A History of Digital Media by Gabriele Balbi Paolo Magaudda

Author:Gabriele Balbi,Paolo Magaudda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

As mentioned, what is today considered the essence of 3G—surfing the internet on mobile phones—was not even on the cards initially. The concept of a third-generation network emerged in the ITU fold in 1992 when 2G was still at its inception. 3G was envisaged as having two main functions, which have still not come to fruition: first, setting up a standard intended to be adopted the world over and to lead to universal roaming and, second, giving individual users access to a single, personal number for their mobile phones, landlines and work numbers with the so-called PCS (Green & Haddon, 2009, pp. 22–23). The concept of potentially integrating mobile telecommunications and internet was not even mooted because the latter was not then yet popular and not seen as likely to be a key media in the future.

Many countries only began allocating airwaves for 3G from 1999 to 2001, assigning frequencies and concessions to private companies. The first services were launched in Japan and South Korea, which were once again in the noughties, together with Italy, the quickest to adopt the new standard (Srivastava, 2008, p. 20). Corporate history provides useful information for an evaluation of the “whos” and “hows” of this process. It was, in particular, Hong Kong-based company Hutchison Whampoa, better known in various countries simply as “3”, that adopted an aggressive license acquisition policy especially in Europe and some Pacific Rim countries. Hutchison Whampoa’s policy was also dictated by the fact that, unlike its competitors, it had no privately owned 2G network or interest in defending the status quo and exploiting existing structures and thus invested strongly in 3G (Goggin, 2011, chap. 2). This is a further example of the innovator’s dilemma referred to in Chapter 2 with reference to computers. In telecommunications, too, in fact, companies that invest to the greatest extent in launching new technologies—and especially in network creation—are then reluctant to invest additional sums, fearing that old and new infrastructures could be in competition. Furthermore, in the early years of its market presence, even Hutchison Whampoa did not view mobile internet as the 3G’s killer application but concentrated on promoting video calling (with limited success as had already, in fact, been the case with landline video phones, see Lipartito, 2003) and other services such as mobile TV (see Chapter 5).

Mobile telephones and the internet started to converge properly in the second half of the noughties. At that time, a base infrastructure that could support the exchange of huge quantities of data had developed and the Web had become a mass phenomenon, which was central to the daily lives of billions of people. The third key towards the convergence was the popular ization of new devices (the so-called smartphones) that made internet access the fulcrum of mobile telecommunications. Smartphones are radically different from first generation mobile phones and are more like computers than telephones and it is thus not surprising that, like Kodak in the history of photography (Chapter 5), traditional companies producing mobile phones 1.0 were not able to maintain their dominance on the mobile handset market.

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