Taking the SMS gamble
Published: 23 Sep 2004 13:50 BST
As chief marketing officer of UK mobile phone giant O2, Kent Thexton was in charge of convincing subscribers to gobble up wireless data. The company gets 23 percent of its revenue from wireless data, including SMS, every year.
But Sexton's now left O2 to become co-CEO of Seven, an influential wireless data company used by top-tier US carriers.
US cellphone service providers, including Seven customers Cingular Wireless and Sprint, are counting on wireless data services like downloading games and movies to succeed in order to offset steep declines in the price of phone calls, their core product. That makes Sexton's mission most critical.
Sexton recently talked with CNET News.com about kick-starting mobile data use in the United States, whether Wi-Fi phones are the answer and other topics.
Q: 3G services are hitting the United States. But how much value is there in paying $80 a month for what, on its best day, amounts to a very slow DSL connection?
A: If you're just really a heavy-file power junkie looking for speed, I agree -- it won't meet my needs. But if you're using it with a PDA or phone, and pulling down simpler emails and photos instead of PowerPoints, I think it'll be a pretty good service.
But it's not really fast enough for video, which carriers seem to be banking on quite heavily?
That's where codecs can help. I sit on the board of a company creating better ways to download music onto cellphones. What they and others are doing is making it much easier to run these sorts of music applications. The same thing is happening to video.
What are carriers doing wrong in their approach now to wireless data?
In the early days, people got ahead of themselves. Now we have colour screens and as a result you're seeing more browsing traffic on phones. Camera phones are definitely helping. Now you're seeing two-megapixel camera phones, which is a lot more data to push across a network. That forces manufactures to have faster processors, better quality screens and more memory.
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