Nothing annoys me more than over-selling technology and no one is more responsible for this than the mobile phone operators.
Here they are trying to sell gaming, MP3s and online video to us when they still struggle to handle plain old telephone calls.
In some cases, such as Vodaphone (who own 45% of Verizon at present) these companies are seeing their average revenue per user decline recently and only the ridiculous charges made for SMS messaging has worked in terms of added value services.
I often make the argument that TV over IP content is currently a trade off between availability and quality, but also true is that fact that, as soon as they start paying, viewers become much, much more demanding. I loose data connectivity on my Orange phone for hours at a time (compounded by the fact that my mobile uses the utterly useless Windows Mobile 5 operating system that demands reboots every few hours due to rottern memory management).
Perhaps DVB-H or DMB (ah, yes, another set of competing 'standards') will bring a solution (they work by downloading large amounts of data in bursts to a cache on your phone, getting over the problem of handover during roaming, ie the fact that your phone stops receiving data reliably if you're moving.
Having a phone and trying to access rich media services on the phone today is a bit like having a 28.8 Mbps modem back in the day...
Here they are trying to sell gaming, MP3s and online video to us when they still struggle to handle plain old telephone calls.
In some cases, such as Vodaphone (who own 45% of Verizon at present) these companies are seeing their average revenue per user decline recently and only the ridiculous charges made for SMS messaging has worked in terms of added value services.
I often make the argument that TV over IP content is currently a trade off between availability and quality, but also true is that fact that, as soon as they start paying, viewers become much, much more demanding. I loose data connectivity on my Orange phone for hours at a time (compounded by the fact that my mobile uses the utterly useless Windows Mobile 5 operating system that demands reboots every few hours due to rottern memory management).
Perhaps DVB-H or DMB (ah, yes, another set of competing 'standards') will bring a solution (they work by downloading large amounts of data in bursts to a cache on your phone, getting over the problem of handover during roaming, ie the fact that your phone stops receiving data reliably if you're moving.
Having a phone and trying to access rich media services on the phone today is a bit like having a 28.8 Mbps modem back in the day...
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