A business traveler joins a live video conference using a hand-held computer as she takes a train from New York to Connecticut. In Chicago, a tourist photographs himself in Millennium Park and uses the same camera to post the snapshot on his personal blog. Two friends, miles apart, listen to the same song on their mobile phones and talk simultaneously.
These are the kinds of activities that the wireless industry is betting will become the norm as networks get faster and more sophisticated. Consumers can already do much more on their handsets than just make phone calls. Now the race for the next generation of networks is under way, which will take mobile communications beyond today's cell phones into a world where many different devices will interact.
No carrier or devicemaker wants to miss out on the wave of consumer technology that will see connectivity speed up and become more portable.
The wireless industry is in the early stages of developing fourth-generation, or 4G, technology that will enable carriers' existing networks to handle greater amounts of data at faster speeds. The thinking behind 4G is that in the next several years, consumers can use products like mobile phones, digital cameras and hand-held computers to access, create and share multimedia content from anywhere. These services require more powerful networks, since the amount of data being transmitted will grow substantially.
With each generation of networks, the key improvement is faster data speeds that open the door for more services. Back in the 2G days of the early 1990s, a mobile phone user was generally just making and receiving calls, and maybe also text messages. The evolution of 2G networks allowed for more calls to be made within the same spectrum, as well as the sharing of photos and downloads of ring tones. With 3G, which is still being rolled out in the U.S., consumers are surfing the Web from their phones and accessing data-intensive media content at higher speeds.
Some high-end products offer a preview of what more advanced networks can do. Upstart operator Helio launched a service Wednesday that allows its subscribers to log on to YouTube from their handsets and access personalized features like uploading personal videos, as if they were using the Web site on a PC. They can even use their phones' GPS function to attach coordinates to videos they capture.
With the Helio service, users can upload high-resolution videos up to a minute long. This is twice the length of most mobile videos and the potential is even bigger with 4G, said Rob Gelick, vice president of media and community services.
"Once there's a bigger pipe, people can upload much more significantly rich videos," Gelick said.
There are several emerging 4G technologies, and the industry's major players are lining up behind the ones they believe will best suit their existing networks. Verizon Wireless said in late November that it has chosen a technology called Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, for its 4G network. Sprint is backing WiMax, a cousin of Wi-Fi that sprays broadband signals over larger areas than the cafe or hotel hot spots that are common today.
The next-generation handsets would use LTE or WiMax for intensive data connections but they also would remain tied to existing cell phone networks.
A version of WiMax for computers, different from the 4G version for mobile communications, is under development. A Sprint spokesman said the company is planning a "soft launch" of a WiMax service for computers in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., before year-end, with full commercial service available in the second quarter of 2008.
Phones for next generation
Schaumburg-based Motorola makes both the WiMax infrastructure for operators like Sprint and handsets for the consumer market. The latter segment is crucial.
"In the cellular world, it's all about handsets," said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner. "If you have a new network and no handsets, who cares?"
Like other handset manufacturers, Motorola wants to have phones that meet consumer demand for 4G-type services. The company admits it was late in introducing phones for 3G networks, and its ailing mobile devices unit needs to win back market share. Some of Motorola's competitors are already unveiling 4G phones, though these devices are still niche products. Samsung introduced a WiMax-enabled handset in Korea last year.
"There's going to be a lot of different types of consumer devices that are going to start to show up over the next year or so that have WiMax embedded in them," said Fred Wright, a senior vice president at Motorola who oversees networks and wireless broadband. Toward the end of 2009, Wright envisions "WiMax modems buried in consumer electronics like multimedia players and gaming devices."
Future frontier
The 4G landscape is still shifting. In November, Sprint and Clearwire Corp. called off plans to jointly build a national wireless broadband network using WiMax. Their initiative would have given WiMax a big push in the U.S. Now Verizon is backing LTE, and other competitors may yet emerge.
Philip Solis, principal analyst for mobile broadband at ABI Research, said companies like Motorola can put resources into WiMax for the time being while preparing for LTE to take off in another two to three years.
"LTE will be bigger, but it's coming later and there's more of an opportunity to use WiMax now," Solis said.
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