Phones, dreams, and the mobile Internet

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 26 Jan 2001 17:37 GMT

Ericsson's problem isn't what you may think. And it isn't stopping the phone side of its business, either; what it is doing, is simply closing down its factories, and franchising its phones.

What is its problem? Actually, you should ask: what are its problems?

Two main problems, in my view. First, it doesn't know what phones to design, and it doesn't know whose designs to buy -- its own, Psion's, or Microsoft's. But even more seriously, it doesn't know how long the world will carry on wanting phones.

Not want phones! How silly -- (I hear you say). They're the biggest consumer product ever! Surely, people will always want phones!

Surely not. What we phone users actually want, is to be able to talk to each other. Phones are what we currently use for the job. But what we are going to use for talking to each other, in the future, will be Internet terminals.

Currently, all voice traffic is carried on voice networks. In ten years' time, all voice traffic will be carried in TCP/IP packets, over IP v6 and later. Nobody in the phone business doubts this.

What nobody in the phone business knows, however, is what devices we will use.

Go to Ericsson's Web site right now; and you'll find that the corporate theme is "The Mobile Internet Revolution." You'll find it is selling "solutions" which integrate standard switchboard PBX boxes with Internet services; selling corporate data access for mobile execs, selling Internet consulting; selling data backbone and optical networks, and messaging.

Now, think how difficult it is, today, to set up a single device which handles your Internet traffic, your voice traffic, and your corporate information, and your commerce. Have you ever tried to record your phone conversations on your PC? Have you tried using your PC for Internet calls? How about both at once? And watching TV at the same time? And accessing the Internet for ordinary surfing?

You, or I, might feel that all this is a load of fluff; all we want to do is place phone calls. How hard can it be to work out that we need a phone, you might ask? But the problem is, although we want phones, we don't want to pay for them.

Tomorrow's phone isn't any cheaper to build than today's phone. But we are coming to expect phone costs to fall, and features to rise; we also expect call charges to drop, but we expect performance to improve.

And of course, we expect someone else to sort out the problems that causes. What Ericsson is saying is that it isn't going to be carrying that can any more.