A FUTURE cellphone data service from Britain’s Orange network will not be
accessible in France—despite the fact that Orange was last week acquired
by France Telecom in a £25 billion deal.
Orange confirmed last week that it will not be adopting General Packet Radio
Service (GPRS), a fast Internet delivery format that the rest of the
industry—including Orange’s new parent company—has embraced.
Instead, it is pressing ahead with plans to use a different standard, called
High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD), to increase the speed at which its
users receive WAP pages and e-mails. France Telecom says it has “no plans” to
use HSCSD.
Orange is determined to use HSCSD because its plans for a video cellphone
depend on it. In September 1998, Orange said it would launch a video cellphone
using image-compression technology developed at the University of Strathclyde
(91av, 26 September 1998, p 11). The video needs a
28.8-kilobits-per-second link, which HSCSD achieves by lumping together two
standard cellphone data channels. Orange will also use HSCSD to deliver data at
28.8 kbps to laptops and handheld devices.
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Orange’s promised videophone launch is now six months late, but Hans Snook,
the company’s chief executive, insists that it’s on the way. “The network is all
ready to carry HSCSD,” he says. “We are the only network with the capacity to do
.”
Rivals says HSCSD’s use of two channels is wasteful. The three other British
networks, BT Cellnet, Vodafone and One 2 One, have rejected HSCSD. Instead they
are readying data services that rely on the GPRS format.
GPRS exploits the fact that multimedia devices handle data in bursts, so most
channels in the network are free for at least part of the time. If the data
capacity from several channels is pooled, each device can transmit and receive
bursts at over 100 kbps, while on average tying up the equivalent of only one
channel.
In March, Vodafone demonstrated GPRS at a trade exhibition in Birmingham,
while BT Cellnet announced GPRS roaming trials with AT&T in Britain, the US,
Hong Kong and Taiwan. BT Cellnet is now working with Motorola to launch a GPRS
network for business users on 26 June.
Snook appears unimpressed. “I have yet to see any GPRS devices,” he says. Yet
the French Itineris cellphone network, which is owned by Orange’s parent,
started a GPRS service in May. Itineris says its new service will cover the
whole of France by the end of the year.
Orange’s rivals dismiss HSCSD as a “blind alley”. And the market research
company Ovum warns that confusion between standards poses problems for the
wireless Net as a whole. “There is a significant danger of disappointment and
backlash,” it says.
“If it is a blind alley, we will shed some light,” says Michel Bon, chief
executive of France Telecom. “I agree that with so many acronyms there is room
for misunderstanding.” One answer in the long term, says Snook, may be
dual-standard phones. But these will be expensive.
