Wireless Data's Diverging Visions
By Bill Frezza
Prodded by my clients, my editor, my new partners and the war stories that are coming in from readers in our "I Survived Wireless Data" essay contest, I thought I'd take stock of this troubled industry's ongoing efforts to find itself. I wish I could promise the right answers, but I'm becoming less confident that we've discovered the right questions.
Two very different philosophies are battling for dominance in the wireless data business; they are diametrically opposed, with no clear winner. The first can be traced to Bill Gates' five-year-old admonition to those of us who thought we were doing something special when we started sticking antennas on laptops. "It's just transport," he said, implying that we were in the commodity pipe business, and if we kne
w what was good for us, we'd make sure those pipes were cheap, transparent, ubiquitous and fast enough to compete with standard wireline connections. Askin
g the question "What's the killer app of wireless data?" is as silly as asking "What's the killer app of disk drives?" Bits is bits, stupid--the more the better--just move them from here to there and be quick about it.
 In the other camp lie those who believe wireless data was put on this earth to solve problems where wires cannot go. These true believers keep searching for the killer app while pouring over demographic data on target markets, hoping to find just the right early-adopter-mission-critical-value-added sweet spot. Not surprisingly, messaging is a recurrent theme because it is both time-critical and can get by on a meager diet of bits.
Choosing Sides
Both camps have passionate advocates. The transport crowd is increasingly willing to sacrifice wide-ar
ea mobility in return for throughput, particularly as additional bandwidth starts opening up in the nether regions above 2 GHz. The wireless LAN vendors smell new opportunities now that the FCC has lifted some of the restrictions on high-gain directional antennas. A few of them actually are talking about wireless LAN bridges with 50-mile ranges! Metricom is mounting a comeback, promising an upgrade to 85 Kbps as it grabs a few licenses in the new Wireless Communications Services (WCS) band. Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) operators wait for their turn at bat as 38-GHz "wireless fiber" provider WinStar goes gangbusters undercutting the incumbent local exchange carriers selling commodity T1 and T3 connections.
Not to be left behind, cellular and Personal Communications Services (PCS) vendors are going back to the drawing board on next-generation mobile systems, beginning the development of both wideband CDMA and Future Land Mobile Public Telecommunications Service (FLMPTS) technologies. Both are
trying to deliver enough bandwidth to carry data. May the fastest, cheapest pipe win.
This Time for Sure
The true believers seem to be throwing their lot in with the handheld
PC or the smart phone, hoping to hitch a ride as a sexy differentiator on someone else's volume product. This is a variation of the "do you want fries with that?" strategy. Packaging, positioning and promotion will make or break this high-risk approach. Horrendous ergonomic challenges lie ahead. Thin-client application suites have to be carefully crafted for impoverished platforms, which can never replicate the full environment of the desktop. Underdeveloped intermediation services will have to support the integration of these nomadic devices with enterprise systems. The Java hype is thick as fog.
No one knows how these mobile messaging products are going to be distributed and supported because they fall between the cracks of the cellular and PC industries. Proper price points are anyone's guess. Yet brutal competition a
mong cellphone providers, largely clueless about data, is forcing most of them into the arena. May the last man standing win.
Which vision will predominate? It's a tough call. Is there room in the market for both? It's too soon to tell. I just wish the pain of trial and error wasn't the only way to find out.
Bill Frezza is a general partner at Adams Capital Management. The opinions expressed here are his own. He can be reached at frezza@alum.MIT.EDU or techweb.cmp.com/nc/frezza/frezza.html.
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