GPRS is as little Always On as WAP was the Mobile Internet
March 12, 2003
There are still only a few GPRS terminals in the hands of the mobile
users and most of those users have had difficulty even configuring
their new GPRS mobile phone - as they are not delivered pre-configured
from the mobile operators. But those few that have now tried GPRS
have realised that the GPRS slogan "Always On" is somewhat misleading
for the GPRS mobile phones available on the market today.
When you are marketing new technology, one of the major hurdles
is to get the potential customers for your new product to actually
understand what it is you are offering. Most new technology has
the problem that customers either feel they do not have the need
for the new technology, or that they do not understand what the
new technology can do for them and therefore do not understand why
they should invest in it. Basically customers do not care about
technology - they care about what personal benefits can be gained
from the product.
One of the ways of marketing new technology is by comparing it
to something customers already know, understand and have invested
in. This is basically what has happened with GPRS. Some bright young
marketing executive decided to use the Internet high-speed connection
ADSL's slogan "Always On" for GPRS! Not a bad idea maybe, as both
can stay connected as long as you want and both are only billed
for the data traffic - not the time you are connected. But in contrast
to GPRS, ADSL has two rather important features that most GPRS mobile
phones currently cannot offer:
ADSL is always on at the speed you have purchased you can make
and receive phone calls, while using your ADSL connection
GPRS is a rather different ballgame and using the ADSL slogan is
at the present actually not the best idea - if you do not want to
disappoint your mobile customers.
The problem is that there are 3 different "classes" of GPRS - Class
A, B and C - but only Class A GPRS telephones allow mobile users
to be always on with GPRS and make and receive phone calls at the
same time! With Class B phones, your GPRS session hopefully gets
suspended when you talk and resumes afterwards, however there is
no guarantee and with Class C, you have to switch between GPRS and
voice manually. Most of the GPRS enabled mobile phones on sale today
run Class B GPRS, but many advertisements do not actually state
which class GPRS the phone is - so even if mobile consumers know
about the 3 GPRS classes, they cannot see whether that mobile phone
supports simultaneous voice and data!
But is does not stop there, with ADSL you know what speed you are
surfing at, because it is the speed you bought from your ISP. With
GPRS you have no idea what speed you are running, except that it
is surprisingly slow! GPRS theoretically runs at a maximum speed
of 171.2 Kb/s - well over the speed of double ISDN - but most users
are actually only getting 20 - 30 Kb/s from their GPRS, definitely
not "high speed"! Another problem is that mobile GPRS users are
sharing mobile bandwidth, so you are not guaranteed any particular
speed, but your connection speed will vary depending on the quality
of your connection and how many other users are sharing the bandwidth
at the same time!
There are two things the terminal manufactures and mobile operators
can do to speed up the deployment of new GPRS enabled mobile phones:
Change the "Always on" slogan to for example "Easy Data Access"
Create new services for GPRS mobile phones
As most of today's GPRS mobile phones are only Class B phones and
do not support simultaneous voice and data, they should not be marketed
using the slogan "Always On" - giving the impression that you are
buying a mobile ADSL. Instead a slogan like "Easy Data Access" is
a much more correct term - once you have managed to configure your
GPRS mobile phone - because it is easy and only takes a few seconds
to start a GPRS connection.
The other thing the mobile operators could do to help speed up
the penetration of new GPRS terminals is to create a mass of content
by offering the content providers good business and revenue sharing
models, to help kick-start new mobile services.
The latest report from Strand Consult "How to make money on mobile
services" a picture of the current & future Market for Mobile Services
in Europe shows that in 2005, non-voice ARPU (average revenue pr.
user) will account for 32% of the mobile operators earnings and
have a total value of Euro 23 billion. Of that, under 2 billion
will come from SMS based mobile services and the rest from new technologies
based on MMS/WAP and JAVA! The report takes into account the mobile
operators appalling marketing of GPRS and lack of revenue sharing
models for new mobile services based on new technologies and goes
through in detail, all the prerequisites from all the players in
the mobile marketplace that need to be in place, before the mobile
services market really can take off.
GPRS is a step in the right direction towards getting mobile consumers
ready for UMTS. But right now, GPRS is comparable to the early Internet
days when millions of people were using dial-up modems - that were
difficult to configure - to access the Internet. The only reason
so many millions of people accepted rather slow dial-up modems was
that they wanted access to all the content on the Internet! GPRS
is a fine start for faster and easier access to wireless mobile
services - now all we need is some content!
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3G Motorola A920
