Home » Technology » Wireless Internet » The other side of the force

The other side of the force

© Wai Seto

WAP is the standard of wireless Internet as we know it. Well, on the other side of the world, many people think otherwise. In Japan, the standard of wireless Internet has fallen into one company's hand, DoCoMo NNT. The unprecedented success of the I-Mode technology has stormed Japanese users. We will not know who is right until after a few years. For myself, whatever does the job is a good technology. As we have been talking about WAP for so long, it would be interesting to see why I-Mode can take off in Japan.

The "I" of I-Mode stands for "Information", and by the way DoCoMo, a division of NNT mobile phone company, is translated to "Anywhere". As of April 17th, there are over 6.1 million of I-Mode subscribers in Japan. Each month, there are 450,000 people subscribe the service. Over 5,000 special formatted websites are serving for I-Mode contents. People in Japan are switching to using mobile phone to access the Internet from traditional PC connectivity. There is one good reason for the change, cheaper! By far, the amounts people spend on using I-Mode are much less than regular ISP charges. On the side, this might be one reason that other countries are not so much into wireless Internet. For example, in US, a flat rate ISP can give you unlimited access to the Internet anytime. Rather, a wireless connection charges a person by the minutes or by the bytes... What I would say is... If we want more people to use the services, stop to make every single penny out of the users!!

What can you do with I-Mode? Well, almost everything you need to do on the Internet... You can send and receive e-mail, look up travel information, and latest movie releases. When a person wants to find the nearest train station or the closest restaurant, he/she would just pull out the mobile phone and push a button. Games are also developed for I-Mode. Many big game developers, such as Konami, Nintendo, and Sega, have developed games for I-Mode users. One major advantage of I-Mode is that the connection to the Internet is constant. Yeap, no dial up and no waiting. This makes I-Mode users can receive and send e-mail anytime.

In the technical side, I-Mode is a packet switching technology. What is packet switching? Well, in short, a telephone call is a circuit switching. That means you own a circuit when you are calling, and you keep the connection for your self. Packet switching on the hand is like IP traffic. Many users share the media link. Anyone has the same access right to send a packet. The packet switching allows more users to share the network. One drawback is packet switching cannot provide quality of service. Currently, I-Mode provides 9.6KB. This number sounds low, but it is sufficient for mostly text I-Mode formatted websites. In the near future, DoCoMo is planning to have 3G network, 3rd Generation network. The 3G network can provide from 300K to 2MB.

DoCoMo Phones

The copyright of the article The other side of the force in Wireless Internet is owned by . Permission to republish The other side of the force in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.