Seeing the other guy screw up is always a pleasure so it was good last week to see the truly awful state of the US wireless telephone network in Arizona.
Whether you got to finish your call was problematical. Much of the time there was no coverage at all. The networks are grim in Europe. In Arizona they’re 3X grimmer. Arizona’s big, but it’s in the world’s richest country. It can afford a decent wireless network.
“I am amazed that they (network operators in general) get by with such a poor quality of service,” says Michel Mayer, CEO of Freescale Semiconductor, “it’s difficult to imagine video to the phone when so many voice calls lose their connection.”
But fly for a couple of hours Westward from the dropped calls of Arizona and you find the boys of Silicon Valley happily designing chips and technologies for sending video over the mobile networks.
Is anyone really going to watch TV on their mobile phone? Those little TVs from Casio have been on shop shelves for 30 years but they haven’t exactly taken the world by storm.
Although Freescale is the dominant supplier of DVB-H RF tuners, Sandeep Chennakeshu, senior vice president of the wireless and mobile systems group, says “I really find it difficult to believe I’ll watch TV on a little screen. But the behaviour of the younger generation is so very different.”
If the networks were robust, and if mobile phones had a roll-out screen stretching to six inches on the diagonal, then TV to the handset has a chance.
But the world’s laboratories have given up speculating on when the roll-able screen will be with us. And the record of the operators in investing in their networks is such that few people expect the networks to become robust anytime soon.
The teenagers may take a different view.
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