To get a good signal on his mobile phone, Steve Mallinson says he often moves to the edge of his bed near a window in his home outside Cambridge, England. From there, he often spies a neighbour, whose own spot is down near a fence.
Mallinson, the chief executive of ip.access, a company that makes devices called femto cells, which improve the quality of high-speed 3G mobile reception inside buildings, says a revolution in wireless data is taking place.
Cisco, Motorola and Intel seem to agree. Each has bought a stake in ip.access, whose devices promise to extend the mobile internet into every household nook. And ip.access has competition from Ubiquisys, a British company, as well as Alcatel Lucent and Airvana, which is based in the US.
Elusive for more than a decade, mobile data service is beginning to move into the consumer mainstream, industry executives at the Cebit European technology convention said, bringing the potential for widespread adoption of more exotic services like push e-mail and mobile video.
In the past six months, the largest European mobile operators, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange and O2, which is owned by the Spanish company Telefonica, have reported surges in mobile data traffic on their networks, fuelled by data-hungry devices like the iPhone from Apple, and by multimedia downloads over their web portals.
The spike in demand has been so sudden that operators like Vodafone, Swisscom and Telecom Italia have had to spend millions upgrading the microwave and fibre links from cell base stations to their core networks to unclog data bottlenecks, according to the manufacturers which have sold them the necessary equipment.
Some operators, including Vodafone and Orange, a unit of France Telecom, have made deals to share their 3G networks to lower construction costs.
Steep reductions in the prices the same operators charge for data are beginning to bring once unaffordable services within the grasp of average consumers, industry experts said.
In the fourth quarter, data traffic on T-Mobile’s high-speed wireless networks surged 61 per cent amid rising use of mobile TV, the iPhone, and downloads over T-Mobile’s Web‘n’Walk mobile portal. Last week at Cebit, T-Mobile demonstrated the next step in mobile video — live digital TV — on a prototype cellphone called the XD, made by South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics.
The thin flip-top phone, which resembles Motorola’s popular Razr, displayed a crisp, watchable picture in a controlled demonstration at the Cebit convention. T-Mobile said live digital TV broadcasts were planned but no date had been set for their introduction.
Industry experts said the introduction of more affordable flat-rate mobile data payment plans in Europe is making mobile TV and push e-mail — the automatic forwarding of e-mail to mobile phones — more accessible than ever before to a wider audience.
“I am not an economist, but if prices for mobile data continue to fall, demand is going to go up,” said Dean Pacey, a vice president in Europe for Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the Blackberry push e-mail device.
RIM, the market leader in push e-mail with 14 million customers worldwide, about of third of those in Europe, is already starting to see a new influx of customers.
The New York Times
