the radio spectrum is finite, limited both by physics and by the way it has been sliced and allocated to various uses by governments. Moreover, the need for wireless technology to follow the user makes it much more complex than its fixed cousin. Clearly though, without the swift rise of the Internet, wireless data would not have the potential it has today. Since 1995 the Internet, or, more accurately, the Web, has created a huge and wildly diverse base of contents, services, applications and business models. It has unleashed massive creative forces as well as teaching people the value of connectedness.
Conversely, there has been an explosion in the use of mobile phones. In countries like Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and much of Scandinavia, the number of subscribers to mobile phones exceeds that of fixed lines. Somewhere between five and seven per cent of the population in some European countries no longer have a fixed phone, but only carry a mobile device. Short messaging and Japan's i-mode have started to prove the value of untethered communication. The desire to merge the Internet's wealth of information with the phone's mobility has been the engine driving the wireless Internet.
The profound transformations that we've been witnessing in the last few years have not been caused primarily by technology, but by information: by its unhindered flowing around and between people, and by the power associated with it. In the information age, says sociologist Manuel Castells, the 'flow of power' that characterized the industrial age has let way to the 'power of flows'. Over time, the distinction between wireless and wireline Internet will erode and eventually disappear. As banker Jack McCue puts it, "Information will move as freely and as easily through the atmosphere as through the fibresphere."
Part one of this book deals with the technological, financial and commercial race to build the third-generation networks. The failure of WAP is investigated, the success of Japan's i-mode, and the short messaging phenomenon. I discuss technology - because the quality of service experienced by the user ultimately boils down to the quality of the networks. The roles played by government are described plus the part played by the telecom operators and many others in inflating the wireless Internet bubble. Part one is an attempt to dissipate the confusion created by the clash of hype and disillusionment.
Part two explores mobile content and mobile business. Revenues for wireless commerce have been predicted to hit anywhere between 22 and 200 billion US-dollars by 2005; this gap illustrates the enormous uncertainties that surround this sector. The potential of location-based and time-sensitive information is examined as are the issues surrounding wireless advertising, the privacy concerns, the role of messaging and the multiple facets of mobile entertainment. I look at the impact of the wireless Internet on corporations, discuss logistics, workforce empowerment, monitoring, and sales and marketing. Finally, this part of the book looks at a series of new players that have entered a sector once firmly controlled by the wireless operators: mobile portals, voice portals, wireless application providers and virtual network operators.
Part three looks at the gadgets - at the current and future wireless devices. I analyse the fault lines that underscore their development: the collision of the phone and the computer, and the tension between devices that try to do everything and those that only do a few things well. I describe ubiquitous computing and discuss various attempts to make a computer as friendly and easy to use as a piece of paper - both by flattening a computer, or by adding some intelligence and wireless connectivity to plain paper. And we take a tour on the 'ultimate mobile computing hardware', according to Mercedes-Benz: the car.
Part four touches upon two new issues brought by the wireless Internet. First, an increased need for communication security. The risks of viruses and malicious hacker attacks are examined, Public Key Infrastructure is described - the approach that is most likely to become the standard for protecting wireless transactions (and their wireline equivalents alike). I also briefly report on the controversy surrounding the perceived health hazards related to mobile phones' electromagnetic radiations.
At the end of the book, Martin Cooper shares his very personal views of the wireless Internet. He knows a thing of two, for he is the inventor of the portable cellular phone.
Although it discusses many technology issues alongside business issues, this is not a technology book. It is aimed at non-technical readers interested in understanding the current state of affairs of the wireless Internet, and the developments that we can realistically expect over the next three to five years. It's not a how-to manual. It's rather a report on the first few days of life of a new era: that of unhindered connectedness.
Perhaps to explain the wireless Internet there is no need for 300 pages, though. Four sentences may be enough, if you have Albert Einstein's gift for finding the right metaphor. When asked to describe how radio (wireless) communication worked, he answered: You see, the ordinary telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull the tail in New York and it meows in Los Angeles. Radio operates exactly the same way just without the cat.
(copyright Bruno Giussani 2001. All rights reserved.)
