Wireless show tunes into TV, Web services

With 79 percent of British consumers complaining mobile services are getting more complicated in a recent survey, the mobile phone industry is looking more than ever for mass-market services that will drive consumers to the stores to buy new and advanced handsets.

Which is where TV comes in.

This is the first year that MTV Networks, the music and children's television unit of Viacom Inc., is present at 3GSM, which kicks off in Barcelona on Monday.

"It is the first time MTV feels it has a place at this show," a spokeswoman said before the show.

MTV will be broadcasting three mobile TV channels at the event, featuring MTV shows and music, Paramount Comedy, Nickelodeon and IFILM, a new MTV brand dedicated to filmmaking.

British operator BT Group will unveil its new BT Movio TV and radio service to the 50,000 visitors expected at the show next week.

Mobile broadcasts are easy to understand, and TV also happens to be a service that operators can offer at a modest flat monthly fee, because it is broadcast. It does not become more expensive if consumers watch a lot of it.

Consumers will need a new phone to receive mobile TV, and that will open the door for other data services, which consumers have so far been reluctant to use.

Mobile TV will kick-start mass-market demand for smart phones and feature phones, said Nigel Clifford, the CEO of mobile phone software maker Symbian.

3G networks are here
Mobile carriers already operate 91 Wideband-CDMA networks around the world, but the 50 million subscribers on these networks with new phones are still a drop in the bucket of the global total of 2.2 billion mobile phone subscribers.

The new networks cost hundreds of billions of euros and they are not being used enough, due to the lack of mass-market services. Data services generate between only 13 and 25 percent of total revenues for most European operators and less than 10 percent for U.S. mobile carriers, with old-fashioned text messaging still generating the bulk of this.

"Mobile media promises to be a major topic of discussion, as operators are looking for the next big thing to entice customers to use 3G networks," said analyst Kenneth Hyers at ABI Research.

Music downloading, the main theme at the last show, has been introduced by operators such as Verizon Communications and Sprint Nextel over the last year, and phones that resemble MP3 music players have become commonplace.

The coming year will see the advent of phones with bigger screens to display the emerging TV and video services.

These bigger displays are also useful for Internet browsing, a development that has not been wasted on Internet service companies such as Google.

Because mobile phones are increasingly fitted with GPS navigators, Internet services companies can start offering localized services, and even navigation, to mobile users.

Yet another example of how cell phones are changing is the arrival of a special chip that turns a mobile phone into a wallet. It has taken six years after the first hype about it, and it is now used in Japan. Europe will follow this year.

Trials with Mifare/Felica phones are underway in Germany and France, where consumers can pay for anything from groceries to bus tickets. Around 200 visitors at 3GSM will be handed a Samsung phone to try it out for themselves.

Novelties at the show will also include a handset radio built on a chip from Bitwave that can tune into any wireless network, past, present or future. The first chip will be on display next week and could be in handsets next year, opening an era where consumers no longer have to buy a new phone each time telecoms vendors invent a new, faster wireless network.

After all the difficulties of getting 3G to work, meanwhile, network vendors now want mobile operators to believe that 3G is not really what they want. They want something faster. The new 3G is called HSDPA and is due in commercial networks later this year, and the next step will be HSUPA a few years after that.

Operators can of course also choose to go with TD-SCDMA from China, WiBro from South Korea, WiMax supported by Intel or Flash OFDM from Qualcomm.

In this wireless mesh--or is it mess?--one thing is certain: Anyone who can keep it simple has an edge. And that should not be confused with the EDGE wireless standard.