Nick Langley measures the gap between hype and reality as mobile
computing takes us into the pervasive era
One day, hopefully in the near future, digital information will
pervade our lives. The fridge, the pool table in the pub, the car,
your wristwatch and the fabric of buildings could be "clients" in
the same way mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs)and
PCs are today.
But, for now, you still need three separate power-guzzling
plastic boxes if you want to type, talk and keep your appointments
handy.
The suppliers' visions of a world pervaded by invisible Web
links at every level - business, social and domestic - co-exist
with product announcements that amount to little more than
providing limited e-business and Internet information to wireless
application protocol (Wap)-enabled mobile phones.
This gap between hype and reality did not matter when business
computing was just about PCs and local area networks. But
mega-billions will be spent worldwide in the next decade acquiring
the ownership of wireless and fibre-optic networks. Pervasive
computing is what will deliver return on investment to the network
carriers and backbone owners, so IT strategists need to start
asking where their business benefits will come from.
IBM, for example, tells us: "E-business content can now be
delivered effectively, efficiently, and economically to anywhere,
and to any device... [pervasive computing] provides convenient
access to relevant information from disparate, unrelated sources,
stored on one seamlessly integrated system." Well, not yet it
can't.
We will access this information through laptop, notebook and
handheld computers, pagers, "smart" phones which incorporate the
functionality of PDAs, and wearable devices, such as smart badges
or tags and wristwatch computers.
The reality at present for most users is expensive, unreliable,
low performance mobile networks, geographically limited, and
delivering cut-down versions of Web pages to phone handsets with
unfeasibly small displays.
The services offered are equally limited, and often available
more conveniently and cheaply elsewhere. You can get share prices
and test match scores over conventional telephones, from newspapers
or the radio.
If you want to know where you are, and how to get to where
you're going, you can ask a policeman.
"It's debatable whether ordinary consumers are actually
demanding mobile e-commerce services right now," says Ovum analyst
Duncan Brown. "Business users, rather than the mass market, will be
the first serious adopters, but even they won't pay a premium for
services which are easier and cheaper to access using a phone or
PC. If suppliers are to survive and prosper, their early offerings
will have to be very targeted, and very compelling."
Behind the hype, IBM has been getting down to defining
strategies which overcome the barriers to pervasive computing. The
low performance of wireless networks means mobile users operate
mostly in disconnected mode. But even when not connected, they must
be able to browse Web pages, read and respond to e-mail, and access
calendar information, groupware and productivity applications. When
mobile users do connect, they must be able to access enterprise
applications and synchronise their local data with the server.
What they get depends on "dynamic content adaptation", or
transcoding, which addresses device characteristics like screen
size, format and graphical capability, speed of network connection,
network charges, and user preferences for what is displayed and
how.
Transcoding software which converts and reformats data will be
packaged as plug-ins for IBM's On-Demand Server.
All this may do the business for IBM users, but how do you make
your architecture so ubiquitous that anyone can use it? "The good
thing about the Web is that it's already ubiquitous," says
Hewlett-Packard Labs' business development manager, Gene
Becker.
HP says the Web supports mobility in two senses. First,
resources on the Web can be accessed from any device that supports
the standard HTTP protocol. It's a simple matter to put HTTP into
devices nomadic users encounter, like printers and projectors.
Second, the Web allows mobile users transparent access to resources
outside their current environment.
At a local level, HP aims to deliver Web services to mobile
users without requiring a global wireless connection. This has the
advantage of minimising how much of the infrastructure needs to be
up and running for users to interact with local services. That may
be the future as HP sees it. The more prosaic present is a bundle
of e-services for Wap, such as HP Openmail, which enables users to
send and receive e-mail from Wap-enabled cell phones.
Wap service providers could be riding for a fall, the victims of
their own hype. "2G+ [technology midway between second and third
generation mobile] is so limited in bandwidth that excessive Web
graphics can be a nuisance," says Ovum analyst Iain Stevenson. "In
its initial release, the practical link speed for GPRS will not
exceed 14.4 kilobits per second - the speed of an analogue modem in
1994."
Stevenson thinks suppliers are hyping the cellular market to a
worrying extent. "This is creating false expectations among users,
and possibly leading to inadvisable investment decisions." he
says.
"The cellular technology that will become available in the next
three years is no revolution. It is limited in bandwidth, and data
services are likely to be priced at premium rates. There is
certainly a market for information services and low value
e-commerce to cellular phones, but the technology will not support
the multimedia applications that are widely touted. You will be
able to buy theatre tickets and place bets over the Internet from a
2G+ cellular phone, but a videoconference with your Aunt Mabel in
Sydney is simply impossible.
"In short, the industry is trying to promote a rather weak 2G
service with a vision of 3G services. It is not until 3G is
available that radically new applications will become possible -
with new terminal equipment," Stevenson adds.
And while the bandwidth issues are being addressed, the problem
of small screen size will persist.
Ovum predicts that to succeed, pervasive computing demands new,
and often uneasy, alliances. "The industry seriously needs to
rethink its priorities," says Brown. "Top of the list must be the
industry agreements and co-operation needed before any wireless
transactions can take place."
Brown says the new industry will consist of a web of open
partnerships between players from completely different backgrounds,
providing a range of competing and complementary services. They
will include device manufacturers, network operators, financial
service providers, content providers and aggregators, systems
integrators and infrastructure providers. This will produce
short-term disputes as they all try to "own the customer", or stray
onto each others' territories.
Back in the world according to the visionaries, two projects
offer a glimpse of the wired world of the future. AT&T
Cambridge Labs' Spirit project is the latest incarnation of the
"intelligent building". The network knows the exact location of
every person, and every piece of equipment in a building. There are
large screens in public areas, showing cutaway views of the
building and its occupants going about their business. If you need
somebody, you can see who they are with and what they are
doing.
When you sit at a workstation, the network brings up your
desktop in front of you. When you walk down the corridor to talk to
a colleague, your desktop follows you.
Each floor of the building is treated as a big graphical user
interface. A mobile desktop application registers a space around
each display, and around each person. When a person space becomes
contained by a display space, the person's desktop comes up on the
screen.
In HP's Cooltown, people, places and things are all "citizens of
the Web". They are connected to the Web, have Web facing
representations, and can offer and participate in services on the
Web, providing systematic linkages between the Web and real world
entities.
As you enter a Cooltown conference room, you collect the room's
URL on your PDA or cellphone, enabling you to control printers or
digital whiteboards. You don't need to access a global network to
use such local services, although the room's "Place Manager" acts
as a portal to the wider web if you need it.
You leave Cooltown on a Web Bus, equipped with both intra-bus
and Internetwireless connectivity. Passengers pick up its URL and
use its services via a Web browser. The bus services can be
"location-aware": the computer contains a global position sensor. A
would-be passenger waiting at a bus stop can pick up the URL of the
bus, and the bus can ring them up and tell them where it is, and
how long it's going to be.
That Web bus could stand as a metaphor for pervasive computing.
From the industry's point of view, it represents the opportunity it
mustn't miss.
But from the customer's point of view, a closer analogy would be
with our deregulated bus service, with vehicles of all shapes and
sizes, in dozens of confusing liveries, taking risks with their
passengers' safety to overtake or force rivals off the road,
charging different fares to get to the same destinations by
different routes - and all coming along at once.
Filtering
- Filtering reduces connection time and costs by discarding data
devices are incapable of using, or users unwilling to wait or pay
for, and converting formats to make images smaller
- Data and applications can be cached, "pre-fetching" Web pages
which can be refreshed while connected, then browsed when
disconnected
- Server-based synchronisation can eliminate the need for
handheld devices to run a complex desktop, because the network
maintains the user's data
- Disconnected operations can be controlled by proxies, which
intercept requests and act on them by, for example, batching
requests and adapting content
- Alternatively, intelligent agents can act on the network on the
user's behalf, finding, filtering, personalising and queuing
information, and negotiating for services
The market
According to the McKenna Group, the pervasive computing market
could be worth $120bn in the next five years. IDC predicts 18.9
million handheld PC companions will be shipped worldwide in
2003.
Ovum expects the number of mobile devices to exceed the magic
one billion mark by 2003, with a large proportion technically
capable of mobile e-commerce. If the market fulfils its promise,
Ovum predicts that end-user spend on services will rise to more
than $200bn in 2005.