OPINION
Motorola's vision: the digitisation of everything
16-12-2004
by Ralph Averbuch
Motorola enjoys a significant business presence in the Republic. With some 500 workers in Cork and a further 50 in Dublin, the company has been operating on these shores for 25 years. But being around a long time doesn't guarantee that people know what you're about.
So in typical style, Motorola Ireland laid on an event for the media where the firm took the opportunity to talk about its activities, which extend from the phones we all know to Mesh Networking, Tetra and network software -- or technologies that most people know little about.
But the really interesting stuff isn't the increasing bells and whistles Motorola has on offer in its phones. Instead, it's the potential for the humble handset to become a device which is just another node on an increasingly IP-networked world. Motorola is using the phrases "the digitisation of everything" and "the expansion of broadband."
But what's that all mean to the average punter? Here's the scenario: there are two things which will most likely create a lot of sleepless nights for the traditional telco's. The first is broadband, a seemingly innocuous high-speed way to connect to the internet. The second is much more threatening when linked to the first; it's Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP for short. That's because, once you have the high-speed connection into the office or home, it is possible to make calls at charges that are a fraction of those you would typically pay. It's particularly so with international calls, where a consumer could pay as little as EUR0.02 a minute to call the US or Australia, at a quality indistinguishable from a traditional phone call and using an ordinary telephone set.
So what has this, as yet unrealised, threat to traditional landline telecoms companies have to do with Motorola? Well, the firm thinks that the mobile phone is going to become much more than the sum of its parts and Motorola contends that, ultimately, mobile handsets will be devices through which individuals are able to communicate on any IP-network -- a list that in the not-to-distant future will include all landlines, mobile networks, Wi-Fi hotspots, WiMax, Mesh networks and, well, you name it.
To your average customer, it's going to be irrelevant how these new technologies work, just so long as they do and the quality is the same or better than it's always been. But from an industry perspective the next two years are going to get very interesting indeed. VoIP over landlines will be a classic example of a disruptive technology -- one which comes along and totally upsets the established order -- and so too are handsets that are computers with the "intelligence" to know which network is the cheapest, or the fastest, or offers the strongest signal.
This means that anyone with a phone capable of connecting to a Wi-Fi point, a WiMax network, or a Mesh Network, is going to have lots of alternative routes to making calls. Those calls will almost certainly be VoIP in nature and will enjoy much lower costs to the end consumer. In fact, the chances are that the price differential between making a mobile call or a landline call could disappear -- so long as you use VoIP.
Motorola seems to be agnostic to the outcomes of these developments but the company does recognise that it is making possible a punch-up through the convergence of all these different technologies into the humble handset. No phone maker is keen to expound the possibilities as they could potentially destroy the mobile networks' current business models. And let's face it, for now at least the these networks are the 800-pound gorillas. Currently mobile telcos own the airwaves, thus consumers have no option but to pay for all the calls they make via their provider; but as these new IP-centric technologies begin to penetrate and the next generation of IP-friendly handsets emerge -- capable of piggy-backing on other network infrastructures -- the threat becomes very real.
Of course, it's all a "what if?" scenario. Yet we are already seeing the potential of VoiP connecting over broadband today. Amongst many others, Gossiptel, a UK VoIP telecoms company, is already selling services for landlines with broadband, and there's no reason at all that this couldn't extend, with the right network infrastructure, to the next generation of IP-friendly mobile handsets.
So expect to see some major upheaval in the mobile telecoms sector in the next few years, as old business models are forced to change and the balance of power between the customer and the mobile phone network alters irreversibly.
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