WiMax will lose

Sachio Semmoto, founder of Japanese broadband Internet and wireless company eAccess, said WiMax, a new super high-speed wireless technology, will lose the battle to be the fourth-generation mobile standard of choice, says Reuters India.

Semmoto, a telecoms industry veteran of 35 years, told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Tokyo that a rival technology, known as Long Term Evolution, will win the race for 4G wireless networks because many large operators in developed countries are throwing their weight behind it.

Semmoto, also chairman of eAccess, said code division multiple access technology is also likely to fall by the wayside eventually.

With mobile phones being the technology of choice among lower-income Jamaicans, new research cautions that illiteracy means many are unable to send even an SMS, which threatens usage of the device as an increasingly popular tool for economic activity, reports The Jamaica Obserber.

Dr Hopeton Dunn, director of the Telecommunications Policy & Management Programme at the Mona School of Business at the University of the West Indies Mona, which is sponsored by Digicel, tips handsets as the 'bridging technology' that will introduce lower-income Jamaicans to browsing the Internet, besides offering valuable economic functions.

These include banking and commerce via SMS ranging from selling phone credit to goods and basic subsidiary businesses, including selling phones, accessories and credit and unlocking phones.

Executives from advertising and telecoms groups told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms summit that "mobile advertising was inevitable and would become hard to resist", although it would take time to reach its full potential, says Washington Post.

Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of advertising group Publicis, gave a succinct reason why mobile advertising was on the way: "Because it will be in the interest of the phone companies, consumers and advertisers. So it will be very difficult to resist."

The normal reasons are also given, such as the sheer number of people who will have mobile phones - many of whom won't have access to other digital media - and the usual reasons were also given for its slow uptake, ie, that carriers and the ad industry are taking it slow because they don't want to startle users and have them consider mobile advertising as spam.