IT vendors to go mobile

IT firms are seeking opportunities within the forthcoming third generation mobile telecoms network, as a stepping stone into the multi-billion dollar IT-telecoms convergence market, and as a means of diversifying from low-margin business.

EC member countries are due to award licences to operate the multimedia network - called Universal Mobile Telecommunications Services (UMTS) - by 2000. In the UK, licences could be auctioned as early as this autumn.

IT firms will be among the interested candidates, noted Wolfgang Groenen, the newly appointed chairman of the UMTS forum's group of manufacturers.

The Forum is working together with the EC to spearhead the multimedia network.

'I would not be surprised if IT companies were interested in bidding for licences. The IT industry is convinced the future is the merger of telecoms, content and broadcast,' Groenen said.

UMTS could be of interest to a number of IT suppliers, notably Microsoft, which has often spoken of its broadcasting ambitions, and was rumoured to be mounting a takeover offer for BT. Other interested parties could be internet and networking companies.

However, UMTS' success hinges on the types of services that will be available.

Device manufacturers believe users would want to run full-blown multimedia services on their mobile terminals, but current mobile network operators prefer to take a softer approach.

The first tranche of UMTS will be available in 2002 and will enable users to send and receive text, graphics and video images, as well as make voice calls from mobile devices. It will offer bandwidth of 2Gbps and shorten the time it takes to send graphics files via ISDN from minutes to seconds.

Ben Timmons, director of strategy and marketing at Cable and Wireless Mobile, which provides marketing assistance to the group's global mobile companies, believes one of the major hurdles will be to get people to understand that mobile handsets could be used for more than voice communications.

However, the appearance of banking services over mobile phones could be used as a bridge to more advanced services from operators. But if mobile operators are slow to react, then IT vendors and those who are used to providing data and graphics to mobile workers could replace them as network suppliers.