Hooray for Hutchison’s 3G plan

Everywhere you turn, people attack 3G. Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at MIT, dismisses it as a “top-down” affair compared with the bottom-up prospect of 802.11b wireless LANs. The settlement of disputes over patents for MPEG-4 mobile video is seen as another victory for today’s slower-speed GSM networks. And on the same subject, fewer than 20 companies had patents on GSM, it is said; by comparison the fact that nearly 100 claim patents on W-CDMA handsets and base stations might delay the advance of 3G.

And as if all this were not enough, France Telecom is expected to pull the plug on MobilCom, its 3G operator in Germany.

Perhaps the biggest argument against 3G, though, is that people will be wary of it because of their disappointment with WAP. But WAP is a slow interface, and 3G is a standard for fast-moving networks. Comparisons are unfair. And anyway, large displays, colour screens and users on their third or fourth handset have all helped a wide range of WAP content to achieve millions of page impressions a month. WAP chat is increasing. And Datamonitor, an analyst which led much criticism against 3G, predicts that the number of Europeans banking by mobile phone will rise from 1.1 million in 2002 to 27.1 million by 2005.

It’s hard to see how a WAP-ish user interface won’t be part of that.

Certainly, Nationwide and Abbey National expect their customers to use WAP in fair numbers.

The success of SMS shows that people can get used to slowness if it’s relatively cheap. I’m prepared to wait a minute for a WAP-based bank statement or piece of transport information: I do that anyway with cashpoints and fixed-line phones. In time, then, people may get used to WAP-formatted services.

Human beings adapt. In Palo Alto in the US, design firm Ideo designed the Handspring Treo handheld. One version has a Qwerty key-board. It’s tiny, Ideo chief Bill Moggridge admits, but he adds that people quickly get the hang of using it.

It’s true that 2.5G phones do all that the Treo does but act as FM radios, MP3 players and cameras besides. It’s also true that just as people still don’t mind waiting for a fax to appear, they don’t now mind waiting for their photos to come through slowly on GSM. But that’s just the point.

Picture-messaging has begun to catch on. It will be accelerated by 3G, but it will also encourage 3G. How? By creating the much-needed confidence boost that mobile operators, newly harassed by regulators wanting to end high termination charges, sorely need.

Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein believes that picture messaging will generate about five percent of telecoms revenues by 2005. I suspect that might be an underestimate.

In different ways, doom-mongers invoke technologies both old – GSM and WAP – and new – WiFi, MPEG-4 – to attack the ambition and investment embodied in 3G. So, hooray for Hutchison. To pay #35m for exclusive rights to deliver Premiership soccer content over 3G might not be my first priority if I ran the firm. But to consider cheap, flat-rate voice charges as a way of turning up the heat on rivals, and to offer nearly full coverage within the M25 on opening day – we need more of that spirit in IT.