DoCoMo is leading a group of wireless infrastructure providers and network operators to develop YA (yet another) wireless standard. According to this Reuters story, which is getting picked up all over the place, the new protocol set will be called “Super 3G” [Gee, I wonder whatever happened to DoCoMo's 4G initiative? -JB]. Super 3G will offer airlink data rates “10 times as fast as the current third-generation (3G) service” but won’t be ready for commercial deployment until at least 2009.
Don’t hold your breath. The business case for operators to deploy anything beyond 2.5G (GPRS or CDMA 1X RTT) is sketchy at best. 3G deployment and adoption worldwide has lagged far behind the most pessimistic projections because customer demand for advanced services has yet to appear, with the possible exceptions of Japan and Korea (and maybe China at some point). In most markets the 3G operators have positioned themselves as price competitors rather than service or feature competitors, thus devaluing their huge investments in spectrum and infrastructure. 3G appears to be more a migration path rather than the revolution, the same way that digital celluarl (2G) was a migration path from analog.
What’s stunning is that the operators and infrastructure providers appear not to have learned anything from the 3G mess they created. They’re still hyping features to which the vast majority of users are indifferent (”sending high resolution video in an instant”) while most customer complaints are about the same old problems: dropped calls and insufficient coverage. I’m not suggesting for a moment that investments in new technology should be tabled, but these companies are big enough and wealthy enough to afford good marketing communications and they don’t have it.
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