ITU 03 diary – Access to wireless, TV channels and flight details on the go

I received an email in my Yahoo! account from Tesco this morning entitled ‘Mobile madness’. For a moment I started hoping the successful retailer had turned up at the show, seen what was going on and decided to undercut the £2 cans of Coke and cafeteria trays totting up to £20. No such luck.

The show is expensive – especially so for vendors who are still forking out millions on stands, anyone who feels the need to buy food or drink and, it turns out, plenty of people using Wi-Fi.

One head honcho at a top tier tech company was complaining about the access provided by Swisscom. Now Switzerland’s incumbent knows a thing or two about wireless access, what with its Swisscom-Eurospot ventures around Europe, but charging attendees for access wasn’t appreciated.

“They could have provided it for free and left thousands of potential customers and partners loving them,” he said. Maybe they knew a lot of attendees would be setting up their own WLANs anyway. Still, a missed opportunity.

So much in selling technology is in definitions. It can get confusing. Earlier this week a representative from the GSM Association said we should no longer be confused by the terms W-CDMA (which will end up being the most popular type of 3G) and UMTS (which is what a lot of people, especially in Europe, have called W-CDMA). Instead, we should all just say 3GSM – which conveniently is the name of another show, held in Cannes every February.

A bad idea? Well, a professor from the University of Geneva sharing the same stage pointed out it’s hardly progress to change the name when most people are now comfortable with UMTS.

Then there happened to be the small issue of the representative of the UMTS Forum. Surely he’d have something to say about that. He didn’t look happy but instead chose to concentrate on progress, specifically the 1.8 million 3G users in the world today.

Fair enough but hold on - 1.8 million? It seems there was no one around to stand up for the other 3G camp. CDMA2000 in its various guises is already in a number of countries, most notably Japan, Korea and the US. Still there are some vendors and analysts who don’t classify it as 3G. They get snooty about the technology peddled by Qualcomm.

To that, I say one thing – who cares what it’s called, see what it does. And CDMA2000 networks, as will be the case with W-CDMA, sorry, 3GSM networks allow some interesting applications and bandwidth on the go.

One person to recognise there’s more to 3G than 3GSM was Katsumasa Sinozuka, president and CEO at Oki Electric Industry. His presentation featured plenty of detail about CDMA2000 – used by KDDI in Japan yet generally overshadowed by what NTT DoCoMo and Japan Telecom are doing with ‘the other standard’ – but most notably an animated videophone application.

Sounds weird and it is. The idea is that while you can look and speak into a camera phone it isn’t always a good idea to have your image hurtling through the ether. He said that for reasons of “security and privacy protection” he can dynamically generate animated approximations of most of our faces. You could probably choose to look like Homer Simpson.

And if we’re talking marketingese, one of the favourites of the week came from an executive peddling Microsoft’s IPTV. Briefly promoted by Bill Gates in his keynote on Monday the technology - aimed at cable companies and telcos – looks impressive. It isn’t about the internet over the TV – remember the failings of WebTV? – but about more flexibly sending video and other content to homes.

It’s a step up from current digital TV but I’m not sure a real selling point is what Microsoft calls “instant channel change”. Now I know there can be a slight lag with channel changing on some digital platforms (and, while I’m here, why is it TVs taking longer and longer to turn on?) but pushing something that came as standard with sets in the 1970s doesn’t sound like incredible progress. Anyway, mainstream players such as Pace and Thomson are on board and we can expect a lot of activity in general in this area.

Finally, success for the dot-aero flight checking service announced by Sita last week. With my flight approaching I can say it seems to be working well. No unnecessary graphics – an important point for access over distinctly narrowband mobile devices – but easy-to-understand, basic info.

No more checking Ceefax first thing in the morning – though my dad might always prefer it that way.