Mobile phone company O2 last week fleshed out its
timetable to make the mobile phone a broader communications hub,
embracing mobile TV, peer-to-peer multimedia and high-speed
3G.
Speaking at the annual Regent Conference for heads of IT supply
companies, Mike Short, O2’s vice-president of R&D, said that
mobile broadcast TV trials for handheld devices would start this
May in Oxford. O2 will work with NTL Broadcast, Nokia and other
content providers on developing 16 TV channels.
He also said that the Isle of Man high-speed downlink packet
access (HSDPA) commercial network, which delivers better than
1Mbps, would go live in the second half of this year, with wider
deployment planned for 2006.
In the middle of this year, O2 will also be trialling
peer-to-peer multimedia, fusing elements of the IP and mobile
worlds, and moving to live commercial services by the end of the
year.
For IP and mobile convergence, Short promised more filters and
barriers to allay concerns over unsuitable content, and to
introduce itemised billing.
Speaking at the concurrent Communications Management Association
conference of telecom users, mobile specialist Miles Saltiel of the
Adam Smith Institute expressed deep concern about opaque mobile
pricing.
"Even I have difficulty making intelligent decisions over
prices," he said, adding that a comparison of roaming costs at the
Athens Olympic Games revealed that the highest price was three
times that of the lowest.
"Ofcom should enforce a transparent pricing regime," he said,
"and ensure that mobile companies advertise their tariffs according
to a standard template, such as APR for finance, or standard
mileages for cars. Ofcom should also take a lead and enforce
low-cost roaming - the default selection should be the network of
the least cost."