A few facts amidst the chat
The ITU kicked off its conference proper with a panel of eight ceos, one of them acting as moderator. The top guns from Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, NTT DoCoMo and Orange sat at a long table. The audience waited below for a session that the moderator, NeuiStar’s Reza Jafari, told us would break with the normal mould by offering an interactive panel debate.
Lord knows what the cost per minute is of these people’s time, but they wasted approximately 120 units here. Add to that 120 minutes of everyone ele’s time in the hall, and that’s quite a productivity dip caused by one conference.
Although this was to be a panel debate, half the speakers preferred instead to speak first at some length to powerpoint slides, by way of introduction. This would have been OK if they had come prepared with anything challenging or new to say. But as the third speaker launched into a presentation on the benefits of the connected lifestyle, time was already going into reverse. By the time all seven of them had had a go, the effect, and most of them knew it themselves, the poor things, was stultifying.
Still, in an otherwise moribund session, bereft of interest outside the vaguest of platitudes, there were some nuggets of interest. First, NTT DoCoMo’s president and ceo, Masao Nakamura, said that the company would have one and a half times the number of 3G base stations in the country at the end opf March 2007 as it did at the end of March 2006.Significantly, many of those are being accounted for by in-building antennas. This would give 70% of the population of Japan access to its FOMA network.
The company also has i-mode roaming in 90 countries, Nakamura said,
Kitae Lee, president of telecommunications and networks business at Samsung, had some forecasts for WiMax, which Samsung loves. Mobile WiMax, he said, would give actual user speeds whilst on the go of 100Mpbs, and 1Gbps whilst nomadic (good news for nomads). Lee said his company thinks there will be 130 million mobile WiMax subscribers by 2011, from an estimated 14.5 million by the end of next year. 130 million in four or five years’ time is a lot, but against 3 billion ceullular mobile users, it’s not the mobile operator killer, the “disruptive threat”, that some portray WiMax as.
Apart from that, Patricia Russo told us that she thought the way the industry can make money (well actually she said “create value”, but we know what she meant) would be to be user-focussed, focusing on value added services, from now on. This would mean much more personalization in the industry she said and would lead to three types of transformation – in the services, the networks and in the industry itself. And as someone who’s transformed Lucent Technologies into Alcatel-Lucent herself, she clearly knows a lot about that topic.