Ed,
I guess that is going to happen no matter what industry is involved. The thing about infrastructure is that it is hardly faddish. Once a standard is established it is utilized as long as possible.
I suppose you could use the highway infrastructure and its evolution as an analogy to the current telecommunication infrastructure because they evolved in a similar fashion.
Think about the highway system in the 60's. State highways were two lane and served service roads for entry and exit. The interstate system introduced 4 lane divided roads and used exits for service access. Over time those roads were expanded to 6, 8 10 and even 12 lanes. The main reason for the transition was to accommodate more traffic with fewer bottlenecks.
The transition from analog to digital and then the introduction of 2,4,8,16 and 32 bit data paths served the same purpose, to accommodate traffic. 3G networks have wider data paths and more points of entry so the data can flow more smoothly. Photographs, bar codes, email, coupons and the sort take up a whole lot more room on the highway than SMS because they require more data space. The data infrastructure has to be able to handle large amounts of data simultaneously for camera phones to exist ubiquitously.
Remember I talked about the user experience. If a user experiences a delay or perceives a process to be unintuitive, then some users will stop and reverse course rather than proceed. There are programs out there that monitor the clicks on websites to see how the user navigates and where they go and where they don't go and why. Those programs also collect demographic information on the users that use websites and compare that data by projecting trends and producing potential bottlenecks and points of retreat. I am talking about marketing tools; not big brother stuff here but the network experience is very much the same.
When one buys a handset for whatever reason, whether it be for talking on the telephone, texting, taking pictures, shooting videos, or sending and receiving email, one becomes part of a demographic to the carrier and the use of those features becomes a set of statistics in their world. They decide what to add to the next standard based upon the current trends in the market.
That graph that I showed you about the proliferation of smart phones in the coming years tells me that the data path and speed of the next generation(s) of networks will have to accommodate massive amounts of data and when I say massive, I mean petabytes, not gigabytes or terabytes. Otherwise the network will bog down and cause unnecessary delays in the transmission of data.
The carriers have to have an adequate highway for the cars before they can sell faster cars. Otherwise they reach a point of diminishing returns. What is the point of selling a fast car, if that car is going to enter a road with bumper to bumper traffic? The evolution is a very carefully, well thought out, contrived place and the features that you, I or anyone else get on our handsets must be able to work well if that handset is going to sell well. Handset makers spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing hardware and software. There is no sense in making a high resolution camera if the data path is clogged. No sense making a video camera if there is no place to send or upload the videos.
The click through process requires a backhaul system of computers that overlap with the wireless space and that path must be unencumbered. Like I said before, if this process outruns the infrastructure, then it will fail or at the very least be slow to adapt. 3G makes all of this possible, The fact that it is somewhat prolific in the modern civilized world coupled with the fact that the 4G standard is being co-developed at the same time is a very, very good thing.
This market we discuss here is all about timing and as you pointed out very susceptible to being faddish. Whether or not it is a conscious or subconscious effort on the consumer’s part, for the most part they still want to buy features that they may or may not use. I think the core components will accommodate a myriad of different possibilities when it comes to passing technological fads but it is the User Interface that will determine how functional it can be and for how long.
When I mentioned earlier that the customizable user experience was important, I didn't put enough emphasis on just how important that was. The thing that makes smart phones smart is their ability to adapt in a rapidly changing environment. Using that pretence when buying a handset will serve you well when you decide to purchase your next "phone".
IMO,
htj
AI
