Jim Evans

Macclesfield, Cheshire

Consultant / Trainer

Excellent article.

Between 1998 and 2001, I was giving training on IPv4 / IPv6 to groups of managers and engineers within mobile phone companies all over Europe in preparation for the 2.5G / 3G roll-out.

I was not popular (at least with the senior staff), if I expressed similar views to PeterC. I pointed out that GPRS offering a share of 28.8kbps at £6/Meg; it was of little interest when I could do a switched circuit 14.4kbps dedicated modem call with about 15min a megabyte within my "free" call allowance. [Q. "Why are you offering me a share of a speed that I stopped using as dial-up 5 years ago when I am being told that 10Mbps is too slow in the office?" - A. "You don't understand the benefits of 'always-on' and not having to dial-up. "]

Through-out my 35 year career, telecomms companies have continuously tried to move up the stack from line and bit pipe providers or from Wide Area to Local Area to make money from the explosive growth in DP demands. Every time the result has been too little, too expensive, too late compared to what the DP crowd wanted or had available. (X.25, ISDN, X.400, Frame Relay, Cell Relay).

IP is now full of facilities that cannot map onto the current "broadband" infrastructure or onto the outdated business models that the traditional telco's force upon us - ie multicasting V point to point Virtual circuits; full mobility V restricted and expensive "roaming".

But we shouldn't forget that hundreds of millions of messages are sent monthly at the cost of £750,000 / Gigabyte. I can transfer that data at between 0p (marginal cost) and £14.99 (limited capacity ADSL line). Is text messaging really that much better than a PDA with WiFi?