Cellphone firms to face new technology

Local cellular phone companies may take four to five years before being able to adopt the third generation (3G) mobile technology which foreign operators are already testing.

Greg Marshall, Lucent Technologies Philippines president and chief executive officer, said that it would not be easy for the carriers to practically throw away huge investments in their current platform amounting to billions of pesos.

"3G will displace all of these technologies but for most companies, especially in developing countries, this is may not be a reality in the next four to five years," he said.

Wide-band networks can deliver voice, data and multimedia services as well as access the Internet through specially-designed handsets and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Right now, Globe Telecom and Smart Communications Inc., the country's largest users of the global system for mobile communications (GSM), have only recently adopted the wireless application protocol (WAP) and are launching a massive information campaign to attract subscribers.

WAP is a way of compressing Internet information to fit into the mobile phones.

However, Marshall said that once another technology comes in, that is the general packet radio system (GPRS), there may no longer be a need for WAP.

"If the promise of GPRS to deliver high-speed Internet access comes true, it may kill off WAP. There's no reason to use WAP which can only deliver text-based Internet information when you can have fast download of Internet sites," he explained.

Marshall, though, said that operators have to move on sooner or later since GSM is predicted to reach the age of obsolescence by 2004.

"Definitely, 3G will take off because it is the convergence of two fastest growing trends -- mobile and the Internet, but it will take a couple of years more. By then, local operators may have recovered their investments," he said.