Cost 219ter
Proceedings of
Extending Horizons
16th January 2007
Conference organised by COST 219ter
Accessibility to Next Generation Networks
DR JOHN GILL: Welcome back. We now move on to looking at what really WILL happen in practice in the future mobile services. We have an eminent person, Paul Lee, who will get us in the right direction.
PAUL LEE: Thank you very much, John, for that introduction. Also, thank you for the opportunity to speak at this event at this venue. I don’t often get the chance to address such a select audience as this.
I work for Deloitte. I’m head of research for technology media and telecoms at Deloitte. I’ve spent all my time, the last five and a half years, looking at the technology media and telecoms sector, and going to a lot of different trade shows, talking to a lot of different vendors. My previous three jobs were also spent in the technology and telecoms areas.
I would like to refer to one of the comments made earlier by the first speaker, Sir Bert Massie, which I think is a message that the entire technology, telecoms and to a large extent the media industry ought to take into account, which is that accessibility benefits all.
What is definitely the case within the industry is a lack of understanding of the importance of accessibility. Importance of accessibility not just in terms of addressing the disabled or elderly but in terms of addressing the mass markets.
I try out lots of new devices – getting through about six or seven mobile phones, lots of different laptops and websites – all the time for my job. What really strikes me is just how difficult, how unnecessarily difficult, a lot of these are made; how important simplicity is within even the general commercial infrastructure.
Some of you who follow even just the news will know there was a big splash last week about a technology company called Apple, which launched a new product called the iPhone.
It has done very well recently, perceived very positively recently because of a new product which it brought out called an iPod, a device for listening to music. A key reason this product has done very well is because it makes it very easy to listen to music stored in a certain manner. Its competition is not as good at it in making technology easy to use.
I think any form of good user-interface, the way in which you interact with the technology, is very powerful. So you don’t have to have the best technology; you have to have the most accessible technology to have the most successful technology out there. So definitely accessibility is equivalent to commercial success.
Go back through the history of technology and look, for example, at the motorcar. Initially when the motorcar was invented the method of steering was called a tiller – a couple of sticks giving you direction. Moving from the tiller to the steering wheel made the car more accessible to everyone.
Look at the PC. When it first came out it had an operating system called Disc Operating System, or DOS. It was the first product which made a certain William Gates very rich. He became richer when he borrowed an idea from Apple and brought out a graphical user interface, making technology even more accessible to a very, very mass market.
You can look again within mobile technology, which is what I will talk about for the next 25 minutes or so. If you look at whose mobile phones are the most successful, whose mobile phones sell in the largest quantities, it will be those who have the best user-interface.
A certain Finnish company called Nokia ten years ago was number three in the field of mobile phones. Twenty years ago, it was a widespread industrial conglomerate, making everything from televisions to wellington boots and toilet paper, and it decided to focus on mobile phones. It is now number one, making a mobile phone every single second. A key reason for its success, certainly towards the end of the ‘90s, the beginning of this decade, is that it had the easiest-to-use phones.
In terms of commercial success, mobile operators liked Nokia mobile phones. People made more calls and sent more text messages because their phones were easy to use. There is a lot to say about accessibility.
Now, in my presentation, I want to talk about how I think the mobile phone is going to evolve. I’m afraid I will not provide a view which will say that it will turn it into lapel pins or earrings, anything like that. I suppose I’ve been working in this industry for too long. I’m more a sceptic, say, than perhaps what might be called an optimist. I think a lot of focus on the future can be quite naïve.
The one change which is definitely changing, and largely has happened, is the phone call. Initially you had the original form of telephone, a two-piece telephone with a receiver in one hand and a speaker which was held in another hand.
You have the Bakelite traditional phone, which BT and others popularised for many decades. Then you have a mobile phone on the right-hand side. The significance of a mobile phone is that when mobile telephony was brought out, the focus of mobile phones was for making calls outdoors. It is largely what is used to make calls indoors.
I’ve seen recent studies, based on a sample of a few thousand people, that have found that 90% of the calls made are indoors. I think what is very important for this audience to appreciate is that the voice call, the phone call, is going to move steadily and more steadily on to the mobile phone.
So, for accessibility of making a voice call, it is the mobile phone area, the mobile phone industry, which needs to be lobbied, which it needs to be having conversations with.
What I will talk about for the next few minutes involves the mobile phone. Within the mobile sector a lot of the change which is happening and which has happened has focused on the mobile phone. This is what most of you will have as experience with mobile telephony. It is not the network. It will be the phone.
The mobile phone has gone through an intense evolution over the last few decades. From the time that a mobile phone was mobile really only if it was within a car, because it was so damn heavy, to the point in around 2000, when the mobile phone was being used not just for voice but also for other things as well.
There are several examples of phones which are used for email, the BlackBerry being the most popular example of that tupe, and phones used for games and phones which are being used for music.
So the phone has gone through an intense evolution. Initially, when mobile phones were first brought out, they would sell in their millions. Now, 2006 was the first year in which a billion mobile phones were sold. That is a very, very large quantity of mobile phones, with some people – but not the majority, obviously – going through more than one mobile phone a year.
So the mobile phone really is the place where you can have most influence. It is where you can effect most change.
The mobile phone initially, when first brought out, cost a few thousand pounds. Now they are selling for $30. That is the price reduction which this industry has gone through.
In terms of the mobile phone, I think there will be different genres of phone which will be popular and standard over the next ten years. Just to explain how we come to that view, I talk a lot to people within the mobile phone industry and to user-groups, to try to understand what people are looking for within mobile phones.
The first type of phone which is becoming more popular is what I’ve called the information phone. It is a phone which has been used to not just make phone calls but also to deliver information like emails, calendars, calendar information and, to a limited extent, the internet.
Now, a few years ago there was a lot of excitement in the UK, particularly for the Chancellor, because 3G licences were being auctioned. The promise of 3G at that time was that 3G – third generation networks – would be able to carry not just voice calls but multi-media, things like photographs, video, access to websites. I don’t know if many of you have used websites on mobile phones, but, unless you have a very large mobile phone, it tends to be a difficult experience. The phone is physically small, the screen is tiny, and you cannot get very much information on to it.
The most information you can get on to a phone tends to be email. That is the most useful information that you can get on to a mobile phone.
So, when you get some of the larger devices, which is what I’ve been given by my work – it becomes too large to become portable, too large to become useable.
One thing I would note is some of the approaches to the user-interface, particularly the keyboard. There have been two approaches towards keyboard – one of them is having a small gap between the keys, and one where there is no gap between the keys. That can be a fundamental difference in usability, having a small gap between the keys.
What does that mean for the manufacturers? It means a fundamental difference in the take-up and the commercial success of that phone.
One of the most successful manufacturers in the space of information phones is a company called Research in Motion, which makes a phone called the BlackBerry. That has one of the best user-interfaces in the market, giving rise to tremendous commercial success. It does make for a very easy-to-use phone.
In terms of where the mass market is in telephony, one of the big areas which has been growing over the last year and couple of years is what is called the slender phone. I would expect there to be probably 100 million phones sold this year which sell because they are thin. That is what people are looking for. The slender phone was interesting and also important within mobile phone development because it is one of the first phones which didn’t focus on having more functions, applications, buttons or things added to it. It sold and appealed because it was thin.
This is where a lot of the mass market will be, where the prices will be lower over the next few years. There will be competitions between the manufacturers to come out with the thinnest available phone. It may, in turn, have impacts on the keyboard, making the phone less accessible as a result.
Another type of phone which is coming out – I’m not sure of the specific implications for the elderly, for the disabled in this respect – is the music phone. It is a phone which does not just voice but also is specialised for carrying music. There are various different form-factors which are focussed on that.
As for digital cameras, Nokia is now the world’s largest manufacturer of digital cameras, largely because so many of their phones now have cameras within them. Every year, Nokia ships around 200 million phones which are also cameras. The cameras within the phones are becoming more and more powerful in terms of resolution and the ability to capture. More importantly, the memory within the phones is becoming cheaper, hence larger as a result.
As an aide memoir to the day, or even what you have done in the recent past, the phone is becoming a potent means of keeping a diary. I’ve noticed that, as we become more and more scattered and distracted, using a phone to keep a diary of what we have been doing is quite powerful.
To take it to another extent, Microsoft has been doing experiments with some parts of society – basically, those with Alzheimer’s. They found that by taking the digital camera on the person to an extreme extent and taking lots of images every single day, perhaps a few hundred, it has served to redress or averse memory loss within people suffering from Alzheimer’s. There is more information on the research lab site for Cambridge Microsoft.
One thing which is expected to happen over the next few years is the increased use of map technology within phones. I think for the general public, within a few years – the same with having electronic maps within cars makes us forget how to get from A to B within a vehicle – we will forget how to get from A to B by walking because we will be guided by maps with mobile phones. Phones will be specialised for things like maps, going forwards.
Then there is also a category which I’ve called the simple phone. There are some phones which are brought out deliberately to be simple. There is an initiative, or a commercial initiative, by Vodafone which has brought out a range of phones called Vodafone Simply. The specific aim is that they are targeted at the over-40s, who find technology too baffling.
There are a few phones which have been brought out because they are cheap. There is a backlash against some of the new phones which are coming out. They are happy staying with phones which just have a good battery, a simple memory and make calls. That is all they do. That is really where the mass market is.
Right now, in the mobile industry, the real battleground is not the developed world: it is the developing world. It is not going to get its next billion customers from the developed world. It is from the developing world. Places like India, where there are ten million new subscribers every month. Places like China, where there are 400 million subscribers, which is about seven times the number of subscribers in the UK. It is a larger market, that is where they are looking to get the growth.
I think phones like the simple phone, or the cheap phone which has been brought out by Motorola, can have a side benefit. This is true of technology in general. By bringing out a simple phone, they can make mobile telephony accessible to a wider market. There are also simple phones which have been brought out for toddlers or youngsters. Certainly, that kind of approach can also be applied to all parts of society, of all ages.
I just want to talk about some of what I think are the key underlying technologies which will affect the development of the mobile phone. Some of these are processors, digital memory, and power storage.
There is a law or an observation, which Ian referred to, called Moore’s Law. It means that every 18 months the power of a processor more or less doubles, at the same price point. So, in a year’s time, the ability of everything that you have got, any gadget that you have got, becomes that bit more powerful.
Memory is becoming cheaper as well. Power storage is also improving, albeit a little bit slowly. But what that means is that, through things becoming cheaper, through technology becoming cheaper, as technology tends towards zero in price, a lot more applications are enabled.
Now, let’s talk about voice recognition. I first saw it demonstrated at the Paralympic Games in Barcelona, where I was a volunteer in 1992. IBM was using it as a demonstrator for what they could do for the disabled community, for the Paralympic Games. In the press room, they had text-to-speech and speech recognition so that anyone could access the news happening.
What happened out of that is that a lot of that technology then became available commercially and has created a significant market. Now, voice recognition has been a limited market so far. It could become a lot bigger. It is driven by processor speeds and memory. The cheaper the memory becomes, the cheaper that processors become, the more attractive and commercially viable voice recognition becomes. So the basic way in which voice recognition works is that you speak and a computer looks up the speech pattern in a vast database. The cheaper the database is, the quicker, the better speech recognition works. That is one thing to focus on going forwards.
Now, in terms of the evolution of the mobile network, we’ve been through three generations of mobile networks so far. The first was the analogue network, coming out in the 1980s. Then we had the digital network, which came out in the middle of the ‘90s, and there were three big improvements offered by that.
One of them was security, important for members of the Royal Family. Second was in terms of capacity, the fact that you could have tens of millions of users. The third is standardisation, the fact that there were a lot of countries, and now there are over 200 countries, which use the same standard, driving the prices down – over GSM in this case.
Then what came along in 2000 – it launched in this country in 2003 – was the 3G network. The original premise of 3G, because everybody got excited by the internet, was to provide greater voice capacity. We have gone full-circle. If you look at the adverts for 3G from things like 3, they are selling you on how many voices you can have and giving away the video minutes for free.
3G will be used mostly for voice, even though you have distractions like mobile television. I have one of the first portable televisions from Casio. I don’t think that mobile televisions will take off any time in the near future.
The mobile-user, as I’ve alluded to earlier, is also changing. So, in terms of some of the changes that we have gone through, in the beginning of the 1980s there were a few users of mobile telephony. Now we have more SIM cards, the little cards in your mobile phones, than we have users.
The mobile phone has gone from being something that you wanted to use when you were driving and hiking to sort of almost the communications device of choice within the office. Mobile telephony used to be for occasional calls, which were so expensive. If you had nothing else, you would use the mobile phone. Now the majority of calls are going over mobile telephony. It used to be a luxury. Now it is a commodity.
The EU is regulating costs of all different types of calls from roaming to mobile-to-mobile calls. People used to have a single phone. Now, increasingly, people have more than one phone – one for the car, work and home. It used to be expensive, many thousands of dollars. Now it is more or less a free device.
In terms of wireless network technologies, there are lots of different wireless technologies which are out there.
You will hear lots of acronyms being thrown around by the industry, things like HSDPA, Wi-Max etc and if you go to the GSM conference which is held every year in February you will be showered with lots of new acronyms. But the reality is what matters most probably at the moment is 2.5G which is up more or less the network we have had for the last ten or fifteen years that's the most common network in the UK what most voice calls go over and data transmission goes over. 3G is still a minority network and things called WiFi hot spots which have been talked about a lot for the last few years.
WiFi hot spots for example, BT has got WiFi throughout its building and within offices it works very well. In the wider space, in as competitor to 3G commercially if you try and find any profit and loss statements for companies which operate WiFi hot spots you won't have much luck because some WiFi hot spots have never ever been used at all, particularly the ones in petrol stations. And there are things like Wi-Max which provide high speed access to wireless technologies.
And now for many years there's been the discussion over whether wireless and wireless technologies will cancel each other out. In my view wireless and wire technologies so the cables which BT brings to your house and the networks which companies like Vodafone, O2, Orange offer will probably coexist and complement each other for the foreseeable future.
Now in terms of how to influence the evolution, I have put together some thoughts on these, and I would portray them as probably quite naive thoughts as to how you can influence the industry.
I would definitely target those who can make a difference in terms of accessibility it's through the handset manufacturers you need to be focusing on to make sure whatever they bring out is accessible. I also would point out statistics mentioned earlier that accessibility is good for profits, and shareholders and the bottom line, and good for the top line.
Also you can do indirect lobbying via groups like the EU and GSMA the Association of all the GSM operators around the world. And they have already effected significant change for example the $30 handset was an initiative by the GSMA. It's based in London, in Holborn not far away from here, and that is one group you could lobby. They organise the biggest conference for the GSM operators in Barcelona every year. Also lobby the major global operator groups Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom. And also focus on the fact that a message I mentioned earlier, good design, makes good business sense. Ease of use benefits the able-bodied and the disabled, driving usage and hence revenues.
What the operators are looking for now, the industry is looking for, desperately is growth because growth in developed markets has run out they need to grow and still the industry is focused on the youth market. Accidental research can spawn benefits for all sectors of society, text messaging was never intended to be a commercial service, now it generates $150 billion per year, and also it makes mobile telephony more access able for all. Specific design allows the industry to extend its customer base to all parts of society. While there are more SIMs than there are people in the UK and still 20% of the UK who have no mobile telephony and probably a big reason is because I think they find mobile telephony too inaccessible or else they are still under five or four or whatever.
So those are my thoughts and views on how the mobile sector is developing thank you again for the ability, the privilege to address you. Thank you.
DR JOHN GILL: Thank you very much Paul for a very interesting presentation. As we are just a little behind schedule we will move on to Professor Alan Newell. Not sure if I dare know how to introduce such an eminent person from the University of Dundee. If he is up to his normal course he will say all the previous speakers have been talking rubbish! Is that the case, Alan? If you dare follow that one!
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