Page 14 - Sphere No.6 (Jun 2002)

SPHERE
12
T E C H N O L O G Y
how much revenue will be involved.
The UMTS Forum, the indepen-
dent body that promotes the uptake of
3G, recently published a study that con-
cludes annual 3G service revenues will
reach US$322 billion in 2010.
Forum Chairman Dr Bernd Eylert
says the opportunities ahead aren’t just
for “techies” and early adopters, but for
everyone. He advises operators to “reach
out to their customers” and learn from
the current 2G boom in text messaging
(SMS) where children usually end up
teaching their parents what to do. SMS’s
multi-media alter ego (MMS) should be
simple and enjoyable to use, he said.
Such ideas have been on
Hutchison’s agenda from the word go.
The technical nuts and bolts behind the
scenes will be crucial, but equally
important to 3G’s success will be the
greatly enhanced customer experience,
which Canning Fok describes as
“adding eyes to the ears” that everyone
is accustomed to in 2G.
Film clips and video postcards will
soon become commonplace. Parents
will be able to eyeball their children
from their offices and not only wish
them a good day at school but also tell
them to comb their hair before they go!
Business partners will video conference
and exchange complex data without ever
meeting up. In medical emergencies,
patients’ vital signs will routinely reach
hospital staff before the patient arrives,
saving many lives.
Curiously, football – a European
obsession – could hold the key to open
a treasure chest of opportunities for 3G.
Whilst Hong Kong fans might favour
horse racing and Australians cricket,
some of the biggest content deals struck
so far have involved football action –
20-second clips of championship match
highlights, allowing fans to keep close to
the action wherever they are.
Illustrating the power of football to
get people talking, mobile phone com-
panies had to put up temporary base
stations near the stadium to cope with
some 50,000 extra calls made during
the Scottish Cup Final played in
Glasgow in May this year.
Such deals don’t stop on the pitch
either. 3G’s ability to personalise services
to suit customers’ interests includes
location-based offerings. If you follow a
particular team, you might want to
know that its star player is doing a book-
signing event a few miles from where
you happen to be.Your 3G device will
not only alert you to the information,
but also show you how to get there!
Such capabilities have long been
the stuff of science fiction, now they
will soon be accessible to the general
public. 3G has the speed to deliver con-
tent and applications in a way that 2G
and even 2.5G – General Packet Radio
Service (GPRS) – couldn’t hope to
match.
“Some mobile operators claim that
3G gives the same services as GPRS,
only faster. This is absolutely untrue,”
insists Bob Fuller, joint CEO of
H3G Italy.
“3G is an entirely new market that
has nothing to do with previous tech-
nologies.The network is broadband and
10 times faster than GPRS. As regards
services, only 3G can guarantee true
multimedia and interactivity in real
time, where the quality of the customer’s
experience feels ‘real’.”
With the launch a few months away,
observers will be watching closely to see
what has been achieved so far and what
exciting opportunities lie just ahead.
BUILDING BLOCKS
Hutchison 3G UK won Licence-A –
the highest bandwidth of five – in the
British auction in May 2000. In just 18
months it grew from a handful of staff to
1,500 full-timers and 600 contractors.
Employee numbers will rise to around
3,000 over the next couple of years.
Managing Director Colin Tucker
confirms that the building blocks of 3G
are largely already in place in the UK,
namely the 3G devices, the network and
the middleware.
Hutchison has no intention of fol-
lowing the example of some GPRS
operators who had nothing to sell when
they launched. Customised 3G devices,
manufactured by Motorola and NEC,
will be available from Day One. These
handsets will support multimedia
capabilities and allow seamless transition
between 2G, 2.5G and 3G systems.
Equally important will be the core
network infrastructure that will make
the devices work.
“We can look at the infrastructure
behind the handset in two layers,” says
Tucker. “There’s the radio network
which provides the connectivity out to
the handset, and then there’s the appli-
cations platform which ensures that
content can be deciphered.”
The radio network is the connec-
tivity bit – switches, transmitters, fibre-
optics etc. Several vendors have been
chosen to help build the networks,
including Nokia, Siemans-NEC, 186k,
Nortel Networks, Ericsson and
Motorola.
“On top of the network is the appli-
cations platform,” Tucker explains (see
sidebar, p.13). “As we needed to move
fast, we decided to take ready-made
large blocks of software – a billing sys-
tem, the ISP to deliver the content and
so on.We modified these, and then tied
them all together with the EAI
(Enterprise Application Integration)
level.The EAI acts as a highway between
all of these pieces. All the communica-
tions are done across this layer.”
In the past, most of the 2G architec-
tures were effectively one piece of soft-
ware and therefore much harder to
upgrade. However Hutchison’s approach
allows it to quickly build complex func-
tionality by taking significant pieces of
ready-made software and plugging them
together through this standard interface.
“If we decide to deploy a more
sophisticated system, we can remove one
piece and replace it with another with-
out replacing all the pieces,” says Tucker.
Care has also been taken with the
location of base station sites using exist-
ing sites where possible to speed things
up and reduce environmental impact.
Services will embrace content from
“The building
blocks are 99%
complete and we
are now in
execution mode.”