-Europe has been the first mover, now it is drifting to Asia-Pacific, we predict the first big contracts to come in 2002," Antoine Rouot, 3G product marketing manager Australia/New Zealand, told ZDNet Australia.
Reports on CNET quoted Mike Murphy, a vice president at Nortel Networks Asia, as saying that -It's obvious that Asia is perhaps the fastest-growing market for the wireless industry." He added that Nortel's focus in Asia is on China, Korea and Taiwan.
Rouot predicts that we will see a lot of CDMA announcements in the coming months, but that UMTS may take a little longer. He explained that because Wideband CDMA, a pillar of UMTS, is based on CDMA technology, to go from GMS to UMTS is a big step.
In Australia, the situation is complicated further. -What will be interesting in Australia, is that Australia has two 2G standards, GSM and CDMA," said Rouot. -It is one of the few countries in the world where you have two standards."
Paul Budde, a telecommunications analyst, sees this as the main problem.
-There is still not a standard, there are numerous versions. Every provider has a different technology. If there is no standard you get a proprietary system for each different Telco, and how would users use this?" he said. -I think that 3G mobile will not become available this side of 2005 in any significant form."
-You'll see a few pilots, trials, a few companies using it. You might get a hundred people in a company go to Telstra, but that's not what I call a commercial system. I mean having a large number of users," he added.
-There is no compelling reason why you and I would start using 3G. What's the business model?"
Rouot agrees that it is not feasible for telcos to deploy 3G at this point in time. -Operators [telcos] are trying to get revenue out of existing infrastructure," he said. -We believe the operators should optimise wireless Internet before moving into 3G."
-The issue is not from a technology perspective, the issue is from an operator perspective. Does it make sense to move into 3G today, from a business perspective," he said.
-The technology is available. At Nortel we would love to do that today, but it's up to the operators. From our perspective, we're ready."
Budde disagrees. -In the laboratory I have no doubt it works. In the real world where standards apply and you do need applications that go across networks, that isn't here yet."
