6th
Home 3G: Femtocells
Have you ever noticed how mobile services seem to follow an inverted Moore’s Law?
Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles ever 18 months. Using this as a measurement you can predict the technological improvement in microchips.
Mobile services, however, got it right as soon as GSM landed. Making calls was easy, the clarity was good enough. Don’t feel like calling someone? Send an SMS instead!
Ever since then, mobile operators have been trying to recreate the incredible profitability of SMS and calls. The last few years have seen a lot of talk about micropayments, yet SMS was already there in the 90s. And more importantly, people wanted to pay for it.
Perhaps as a way to drive next generation services to a larger number of customers, Nokia, Siemens and Thomson recently announced plans to co-operate on “home 3G” through the consolidation of femtocell technology.
Access points integrating conventional wireless and residential 3G have already been announced. Yet as far as I’m aware, the fundamental practicalities have not been divulged: if I have a femtocell, will my phone automatically use it when I’m at home? Does that mean my calls will be routed through my broadband? Will this be a service provided by my mobile operator? Will it be cheap?
Meanwhile, mobile operators seem to see this as another way to deliver digital content instead of enhanced quality of service. “Home 3G” is cited as another way to sell music, TV and films. This could be a market of diminishing returns in the UK, irrespective of what statistics show about Japanese mobile music sales.
Such technology coupled with recent technological improvements in handsets makes me wonder about the future of the mobile web. The movement away from WML to XHTML MP was welcome, but slow. Meanwhile, devices like iPhone already have desktop-quality browsers.
Hopefully all we’ve learned creating mobile-friendly sites will continue to be built upon by taking the unique nature of mobile devices into account during the design process. Either that or customers will have to sit there zooming and scrolling with their touch screens, give up, and use their laptop instead.
