GSMA and Microsoft test the water for mobile broadband
Rating: give us the money, we can tell you how
By Annie Turner
The GSM Association (GSMA) and Microsoft are embarking on a global research programme to determine consumer trends and the mass market potential of notebook PCs with embedded mobile broadband. They could save their breath to cool their porridge.
The bottom line is that most people can’t afford a top-end handheld or laptop, mobile data rates are too slow and data charges much, much too high.
Those are the inhibitors to a mass market and those in emerging economies whipping out their laptop to send email from their nearest town.
It’s amusing that the telecoms industry at large defines anything under 2Mbps as narrowband, whereas most of us are lucky to get beyond the realms of kilobits per second via GPRS or 3G. Sure, the HSDA (high speed packet data) rate of technologies is being rolled out around the world, generally starting with HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access), but the maximum possible uplink speed is an inadequate 384kbps nowhere near enough to upload a video of your dog doing backward somersaults to MySpace.
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