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3G Is A Dog, And Other Truths
naylorjs writes: "This is an interesting article from the BBC about the technological future, in particular broadband and wireless. What makes it more interesting is the comments about nation states and such like. A certain amount of lateral thinking in use here, something that we don't see enough of in the technology field. IMHO."
use it new, pay the price. let it mature, and before long you have something better and cheaper than you used to use.
you don't have to live on the cutting edge all the time. it's really a lot better to wait a little while for cheap, solid tech, instead of jumping on the bandwagon the first time it comes around and realizing you just spent hundreds of dollars on something that sucks.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Even a few years ago, I couldn't imagine what I take for granted now - the instant gratification of being able to answer any question on my mind just by calling up google.
How can some professor do better?
I adblock all animated gifs.
Blessed be the prime numbered slashdotters
I mean, really. Negroponte's always been so long on handwaving and short on actual technical pragmatism. And it's not like people have actually listened to a word the man said since "Being Digital".
Why is broadband good? "Different rhythm, different response time, different way of dealing with the web itself." Yeah, I bet that was your reasoning for getting DSL, too (if you happened to be stoned at the time). Except apparently you wouldn't want DSL because the order-of-magnitude speed increase over a modem "isn't giving the consumer enough difference". Apparently being able to stream live video to a handset isn't worth anything.
Well, thanks a lot, Nicholas. You can go back in your box for another five years.
-- Yoz
What companys don't realize is giving the ability to instant messange on a phone is kinda self defeating. You can just call the person. So no one is going to swich from standerd cell phones to much more expensive ones for useful purposes, just for the cool factor. And you can't make that much money of it.
It was an interesting interview, don't get me wrong, but news outlets like The Register have been telling the truth about 3G for over 2 years - for some reason there's been a stubborn refusal to believe it - perhaps because it's not what we want to hear?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Funny...for someone who works at one of the most technically-apt universities in North America, I didn't expect to hear this from him: Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G. It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here. It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
3G isn't bad. The American handling of 3G is, but you shouldn't punish consumers because of the fact you believe the standard is crap. If everyone cared about what America wanted in its consumer electronics standards, then America wouldn't be the sole dissenting voice in cellular standards. The problem isn't one of technology here, but one of corporate moneylust getting in the way of good ol' common sense.
Look at how consumer electronics devices have blossomed in the Orient...They've made 3G devices a part of their lives. The reason it won't work here is because our society as a whole looks down on a lot of the new technology as being fad-ish. Until marketers get a clue and discover just how to pitch these devices and demonstrate how they can complete our meaningless lives, they're not gonna take off.
Marketers for the last five years have been following the logic which carried them through the Internet bust, which was - "If you build it, they will come." Well, no shit, Sherlock...but you have to build something that's worth a damn to them. Quit trying to push off crap and market it as the next great thing...instead, make something that can change our lives, and prove that it will.
Many companies could afford to learn this lesson from Apple.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
A: First of all, put that in context that the largest amount of semi-conductor material to flow into the home will undoubtedly be through toys. It's not TV sets; it's not refrigerators; it's not PCs; it's not handsets - it's going to be toys. The reason I use that Barbie doll example is that the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content.
Somehow, I think the online contents for a Barbie doll will be quite minimal.
On a serious note, I think he's got a point there. Imagine one of these toys always getting an updated interface (audio) to interact with the children. Interesting.
One of the big problems of technology is that the world is broken into four groups who don't really understand each other.
Firstly, there are the technologists - the smart guys with their engineering PhDs from Stanford and the like who work for Ericsson, Qualcomm or Nokia. These people understand the technical reality of getting broadband services to handsets and the like.
Then there are the evangalists. These people post long, largely ill-informed, comments to slashdot. Sometimes they work for Gartner Group. If they're really lucky they get paid too much to work as VCs. These people don't really understand the technology, or consumers, but they tell a great story. Oh, and they love Amazon.com.
And then there are the business people. (And no, getting an MBA from Stanford does not automatically qualify you.) These people understand that 3G costs losts of money. They fret about what end demand will really be, and hire evangalists and technologists to try and raise some money. If they are lucky they get to sell their idea to some large company where the business development people really do have Stanford MBAs.
Finally, there is the other 99% of the population. Call them 'consumers'. They are rarely consulted about what they want; 'cause, hey, the evangalist tells a better story. Unfortunately, these are the people that actually buy and use the service. Unless consumers spend money the service will die.
So, to 3G: unless consumers see a compelling reason to massively up the amount they spend on telecommunications then 3G is in terrible trouble. ARPU for voice cell users is static or declining as penetration rises. (Why is this so? Because the handset, network infrastructure, maintenance, and license costs are much higher than 2G.)
So - where are the compelling applications that will encourage consumers to spend more?
Video phones, perhaps. Would you like a list of companies that died thinking consumers want to be seen on the phone. (Just think for a moment about the practicalities of walking down the street with your cell phone in front of you. Then think about the value of looking at someone in glorious jerky-and-small-vision with terrible lag.)
Stock quotes and charts, perhaps. Sorry, the days and number of day traders are on the wane.
OK. TV? Well perhaps, BUT think of the bandwidth requirements.
Email??? Sure, but a Blackberry or GPRS phone does it for cheaper.
Unless someone can find compelling *consumer* applications, then 3G is unlikely to be a commercial success.
*r
--- My dad's political betting
3G has been a pipe dream from it's inception.
Services like the lately lamented Ricochet provided speeds superior to those promised by 3G over a year ago - and people apparently didn't want to pa $70.00 per month to access the TCP/IP services in metro areas that Ricochet provided - even with unlimited access, or all-you-can-eat for that price.
3G is looking worse and worse every day. What did 3G promise?
500kbps - if you're standing still next to an unloaded base station. 120kbps standing still on a loaded network. 60kbps if you're moving - all with per-minute and/or per megabyte charges. It won't fly here in the U.S.
Hopefully someone will revive Ricochet and we can all surf wirelessly without the foibles of "freenet" 802.11b networks or the limitations of fixed wireless. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Have you ever really tried to do any of this stuff with a phone? Browse the web? Get your email? It's useless on a phone. The screen is too small and entering information into the phone is an exercise in frustration. Or you end up with a phone like the Kyocera which is a great palm, but sucks as a phone. Ever try actually holding it to your face and talking on it?
I'm all for cool technology and doing things that are cool just for the sake of doing it, but John Q. Public is never going to accept this stuff if it's a pain to use. It solves a problem that doesn't exist.
Scottaroo
----------
If your answer is Microsoft, you obviously didn't understand the question.
Nicholas Negroponte is fairly bright, but I think some of the things he talks about (e.g. giving UN membership to Nation1, a "virtual nation" composed of the world's internet-enabled children) are a bit too loony to be taken seriously
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
I have a cell phone. I have a desktop. I have a server, and I have a portable MP3 player. I have a truck. I have a bike, and I have a muscle car.
I say that, to say this: I did not buy an El Camino. I bought a truck, and I bought (well, restored) a muscle car.
The same goes for my desktop and server. I did not buy an over powered dual-NICed desktop to also be my server on a dsl line. I bought a desktop, and a dsl line to connect to, and a Ultra Sparc in a colocated rack at a local ISP.
In the same sort of thinking, my cell phone doesn't play MP3s, although it can surf the web, I have never even bothered to try it.
To the average consumer, a phone should be a phone, first and foremost.
Features are good if they are free, but forcing me to pay twice the price for useless stuff I would never use, just makes me spend my money at another company.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
There was an interesting article last year in MIT's Technology Review Magazine about Negroponte leaving the Media Lab, leaving the Lab's future uncertain. The article makes a number of references to the Media Lab, including Biotech Research. It's interesting that he still refers to the Lab as "we" - I assume it's hard to let go, and probably good for the Lab to keep him around as an advisor.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Not that I don't agree with some of the points he makes, I have a real problem with the sardonic, holier-than-thou Sagan-istic manner it which he delivers it. Who is this guy, anyway? Some self appointed technology critic bent on whining his way into our hearts and minds?
The notion that the average consumer is going to be unimpressed with broadband, because it's simply not a large enough increase, is ridiculous. Has it been that long since we've been on a dialup connection?
I also fail to understand how he can say, "Well, I'm getting 100,000bits now, and you want to give me 400,000bits, will no thanks, that's not a big enough difference.
Pardon?
A 4 X speed increase? Not a large enough difference?
So, anyway, that's my 2 cents.
It is not the way that makes the man great, it is the man that makes the way great.
-CT
The guy is a pundit dressed in academic clothing, nothing more.
So, the miracle of 3G is that soon your home encyclopedia will be replaced by the wireless talking Barbie! Bet that will shed her dumb blonde image...
Ceci n'est pas une sig
With that as a backdrop, the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
I think this is the most interesting part of the article. IT is pretty much the only industry where consumers expect giant leaps in terms of performance before they upgrade. What other classical industry demands such high rates of devellopment? automotive? textile? Not really. People have come to expect more and more out of engineers over the years and the R&D to keep up with the demand has been ever increasing. Are we going to get to a point where progress is just too great and the users have no more need to upgrade, or is progress going to lag behind, thus reducing incomes and R&D --> vicious circle. I think there's a limit to how much speed is needed and that will give rise to a serious problem in a few years. What will happen when you can stream digital video uncompressed along with audio, playing games, etc on the same optic pipe? Will people go on upgrading endlessly just to show their friends "look, I can transfer my swap file from my PDA to my cell faster than you can!"...
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
Well, almost.
When I last checked, Norway had a good 4,5 million people, Singapore some 4,3 million and Ireland 3,8 million. His guess for Costa Rica is quite close with 3,7 million, but is 3 out of 4 really that good for a "genius".
No big deal, I know, but it still wrecks his magic number ;)
- mipe -
'Sfunny, though, I would have thought that NN, with his cyberbooster past, would have been all over this. Maybe he's just getting to old to use a mobile phone. He probably can't cope with the buttons. The article says that he wears his reading glasses in restaurants so that he can see what he is eating.
Nowhere did it say that the link was a Negroponte interview!!!
Now how do I get the cooties out of my apron?
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
-frank
This guy still has his head in the clouds as far as the role of technology in day to day life. Online newspaper readership is not a barometer of the success or failure of the internet as a business venture. In the US, and in the world in general, e-commerce is a bomb. Billions were invested, with little to show for it except fancy $700 chairs, nice servers, and ebay. E-commerce was supposed to be the next revolution in business, bigger than the dawn of the industrial age. It was, for about 2 years, then the bottom fell out of the dot.com business model, because there was nothing concrete to show for it. This is, I think the point that he was trying to convey. We want results, not vapor. 3G is not going to be an easy transition any place that has a lot of acreage to cover. In Japan, it is much easier; the cellular situation there is a monoply. The same company owns the towers, the sevice, and the phones. If they want to implement a new technology, they do it. But look at how small Japan is, and the really cool stuff is only in Tokyo; a big enough market, in a small enough area. 3G is not easily implemented, and is not a viable solution, for the US.
No one honestly cares! Now, before you dismiss this as "troll", let's take an honest look at the situation:
I have a Motorola StarTAC using Sprint's service. Now, outside of the occasional dropped calls, I don't have a complaint about the quality of the service. Guess what I use my phone for? That's right, sending and receiving phone calls, which is exactly what 90% of America uses their phone for.
My phone is "wireless web capable". I have never used it... it doesn't appeal to me. Everytime I've seen someone using "wireless web" it looks like a novelty. 4 lines with maybe 25 characters each... nothing particularly special.
I don't have a burning desire to check my e-mail from my mobile phone... the last thing I need is some damned electronic leash. If I'm not in front of my computer, it's because I'm not doing work; if I'm not doing work, the last thing I want is to be interrupted by e-mail.
My mobile phone has a PCMCIA interface to allow "dial-up" through the cell service. The attachment runs about $200, and the speed is 19.2Kbps. I would think that if you really needed to have a wireless internet connection, 19.2Kbps would be fine. Let's face it, if having an internet connection anywhere is THAT important to you, you're probably using it for business purposes. That means e-mail, possibly messaging co-workers. No, you can't VPN into the intranet at 19.2Kbps, but I wouldn't want to try it at the numbers 3G LIKELY produces ("see, you'll get 1Mbps, but only if you're standing still between these blocks during the vernal equinox...").
Most every mobile provider offers quick messaging, and several of them DO offer e-mail to the phone.
Instead of concentrating on videophones or MP3 trading or full-color sega produced videogames, how about improving the phones? My StarTAC is fairly small, but it's not as sturdy as I would have liked. Give me a a solid 2G phone with an aluminum or titanium skin that can take a beating, and a battery that gives me 8-10 hours talk time. I'll jump on that phone for $500 long before I'd buy a 3G videophone/e-mail device/Game Boy wannabe/MP3 player for $200.
Yes, 3G might be very nice. But you can already have streaming multimedia in 2G. You just need the right technology.
And the right technology is at: www.activesky.com
He also talks about 6 or 7 thousand nation-states, then talks about the EU (a proto-nation-state) growing.
A job at MIT is like a licence to product bullshit for gullible journalists.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Actually read this article?? Started out makeing some sense and ended stoned hippy ramblings.... not that that is a bad thing. I do think the drugs had started to kick in nicely by the end.
[news for me, stuff that doesn't matter]
The article misses some of the points of what 3G is about. 3G was developed to be a converging path of current technologies to integrate them in a more practical way.
Currently there is almost a different standard for each region / country on the planet.... where is the sense in this?
3G allows technologies based on TDMA/ GSM and those based on CDMA / IS-95b to meet somewhere.
IS-136 derived technologies will merge to WCDMA/UWC-136 and IS-95b derived technologies will merge to cdma2000/3xrtt.
Handsets that are 3G capable should be able to work with any 3G network through mediation carried out at the base station.
The added bandwidth, whilst integral to the standard, is only one part of it. This defiantly was not addressed 3G was called a dog.
bleh whatever....
I would rather a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy
All the arguments you have given are (kind of) true. But just check out Japan. Their phones have at least 160x160px (and less than 90 grams weight), most are in color. And that's more than enough to use "wireless web access". 4x25 was what killed WAP, it's not what will kill 3G.
Japanese people are tottaly into mobile phones. They use them for iMode, phone-calls, mail, surfing, sending eachother pictures and some-kind-of MIDI files etc. etc. etc.
The catch is that with 3G you will not have a phone anymore but a multimedia all-purpose communication device.
boky
Damn that's too cool. I mean, that's a lot of stuff.
But isn't paying for a _personal_ sparc server _and_ dsl line paying "twice the price for useless stuff"?
If you consider yourself joe average consumer, g3 would be expected to be a smashing success! You're not average though, and g3 flunks the big one -- but damn you've got some nifty toys! Just don't smack me over the head and tell me that you got all that _and_ a wife and family.
By that point swap files will be obsolete. They already are, for some of us. ;)
The users are mostly kids with limited phone budgets who want to maximize their telephone use. SMS is ridiculously cheap, it uses essentially one frame to transfer a message. It is incredibly profitable for the telephone company, and unlike a telephone call, you can send and receive SMS messages anywhere.
See my journal, I write things there
First, the Japanese culture generally seems to be more in to tech gadgets than the American culture. Look at some of the thigns (Tamagochi) that have been huge successes over there while enjoying at most a modest (and usually less) success over here. Just because many Japanese consumers like multimedia phones, doesn't mean many Americans will. I certianly won't buy one so long as my StarTAC keeps working.
Second, getting 3G up and running in the US is going to cost a LOT. Remember, Japan is smaller than the state of Calafornia. There is a lot more square footage in the US that would need to have 3G equipment installed in. That higher cost of startup leads to higher inital service fees, which most people don't want to pay. This is espically true if the objective is to provide good coverage and high speed access.
Also along those lines 3G will have adoption troubles until there is a nice nationwide network. Right now my CDMA 1900 Sprint phone can get signal in most any city in all 50 states as well as most all highways. Unless the 3G rollout is on a massive scale it won't be able to compete and hence I won't be as likely to want it. A service is pretty useless if you can't get it in your area.
Finally, one of the things I and many others I know value about our particular cells is they are small. My StarTAC, folded up isn't a whole lot bigger than a pager. Well if you try to whack a 160+ pixel LCD on a phone, it's going to get a lot bigger. Not something I want to lug around.
I'm not saying 3G is necessiarly doomed to failure, but they have some issues to work out soon. The American and Japanese markets are NOT the same thing.
Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G.
3G licenses were sold (marketed) at the peak of the hype (marketing) about 3G being the "next big thing". Telecom companies paid billions, the market collapsed and these companies end up with big overdrafts. Bug**r all to do with the technology, quite a bit to do with marketing.
It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here.
An auction isn't a way to market something? ... the method? Auction off N licenses when you
know that there are at least N+1 (at the time, very rich) companies who need a
license to stay in business. Noone dares to drop out of the auction process,
so the prices spiral.
Granted, the UK auction process was a mistake. In particular it was designed to make money for the government (which it did very well), instead of to boost a developing technology
It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
So this is the nub of his argument? "It's a dog"? Any reason for saying this? Technical justifications? Nope. Just "It's a dog" ... profound insight!
With that as a backdrop, (Conclusive proof that it's a dog) the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
You can currently get 9.6k over GSM. 3G gives you (at least) 144k. So he *does* like 3G after all! Either that or he doesn't know what he's talking about.
3G doesn't even exist. Some people might argue that it'll come in a year or two years (don't think the Japanese have it, that's not 3G).
Ah! That clears up whether he knows what he's talking about or not. Who's going to tell NTT DoCoMo that there 3G system isn't Negroponte-compliant? What about the Korean mobile networks who implemented a 2.5G system and found that it actually worked well enough to be classified as 3G?
The sad part, and this isn't being discussed enough, is that it's no good.
The sad part is that attention-hungry half-informed talking heads like Negroponte continually hype up new technology to ridiculous levels, for others to talk it down the following year. It's happened with Internet services, WAP, Bluetooth and now 3G. It confuses the public and discredits the industry - but it makes good headlines.
3G is a new technology which is evolving from 2G (well, duh!). Will it be implemented? Yes. Will it be successful? That depends on whether people find enough uses for it ...
Just like when the internet started noone knew what it will really be used for. Just like the internet, the closest thing to a 'killer app' is already available (email for the net, voice calls for 3G). Unlike the internet it's been hyped to heaven and hell before it's been born.
3G does need informed discussion, it doesn't need Negroponte.
Here in France you can get essentially anonymous GSM service using a prepaid mobicarte or SFR SIM card. They asked me my name and they have it in a database somewhere, and they might have asked me for id, I don't recall, but at any rate it wasn't any form of id officially recognized in France such as a passport, so it could easily have been false. The handset is your standard handset of course, so it's not disposable, unless you're wealthy, but as far as I know nothing stops you from buying as many handsets as you want anonymously.
Structured data. Structured searching. The Enzyme Project
You could ofcourse have checked the Media Lab website to see where Nicholas Negroponte is. He is still there on the webpage. http://www.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/
He is working there as a director in a foreign minister role. Not strange after having been its director for about 15 years.
Use Adsense for Charity
NN:It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned.
OK, an interview like this is probably not the place to expect a well thought out solution to the filtering problem, but this is another in a series of vague unsupported ideas he throws out there. What does this mean? How would this system work? It's easy to say that "popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it" is a good idea, but are there any difficulties with it? Why hasn't it been implemented already? Let's hear it, Negroponte, that would be more interesting than throwaway platitudes.
Structured data. Structured searching. The Enzyme Project
Q: You say digital technology will end the nation state and eventually produce a global cyber state. Now, speaking at this moment, that looks particularly wrong, doesn't it? You have a war being fought in defence of states; you have people who don't have states - Muslims and Palestinians - saying can we have a nation state, please? So, that prediction has turned out to be very wrong.
A: No, actually, it's turned out to be quite right. Let me explain how. Clearly, the notion of a piece of land, definable - these are atoms and they have an edge and a limiting contour - as something that you relate to as a culture or as an individual is extraordinarily important. What's happened is that the nation state as we know it today happens to be the wrong size. It's too big to be local and it's too small to be global; the UK is a perfect example.
For a better answer to this question, try reading Spiral Dynamics [www.spiraldynamics.com].
Spiral Dynamics theory concerns itself with what people and nations value, and according to SD there are about seven or eight basic value systems, or 'value MEMEs' that operate in people.
Each vMEME is colour coded for ease of reference--they are (very basically):
BEIGE: vaues instinctual basic survival eg. homeless people, starving masses
PURPLE: values ethnic tribes, family and mythic rituals, eg. superstitions, corporate 'tribes'
RED: values power, impulsivity, egocentricity, and rebelling, eg. streetgangs, frontier mentality, James Bond villains
BLUE: values conformance, absolutist principles of 'right' and 'wrong', Order, and the One True Way, eg. Puritan America, Confucian China, Islamic fundamentalism
ORANGE: values achievement, escape from the 'herd', the world is a chessboard and you play to Win, eg. Wall Street, Colonialism
GREEN: values sensitivity, communitarian human bonding, dialogue, relationships, multiculturalism, eg. Postmodernism, Greenpeace
YELLOW: values integration of all of the above, as life is a kaliedoscope of natural hierarchies, systems and forms.
So even with this very rough map of the different vMEMEs, we can tentatively see that the USA is predominantly an ORANGE (personal achievement, we protect our interestes) oriented culture, but also has a significant percentage of the GREEN (no culture is better than any other, USA is an oppressor) vMEME active.
Contrast that with other parts of the world that are still firmly set in BLUE--there is One True Way, Our God is the Only God, our culture is Good and it's order must be preserved.
Or even parts of Africa that value the tribe and where lines of kinship are considered very important (PURPLE).
And applying our vMEME map to the current conflict, it would seem that the Taliban is an unhealthy mixture of the BLUE 'our religion is True,' vMEME with the RED power striving vMEME (and we'll personally take power, commit terrorist acts, and kill any of our people who disagree with us).
And remember that many people devote maybe half their lives guided by whichever vMEME is operating in them, be it ORANGE achievement or BLUE conformity.
And yet, we're somehow supposed to believe that, given enough mobile phones, our differences are going to dissapear and we're going to form a Global Cyber State?
It's difficult to see how digitally connecting everyone on the outside is somehow going to make the differences on the inside dissapear.
Imagine a student phoning a terrorist:
Western student (GREEN): let's talk, for I aknowledge and respect your culture...
Arab extreemist (RED/blue): You are not of my culture, you are an infidel--die infidel, Die!!
Perhaps the trouble with Dr. Negroponte's answer is that he's looking, like a good technologist, from the outside, at the physical systems, and talking about stuff ilke 'the size of the state being wrong'.
But by using SD we can start to fathom the depth and breadth of the inner codes and values that are operating in people and nations, and why the conflict exists not just between states but also between the different vMEMEs operating within single states.
eg.:
'they attacked us and we are just in punishing them' (BLUE),
'we have to protect our oil interests and stabilise the area' (ORANGE),
'America is oppressive and interfering with minority cultures' (GREEN)
>According to Nostraponte, site visitors have no
>problem whatsoever in paying a few cents for
>every article they read.
Which turns out to be absolutely correct for most people. I pay a monthly fee for unmetered low bandwidth allowing me to browse the web for, er, a few small coins a minute or, in pratical terms, per article. For article read whatever you want - and people will pay differing rates - so the gamer will be happy to pay a bit more for their chunk to be bigger or faster.
A yes, you say, but they are not paying for the article _itself_. True and this is maybe why people are reluctant to pay, effectively, twice.
C
Your post makes sense. It is logical, rational and Plain wrong.
Consumers the world over have shown that text messages are a very good app for those mobile digital radio communication devices that we refer to as "telephones". And that they will put up with typing on a numeric keypad, message length limitations etc.
Which is why the providers who failed to predict this are scrambling to lessen those limitations and anonnoyances in the hope that it will help them sell thier brand of electronic widgets and services.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
This is just so Neal Stephenson... the concept of education for kids being delivered as content into devices that have what would now seem to us to be the strangest UI's.
Think today's great? Should've been here *yesterday*.
"It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned."
o .html
Well I thought it sounded like one of my projects so thought it might be of interest to someone else..
Open image directory software: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mogmios/projects/kigdem
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Sorry, Negroponte isn't a lateral thinker. I read his "Being Digital" - what a bore. The brilliant man compared bits to atoms - wow - now that's an original idea. Any Slashdot reader could make that comparison. And this guy's a guru? OK he (co?)founded the Media Lab - that's not bad. But pleease.
I guess every group of people have to try it out for themselves and they should be allowed to do so without exception (would you please wake up Middle East, he's sleeping again during the class).
Sure, digital stuff will have profound effect on many things, even how societies organized but I'm just saying that national states aren't alone in this regard, and in fact would come to an end with or without anything digital.
And I agree with the interviewed pundit that one of the things into which national states are going to change is the local state, a small and governable group of people in a smallish piece of land. A local state may be ethnically homogenous but that is not it's main defining feature.
Btw, phones aren't just phones. I really want at least two, possibly three phones with different qualities.
Point to the list is that there can be more then one uberphone. It's like which one is the better ballplayer His Airness or ZZ? (Of course Jordan is possibly the greatest athlete ever, but that is more then made up by the images of fierce troll warrior-god.)
--Flam,
who publicly predicted that the Dutch would win the World Cup a day before they are knocked out by the Irish.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
DoCoMo (Japan's largest mobile communications company) has services that aspire to third generation mobile comms, but the technology is just perked-up second generation. There are no commercial 3G networks anywhere. Yet.
get a Free BSD!
First of all, I must say I am not very familiar with US Sprint service. I live in Europe and 3G is an important issue here as it is in US and in Japan. I must agree that costs for setting up 3G are (in most of the countries around the world) simply astronomic. Mostly because of huge government apetites. This will cetranly /slow down/ adoption of 3G, but it will not kill it.
Secondly, I've seen japanese thingies and I could not believe it: the phones are lighter and thinner than your Motorola StarTAC and have support for 160+ px and color. Some (ok, a bit bigger models) even have a build in video camera.
While it is true that people want to use phones for phone calls, I guess no one would mind being able to see the person on the other side or even stream pictures of babies firsts steps and mooshy stuff like that.
Conclusion: if there is enough interest from big companies to push this forward, eventually everybody will be using 3G.
boky
I'm very skeptical and I have absolutely no invested interest in this matter other than that as a consumer. Any one of the above questions can (or should) sink the worth of 3G in the respective countries. What's more, the question remains if the investment in 3G is more worthwhile than investment in other infrastructures and devices. For instance, I, for one, would rather have a seemlessly integrated PDA, Cell Phone, Wireless email (and maybe light weight web) device [similar to the Treo...possibly] than a cell phone with streaming video and little else [Especially given the current limitations on battery life, data entry, screen size, and so on.]
Actually Nostraponte was talking about micro pay systems for the articles not for the access. This is no more double paying for the article anymore than paying to get into a movie and then having to pay for popcorn is double paying for the concessions.
I believe the original quote is
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"
- Groucho Marx
One of my favorites...thanks for reminding me of it!
There are killer apps for 3G, you just aren't thinking of them. Sure, browsing the web with your startac is lame - but have you seen the CURRENT state of japanese phones? They pay monthly service fees, alowing the handset manufacturers to subsidize the cost - the result - thin, small phones, high resolution full color screens, java clients, long battery life. Now having a schedule, e-mail, and web in a navigable high resolution screen (you'd be suprised that a small screen is that useful when you see these)..given a few more years of development becomes an attractive st of features.
Now, talk about some killer apps. I personally think it will be location services. ie, I opt in to be notified when a good friend of mine happens to be 2 blocks away - and he has opted in also. A map comes up, with a local coffee place - and we meet there after trading a few instant messages. Obviously all the auto features are useful as well in terms of mapping, directions to food, atms, etc. Maybe United will even subsidize your long distance calls while you are sitting in their terminal because they delayed your flight.
In any event these ideas are all in vc stages right now, and there are some that make compelling use of the additional bandwidth.
Barbie needs a Cat 5 cable attached.. hmm wonder where they could put that?
It seems the fate of many new technologys goes something like this:
1) Hyped
2) Introduced
3) Debunked
4) Used
5) Taken for granted
(Of course, the process is not entirely linear.)
At the moment, a lot of people are debunking 3G,
a natural response to the hype. As there are no
phones on the market as of yet, it's too early to
say what will happen.
It's likely the people will, in fact, use 3G but
maybe not in the way intended.
(Much as the european phone companies had no idea
that SMS messaging would be a major future source
of revenue when the GSM standard was introduced)
Nicholas Negroponte is the same guy who predicted that there would be $1 trillion in e-commerce by 2000, and that micropayments will "change consumer behavior enormously.
Negroponte is yet another snake-oil salesman kept alive by the popular 'science' press.
They are always chasing sexy projects with results always being "around the corner".
Given the untold number of millions spend in the media lab, what do they have to show for it??
1. Spend $Billions to buy licenses and deploy 3G
2. ???
3. PROFIT !!!
... It is a muscle car! And I was all fired up to fart in your general direction, but being a prudent /.'er I looked it up first and it is listed.
/ mu sclecars-definition.html
Good on you!
http://www.musclecarclub.com/musclecars/general
I work in wireless, and am struggling with the current poor bitrate speeds that we have to deal with on networks right now. with 3g, speeds will go from about 9kb/s to about 56kb/s. What this guy doesn't understand is the screen size is so small, there really isn't a whole lot you can do with more than 56kb/s (unless we're talking video, and at 100kb/s, that's about the max there). Obviously, this guy they interviewed has a lot of opinions and not a whole lot of experience actually WORKING in wireless...
Multiple personality disorder - benign, life enhancing version.
What's your problem with this statement? Untill someone implements micropayments, this prediction cannot be proved or disproved. So, what's your point? That he was wrong in the sense that we still don't have micropayments? Is that his fault?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
In my work I get to hear a lot of the behind the scenes that go on a Sprint PCS. I also work with Cingular, Verison, and AT&T My experience with each company has led me to believe that Sprint is on solid ground to expand rapidly. The other companies I deal with are still trying to figure out how to change to a new technology without making the consumer think that they are making their phones obsolete. This is usualy done by changing your company name and telling customers, SUPRISE! you need a new phone! Sprint on the other hand has been very solid. They started out Digital to begin with, they now as of this year own licences for bandwidth in every part of the country. All they have left is puting up more towers, Which takes time, permision from land owners, and a couple million dollars each. Even with their growth, they still have the larges single technology, single company, siemless network in the U.S.. They are nearly ready to open up to 3G, They will start at 144 Kpbs. They already have 3G ready phones quity slipped onto store shelves. They also have GPS on the way for every phone, They have liecences from Palm for their O.S. Sprint is a gadget lovers dream company.