3G has promising future in Asia Pacific: Analyst
3G has promising future in Asia Pacific: Analyst
SINGAPORE (AFP): The Asia Pacific region has all the ingredients for third-generation (3G) wireless phone services to flourish, according to a leading industry analyst.
But telecoms operators and phone vendors could prove an obstacle, Greg Tarr, chief investment officer with Asian venture capital firm M-Werks, told AFP on the sidelines of the three-day Internet World Asia conference which opened here Wednesday.
"Asia has all the right things going for it," Tarr said.
He cited the region's high base of installed mobile phone users, strong growth rates, a young population with ample disposable income in many countries and an ability to adopt new technologies.
But for 3G to flourish, it will require phone vendors and telecoms operators to work together to map out a strategy, learning from the failure of wireless application protocol technology (WAP), he said.
"I think that on one hand, the handset makers have a responsibility to market with what they can deliver, and to deliver on time, but on the other hand, the telecoms operators also have to take control of the marketing," Tarr said.
"There is a need to have an overall strategy that works quickly and that means not trying to develop everything inhouse."
The 3G system allows dramatically faster mobile applications than those currently possible, including video communication using mobile phones and high-speed Internet access, but interoperability issues remain among phone makers and telecoms operators.
The marketing hype for 3G has so far been low key compared with that for WAP.
"I think that a lot of vendors were overhyping what they could deliver (for WAP) and they kept slipping on the delivery schedules in terms of handsets and available services," Tarr said.
"There was a lot of backlash from the public because when they went to the retail outlets to buy their mobile phones, it couldn't live up to those expectations."
Tarr also saw the dotcom shakedown as "healthy" for the tech- savvy region.
"It weeds out a lot of the third tier firms that have no business being a corporation whatsoever. They have no business plans, no seasoned management, so I think it's actually healthy," he said.
David Michael, Hong Kong-based vice president with Boston Consulting Group, said the dotcom collapse was inevitable.
"It is what we might call the revolution eating their young, which is the first new entities that arise out of a revolutionary phase are very often replaced by something else," he said.
U.S. brokerage house Salomon Smith Barney said in a report last month that the dotcom shakedown has not slowed the level of Internet penetration or Internet-related applications and businesses.
It said Internet growth continued to exceed its expectations for the region.