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From the desktop to top of Kilimanjaro - the future of mobile technology


Johannesburg, 06 Jun 2002

If you want a good idea of where mobile technology is going in Africa, consider this - today you are able to make a call on your cellphone from the top of Mt Kilimanjaro.

"If you can connect there, you should be able to connect anywhere," says Heinz Stephan, director product and technology at Comztek.

He believes that to understand where mobile technology is headed we first need to see where it came from.

The telephone drove contact ability and, later, the Internet continues to drive connectivity. With the worldwide Web, access to information and communication between widely dispersed individuals emerged from the realm of government and academic institutions into the mainstream.

The proliferation of PCs from the 1980s, coinciding with the increasing pervasiveness of the Internet, drives the need for connectivity. During the latter part of the PC evolution, another revolution occurred in the form of mobile telephony.

Suddenly everybody was contactable, regardless of their geographic location. "While the PC looked after our data connectivity needs, the cellphone looked after our voice requirements."

However, this separation was still a barrier to true anytime, anywhere communication.

The business need of wanting to carry and access information wherever we went led to the emergence of the PDA. It was logical that the PDA and the cellphone would eventually merge since many of their functions overlapped.

Combining the two provided users with the benefits of both in a single device - we were now not only contactable but also connected. In this mobile world, the technology that allows us to connect to such resources as the Internet is mainly GPRS and 3G with a connection speed ranging from 9kbps to 2Mbps. "Mobile technology is unique in that it has the ability to combine both contact ability and connectivity services," says Stephan.

"On the flip side, the wireless network, which relies on technology such as WiFi, provides link speeds ranging from 2Mbps to 108Mbps. The future is obviously the marrying of the two technologies - mobile and wireless - to ultimately provide an always-on, always-connected, transparent roaming environment," Stephan continues.

He says the future is intelligent Internet-enabled mobile devices. Predicted by some to become as prevalent as fixed-line telephones by 2008, intelligent Internet-enabled mobile devices are being driven by five main factors:

* Messaging, mainly MMS
* The need to be contactable at all times
* The need to be connected to the Internet at all times
* The rapid proliferation of mobile applications and the mobile enablement of applications. A good example of this is Mobile Google
* VPN services, particularly for business users

"In the business arena, the benefits of true mobile technology are unquestioned, particularly in the sales and service industries," says Stephan. "Employees must be contactable and at the same time be able to connect to the Internet as well as to corporate data resources.

"This has become a global trend with birth of the nomadic workforce and the need for companies to reduce overheads such as office space and improve productivity. This is further driving the evolution of mobile technology. Economies of scale, increasing demand and decreasing costs will further drive the adoption of a mobile lifestyle and the availability of the technology to achieve it."

Ultimately Stephan sees a meshing of technologies such as WiFi, WiMax and traditional mobile packet transmission technologies such as GPRS and 3G in the not too distant future.

"This will create an interesting technological landscape where mobile technology will seamlessly interact among business, home and Internet environments without the user even noticing the transition - in essence very much the way a cellphone switches between transmitters without the user noticing.

"Mt Kilimanjaro will no longer be the escape from the rat race that many of us believe that it is. We will have to accept it, adapt our lifestyles and business processes and then the world will be better for it," he concludes.

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Editorial contacts

Lesego Ranchu
Citigate SA PR
(011) 253 5600
Heinz Stephan
Westcon
(011) 237 1800