CONFERENCE: That almost mythical item in the wireless world, the Coke machine that you operate with your mobile phone, actually exists. And if it didn't, you get the feeling that the world's biggest annual mobile and wireless technology conference, the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes last week, would have willed it into being.
Taking bulky pride of place at the constantly-crowded stand of Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo, the big red Coke machine underlined the fact that the battered telecommunications sector is determined to prove that it has substance behind the hype.
During the week of this yearly mobile geekfest, the biggest draw was easily the NTT DoCoMo stand, located downstairs in the Palais des Festivals to help draw the punters to much smaller companies' surrounding booths. DoCoMo displayed ultracool colour-screen Japanese mobiles with built in cameras, weird phone prototypes that could fan open like a Swiss army knife, and neatly-uniformed Japanese women politely explaining how its trademark high speed mobile internet service, iMode, actually works.
For Europeans drained after the 3G licence spending spree and still awaiting networks that can offer even a fraction of iMode's capability, NTT DoCoMo remains a beacon of wireless hope. "Seen the DoCoMo stand?" was the first question most attendees asked each other.
The other was whether they'd been able to scam a trip out to the enormous ship - a ferry from Corsica - that German giant Siemens had painted in its corporate yellow and anchored, very visibly, offshore. Smaller shuttles brought delegates out to the ship all day.
On board, Siemens had set up a wireless island to demonstrate its software and hardware offerings, deflecting a 3G signal from its running network in nearby Monaco. Most of the predominantly male, be-suited attendees had never seen a 3G network in operation, or one of the wardrobe-sized 3G base station transmitter units that will eventually be scattered across the European countryside, and a network being bounced from Monaco was definitely considered a must-see.
The ship exhibited Siemens' flashier side, but Mr Lothar Pauly, board member of Siemens' Information and Communication Mobile Group and former head of their mobile division, was more quietly optimistic about growth in the industry, and cognisant of past mistakes.
"Of course, the current market is flat. Maybe we'll see 10 per cent growth for 2002," he said. But he intends to push his own division to outperform that figure, as it has done in the past year.
Despite the downturn, Siemens still managed to turn in 27 per cent growth in its mobiles market and 50 per cent growth in its network equipment market. "We have taken market share," Mr Pauly said. "But what was most important to us is we turned back into a profitable business." Part of that recovery was due to job cuts - "of course, if you take 4,000 people out of the system, it helps" - but he notes that Siemens needs to grow by expanding its margins, not by down-sizing.
Like many companies at the congress, Siemens was showing off whizzy applications such as streaming television broadcasts carried by mobile, mobile phone-based shopping, mobile dating, gaming and betting services, and snazzy handsets. But as Mr Pauly admits, the networks are not yet in place to handle these services.
"For all of this we need bandwidth," he sighed. Does he believe WAP-wary Europeans will rush to embrace much-vaunted 3G networks that don't yet exist outside small test networks in Monaco and the Isle of Man?
"Lesson one is obviously not to start too early [by hyping services]. There was a lot of negative perception put into the market by WAP. We should not have done it, creating expectations before WAP portals were ready."
Confusing billing also led to annoyed consumers and should be tackled at the outset, he said.
"And, we should not make the mistake again of marketing technology. GMS, UMTS, WAP - no one understands that. It's too engineer-driven."
Sell the consumer dating, betting, gaming, or paying for a Coke from a Coke machine, and they'll be more likely to bite.
