The state of the wireless industry – by the father of the Mobile phone
By Ben Robinson on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 3:36 PM PST In Events, Research
At a recent conference (the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston), someone called Dr. Martin Cooper picked on five problems with the wireless industry. Interesting enough you might think, but this chap invented the Mobile Phone!!
Below are the five problems he picks on, courtesy of CrunchGear. Dr. Cooper also suggested some solutions, but for those I am going to suggest you follow the link to CrunchGear, who have eloquently described them. It’s not everday you get to see things clearly laid out by someone so key to the development of the industry, so it’s worth a read!
1. Most cell phone conversations are held indoors, yet all the base stations and towers are located outdoors.
2. The Internet proved that an open network will invite a myriad of applications to serve the needs of just about everyone, yet the wireless industry still clings to the “walled garden” idea of closed networks and development.
3. The idea behind efficient wireless signal transmission is to deliver radio frequency energy to specific individuals at the time each individual’s device needs to transmit or receive information, yet wireless signals are constantly broadcast every which way, in all directions, which is a really inefficient way to connect.
4. Phones are primarily used (70% of the time) to talk and listen, secondarily for text messages (which use small bandwidth), and tertiary for e-mail (which uses small to medium bandwidth), yet we, as consumers, get constantly bombarded with marketing for expensive high speed data services that people don’t use all that often.
5. When purchasing devices, consumers are persuaded that they are getting something for nothing and then urged to throw their old devices away.
Follow this link to the CrunchGear article.
[Via: CrunchGear]
