As the wireless subscriber base continues to mushroom worldwide, operators are already implementing data services as they evolve from voice carriers to voice and data carriers.
Subscribers should move to data services at a high rate, with close to a quarter-million data subscribers using evolutionary wireless handsets by 2004; leading data markets will be Western Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America.
As data subscribers grow, shipments of WAP-enabled handsets will also rise, growing from approximately 33% of all handsets shipped in 2000 to almost 90% in 2004, according to a new study from Allied Business Intelligence Inc (ABI), "Wireless Internet 2000." In 2000 and 2001 most carriers will have made the move toward implementing high-end data services through actual access via general radio packet services (GPRS), EDGE, 1XRTT (CDMA-2000), W-CDMA and truncated access via wireless application protocol (WAP) and the already apparent handheld device markup language (HDML).
Truncated access technologies, such as DoCoMo's i-mode, which uses rewritten hypertext markup language (HTML), have also gained support. In Japan i-mode is receiving great usage and subscribers are signing up at an alarming rate as the wireless world looks on with admiration and anticipation of the same type of fanfare accompanying data services as they are rolled out worldwide. The introduction of HDML, CDPD, WAP and short messaging as well as i-mode have already begun to attract large numbers of users.
"Truncated access will outpace actual access through the early introductions of the services, but as handsets become more robust, subscribers will turn to actual Internet access via the handset and the laptop as the market evolves," said ABI Senior Vice President of Communications Research Larry Swasey, the author of the report.
Mobile wireless data had been introduced in the past but was looked upon as a security risk, as well as a poor technology since top speeds were 9.6 kbps, 14.4 kbps or 19.6 kbps, depending on the air interface. Wireless handsets will soon be viewed as another extension of the client-server architecture made common in the 1980s.
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