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By: Ernest Lilley Date: 11/10
CTIA Website: CTIA Wireless
Summary: CTIA, the Cellular Telephone and Internet Association, holds two shows a year, one on the east coast and the other in Las Vegas. Though the Vegas show is smaller than the East coast show, there were still enough interesting developments in wireless networks and devices to make it worth the trip.
photos: © 2002 techrevu
CTIA Photos
I just flew back from CTIA in Vegas, and boy are my arms tired. I'll be here all week. Sorry. CTIA is the Cellular Telephony and Internet Association, for the the acronym obsessive among us. Just last Spring I covered the sister event in Orlando, FL, but things are moving so fast in the wireless world right now that I wanted to see what was new.
Some of the wireless networks that looked so cool last spring have made it to market (CDMA2000), cell phones are adopting ever more digital functions (including: camera, PDA, and Bluetooth gadget), and the RIM Blackberry still owns its niche...but isn't stopping there.
Why Wireless?
There are a couple things that turn investors and developers on about wireless applications. First and foremost, it's not the wired internet, which users have been programmed to expect to get something for nothing, thanks to the nineties market share madness. Since folks have always had to pay for cellular access, they have fewer qualms about paying for their wireless data access as well. Secondly, while the installed computer user base is only a fraction of the world population, cell phones are pervasive around the world...including third world countries where it's cheaper to put up towers than to string cable. Cheaper, and more resistant to infrastructure attack.
Tom Wheeler, CTIA president, broke the keynote sessions up into a series of conversations with industry executives starting with RIM Blackberry CEO Jim Balsillie who talked about their new licensing agreements to let other firms incorporate the RIM technology into their devices. Wheeler took questions from the audience on his Blackberry during all the keynotes...do you think he's on the payroll? Speaker after speaker drove home the message: The technology for wireless data transfer is here and the overseas markets show that there is a demand for messaging, data access, gaming and other applications like streaming video and music. The time is right for wireless cellular to lead a new tech-wave...all we need is investors to fund it.
Interestingly the keynote speakers also pointed out that for the enterprise, mobility is about saving time (and money) and increasing productivity. For the consumer, it's about spending time (and money) through entertainment.
Two things that really turned me on at the show were new Blackberrys to go with the GSM enabled cell phone version we saw introduced at the last show. Now there is a CDMA version for Sprint and Verizon customers, as well as a Nextel personal radio network model coming to a network near you this spring. Incidentally, I think that this is the first non-Motorola Nextel handset made. All three have back-lit keyboards that are a vast improvement over the original series.
Nokia had a great time showing off the clamshell cased 9290 communicator (Nokia 9290), which has been a long time coming to the US, largely due to a lack of the GSM/GPRS data network it needs. Most of the major US cities are now ready for it, but this cool toy has been several years in the pipeline and no longer qualifies as new. What was new is Nokia's 3650 tri-band phone with a 640x480 pixel digital camera built in. It's not the only cam/phone out, but it may be the coolest.
At the show were two printing solutions I liked. One was the HP 450 Mobile Printer, which does 4500x1200 dpi in b/w or color, runs on ac or its lithium ion battery and fits nicely into a briefcase. The other isn't a gadget but a service. The PrintMe Network lets you send your PDA, Cell Phone, or other mobile device's output to a network of printers in hotel business centers, airports, copy shops and other locations as well as any fax machine that's handy.
They may not be as sexy as a BREW enabled high resolution color cell phone with GPS and an MP3 player (like the Audiovox CDM 9500) but several companies were showing adapters for PDAs that turned them into magnetic card readers, bar-code scanners, and thermal printers. Not cool, but very useful. I especially like the wireless POS (Point of Sale) solutions that Apriva and IPC have come up with, allowing you to make credit card sales anywhere you can get wireless web access.
Up until this time, the world has been a pretty divided place when it came to cellular standards. Europe continues to be largely GSM/GPRS, while America has been predominantly CDMA. For a long time we've been running a poor second to our Euro-relations when it came to cool new gadgets, but that's finally turning around for several reasons. One, AT&T has rolled out GSM more or less country wide, and two, CDMA's latest version, 1X, has leapfrogged the data transmission rates of GMS/GPRS impressively, allowing mobile web (and voice) access in times that make anticipation something you can leave to pouring catsup. I tried out a both technologies at the Sierra Wireless booth, and it didn't take long to figure out which I preferred.
I remember not so long ago when Jerry Pournelle was happy to get a Ricochet connection in his house (FrontPage XP Bad, Ricochet Good), just before they filed Chapter 11. If he doesn't have broadband yet, I'd suggest looking into Sprint or Verizon's CDMA2000.
CDMA may or may not take over the world, and GSM has had a head start, especially in Europe, but if you were going to open up a new country with potential for an awesome market where would you go? Would you believe...China? China Unicom has just reached their 4 millionth CDMA customer and has signed a deals with Ericsson and Nortel Networks to build a CDMA 1x network.
On the other hand, the 3-4G upgrade for GSM, known as EDGE, will be rolling out sometime next year with data rates up to 473.6 kbps that make CDMA2000 look like a 28k modem. May we continue to live in interesting times.
Though everyone is clamoring for games and other mobile applications to take advantage of all this bandwidth, real or potential, the short life cycle and lack of device standardization make development a nightmare. It turns out that porting things over from WAP doesn't work all that well, and not everyone wants to develop in JAVA. Qualcomm decided it was time to wake up and smell the BREW (TM).
BREW is a development platform that hooks into a set of instructions built into enabled cell phones and other devices. Developers can work in their choice of languages including BREW's native C/C++, XML or Java, and produce applications that take advantage of the thin, open and standardized platform. BREW applications are downloaded when you want to use them. The basic business model for BREW apps has the carriers making their money off the application download and data transport, while developers get paid for the applications themselves.
At CTIA Insignia announced their release of a BREW based JAVA virtual machine, opening up the devices to any JAVA based app.
Of course, not everyone wants Qualcomm to get any more influential, so even though BREW is network agnostic, its growth may be limited to CDMA devices.
Shortly before I took off for CTIA, a copy of Andy Dorman's updated guide to the wireless world showed up, so I took it along with me. It's a good thing that I did, because I've been paying more attention go digital cameras and other things that wireless networks and the 7 hours it took me to fly to Vegas were perfect for a crash course in current technology, or as current as print publishing can make it.
The Essential Guide to Wireless Communications Applications by Andy Dorman
Dorman is the Senior Editor at Networking Magazine, and he writes clearly and intelligently, providing an excellent overview of the wireless industry from what network the Rim Blackberry uses (Motient) to the future of data communications in 4G. New and notable for Byte.com readers is the updated section on mobile device OSs, including the Tablet PC. I found his discussion of the different types of cellular networks being rolled out and on the horizon especially useful as I prowled the aisles. Just last year I was impressed by 1xRTT, the 2.5G CDMA upgrade...now, as Andy points out, it's fractured into a whole alphabet soup of 1x derivatives that he helps navigate.
In the past I've liked McGraw Hill's "Demystified" books for clarifying the arcane. A couple you might consider for more information on wireless data and telephony are:
- 3G Wireless Demystified by Roman Kitka, Richard Levine, Roman Kikta, Lawrence J. Harte
- GPRS Demystified by John Hoffman (Editor)
- Wireless Data Demystified by by John Vacca (coming 01/03)
And though CDMA hasn't been demystified yet, McGraw Hill does put out a popular book that should clear things up.
- W-CDMA and cdma2000 for 3G Mobile Networks by M. R. Karim, Mohsen Sarraf, Victor B. Lawrence
Things are settling down in the wireless world now that the data networks have been chosen and implementation is well underway. Now that we've been through the crash and burn aftermath of the e-bubble's bursting, investors and developers alike are wary of putting too much faith in new technology like cell phone photos or games, but the overseas and now domestic numbers show that there really is gold in them thar hills. Cell phones and PDAs are hard (or impossible to tell apart) and enough devices are appearing so that you're not trapped with one network or provider but can choose the one that fits you.
The wireless age is really upon us, ready or not.
- Previous Byte.com CTIA Coverage:
CTIA Fall '02, Orlando Florida by Ernest Lilley- CTIA Website: www.wow-com.com/
- CDMA Development Group: www.cdg.org/index.asp
- GSM/GPRS/EDGE:www.gsmworld.com/technology/gprs/
- CDMA/CDMA2002/Brew: http://www.qualcomm.com/brew/