Digitalwall: 3G Time Comes (3) SMS, Email and MMS

Instead of replacing one another, the three emerge on the stage sequentially.

Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of the Internet, it is nothing strange today for everyone to have more than one email address. The biggest headache for the mass emails we receive everyday is the fact that they are ridden with so many spam mails that those from our friends or business partners are often overwhelmed.

Now that many of us cannot live without email, it seems very natural to be able to receive and send emails through mobile phones. When mobile operators introduced the WAP-based mobile Internet service many years ago, the mobile email service was one of the intended functions.

Yet ironically, few people actually use that function. Of course, the user group of the WAP-based mobile Internet is really a small one - small enough to be ignored when compared with the total population of computer netizens. And even with such a small number of WAP-based mobile Internet users, not all of them use the WAP-based email service.

Some people blame the complicated operating interface of the handset for such a situation, saying it has added difficulty to receiving and sending emails. However, in terms of the "input interface", it is not a sound reason.

Yes, Chinese character input is troublesome. However, when using it to send SMS, many youngsters are able to move their fingers so dexterously that it seems as easy as having lunch. Why, then, are these youngsters reluctant to use their handsets to receive and send emails?

The answer is there as soon as the question is asked. That is, SMS itself is a kind of email or, in a more exaggerated term, SMS is the email service on a mobile phone.

Technical specialists might disagree with that argument, as technical standards for the email service at both the handset end and server end are completely different from those of SMS.

When we leave aside those technical details, we can see that SMS and email are both communication forms carrying texts. They do not require both parties of the communication to be online simultaneously (as with the case of making a telephone call). For handset users, they are highly substitutable to each other. Whichever gets popular first will be the mainstream service.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), SMS gets the upper hand and becomes the mainstream service, which, inevitably, has squeezed the market room for the handset-based email service. As I have mentioned, consumers do not care about technical issues. While about 2/3 of handset users in Taiwan have never accessed the Internet through the mobile phone, and the threshold for handset-based SMS is extremely low, the answer for which application will mature first is immediately clear.

Now that SMS is in the mainstream, it would be both stupid and difficult in terms of marketing practice to urge consumers to replace SMS with the handset-based email service. The question left is: how to achieve the interoperability between the mobile communication network (SMS) and the Internet (email) without changing the way that consumers have got used to?

Thus, consumers would be able to send emails to a handset, which would be converted to SMS. Likewise, a handset user would be able to send SMS to an Internet email address. As a matter of fact, some operators have already introduced such service, which allows the conversion from email to SMS, and sending them to a handset, and vice versa, SMS into email.

The bottleneck, however, is the billing model. A piece of SMS, which contains up to 70 Chinese characters, would cost NTD 3. Who would be willing to pay such an expensive price? Besides, the operation is more complicated than just receiving and sending emails. This is not a problem that can be addressed by means of discounting or promotion. The nature of the billing model of SMS is incompatible with that of the Internet, which has a different cost structure.

To address that issue, there should be a set of new communication standards that integrate both networks on a single platform to enable the interoperability between both services, and allow users to switch their applications painlessly and use the messaging service across both networks (the mobile communication network and the Internet) without caring about whether the receiving end is a mobile phone number or an email address.

The enabler is MMS, which is a hot topic at the present market. It is not an SMS service, because it sends and receives contents through the Internet. It is neither an email service, because, like SMS, its contents can be sent from one handset directly to another.

For consumers without Internet experiences, it works like an SMS service, as it is used in the same way as SMS. The only difference is, in addition to texts, it also allows the transmission of images and music. For consumers with Internet experiences, it is an email service, as the receiver of the recipient could be an email address.

In fact, when receiving or sending MMS, the handset involved is actually connected to the Internet. But is does not matter to consumers. In other words, smart telecom operators do not intend to tell consumers that they are actually accessing the Internet with their mobile phone.

Operators have realized that, to most consumers, the mobile Internet is something too difficult to understand and also a service they hardly feel they need. The messaging service, however, is not.

Throughout the history of the Internet, the email service has been the largest application, indicating that there is a huge demand for the "asynchronous communication" (one that does not require both parties to be present simultaneously).

Interestingly, in Japan, where the mobile Internet is a highly developed service, SMS has only a small group of users. In some operators' price plan, it is a service that charges additional payment and requires the submission of applications to telecom operators. The reason is simple: as born first, the handset-based email service in Japan is more mature than SMS, and therefore has squeezed the market room of the latter.

It seems that the messaging service is the largest application of 3G mobile communication. Or is it?

If you are aware that the SMS income accounts for less than 5% of the total revenue of mobile operators, you might not draw that conclusion. In the next article, I will talk about the real killer application of 3G: the video phone service. (
2003/03/23 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )