Week in Review: 9th Febuary to 15th Febuary, 2004

Introduction
After a week where Comcast made a hostile bid for Disney and Vodafone barks a little bit closer to the heels of AT&T Wireless there has been a continuation of major deployments of mobile services worldwide. Indeed Vodafone are once again in the news, this time for the launch of its 3G/GPRS mobile data connect card for laptop customers. The major question is whether it is in fact a 3G service or GPRS service as Vodafone has some work yet in hand to roll out a European wide 3G infrastructure.

Events
One of the most significant events this week was the move by Nokia to buy out Psion's interest in Symbian. After last weeks news where NTT Docomo had kindly kicked Microsoft's operating system into touch, Nokia has now added further validation to the Symbian platform. The theme of the week was the deployment of many different services related to Valentines day. However it must be pointed out that the deployments in this area have been focused on the US and no such applications have been evident within Europe or Asia. As ever Verizon continues to develop strategic content partnerships and from a visibility point of view are by far the most innovative of operators currently deploying wireless services today. Healthcare seems to be a major focus to the introduction of W-LAN technology, but there are also many applications suggested within the ambulance and hospitality sector. While many may feel that its great to be able to receive email via wireless devices the announcement of Sprint delivering Yahoo Instant Messenger to the mobile will push the corporate industry to deliver similar services to their business colleagues.

Devices
While push-to-talk device entrys onto the market become more evident it remains to be seen how successful this market will become. While the camrea phone market has boomed (with the requisite amount of marketing) the push-to-talk market is too early to call. It is our belief that more focus should be given to the business customer where many applications, including the many available location based solutions, will truly add the value for the end customer and deliver the return on investment for operators. To deliver such services, vendors must remain focused on the required make-up of wireless devices to deliver such services.

Technology
As ever the week in technology brings many new ideas to the fore. Sonaecom (Portugal) launched an alternative high-speed internet service based on an IP Wireless UMTS TDD solution leveraging Sonaecom's cellular infrastructure.To go with this Proxim announced its new wireless switch, allowing roaming between GSM and WLAN networks. As WLAN takes more of a grip within the business world the need for roaming between such networks will become more a requirement than a hope.

Conclusion
While the US continues to outstrip the rest of the world in its willingness to deploy new and exciting ideas, Europe and Asia tend to lag for a number of reasons. One of the reasons for this is because while Europe would like to give the perception of being a competitive arena, the MVNO business has yet to rise to the fore. Without such a market the reasons for the major mobile operators to deliver on competitive services is not necessarily required. The focus must be for the European Union to liberate these networks and allow the smaller competitive forces to deliver on the true potential of 3G services

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