(keitai-l) Re: port of i-mode to other cultures

From: Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net>
Date: 11/02/03
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0311021425560.512@angelic-vtfw.cvpn.cynic.net>
On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 wbc@tkk.att.ne.jp wrote:

> H Curt, with KDDI offering flat rates for browsing, I see the packet
> model rapidly deteriorating.

I expect that, as with Docomo, KDDI's cost per packet has gone down
dramatically with their 2.5/3G upgrades, so they can afford to drop the
price to the consumer. Docomo did this by simply reducing the per-packet
charge (in some cases to a tenth the old charge) on their 3G network.

KDDI's gone for free browsing, but what that costs them depends on how
much traffic people use when browsing. For typical web pages for phones,
that's not a lot. I don't think you're going to see KDDI offering free
data connections for applications that use bandwith the way web browsing
on a PC does. Giving away a few hundred kilobytes of bandwith to someone
browsing for a half hour is rather different from giving away several
dozen megabytes of bandwidth.

> At the moment browsing is pretty useless

I'm sorry, but this is just plain wrong. Tens of millions of people here
in Japan use it every day, and many of these people do own computers.

> although some content is available but runs up quite a bill

It's not that bad. It's certainly cheaper than voice conversations.

> and the eperience is very poor when compared with a PC or possibly
> with a PDA.

Actually, in some cases, the experience is utterly fantastic compared to
a PC. For example, when I'm far from home and want to figure out what
trains to take to get home, I'm much happer with pulling out my phone
and punching my current location and destination into a web site than
I am taking a taxi home, booting up my computer, punching in the info,
printing the directions, and then taking a taxi back to where I was
before.

As for the PDAs, well, I've used both them and keitai to browse the web,
and the keitai has advantages as well as disadvantages. For example,
typically the keitai is faster for small tasks because you just whip it
out and browse. With a PDA you generally have to set up a PPP connection
via a wireless modem, which eats thirty seconds right there. And of
course with a PDA you don't have "instant" e-mail: instead of just
getting a buzz the moment it arrives in your inbox, you have to set up
that Internet connection and do a POP mail check. That's pretty useless
for things like sever-down alerts.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs_at_cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC
Received on Sun Nov 2 07:38:17 2003