Surfing by cellphone may require patience

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Consumers looking forward to browsing the web on their cellphones are likely to be sorely disappointed when the so-called 2.5G mobile networks finally arrive this year.

Telecom and Vodafone have both said their services will initially run at speeds that are significantly slower than ordinary dial-up modems.

Vodafone's 2.5G service is based on GPRS (General Packet Radio Services), an enhancement to its existing mobile phone network that has been designed to support data packets.

Hopes that GPRS would be fast enough for web browsing or multimedia applications have been dashed by Vodafone trials that have shown the system will deliver data transfer speeds of around 20 kbps.

"It's about half what you would get out of your home connection," general business manager Todd McLeay said.

Vodafone was unable to confirm yesterday whether the disappointing performance was caused by concerns over radiation emissions exceeding safety standards when the system was run at higher speeds.

Last year the British science magazine New Scientist reported that Motorola had been forced to doctor its GPRS phones to operate at less than a quarter of their capacity to avoid overheating and radiation emission problems.

But performance is not the only issue hampering Vodafone's implementation of GPRS. The system has been running on the company's network since late last year, but a shortage of handsets has meant that its use to date has been limited to developers and a small number of trial customers.

Mr McLeay said he expected the service would be "publicly launched" in April or May, subject to the availability of phones. So far, Motorola had been been the only company able to supply GPRS handsets, and then only in small quantities.

"If we had the phones we would be able to launch it fully," he said.

Meanwhile, Telecom's rival CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) network will deliver only a 14.4 kbps data speed when it is launched, on a date yet to be announced but around mid-year.

Telecom spokesman Glen Sowry said the service would be upgraded a few months after it was launched to the CDMA 1X standard.

In theory, CDMA 1X supports speeds of 144 kbps, but in practice the speed achieved will depend on traffic levels.

"It's a bit like a dial-up [connection] which achieves 56 kbps under ideal conditions, but there will be occasions when there are a number of users trying to download data from the same channel."

Mr Sowry was unable to say how much the service would be degraded when users browsed popular sites, but he said trials were being conducted to find out what speed customers could expect.

Telecom's two-phase launch of CDMA seems to have been forced upon the carrier by handset shortages similar to those facing Vodafone.

Mr Sowry said manufacturers around the world were now concentrating on CDMA handsets rather than CDMA 1X, and Telecom "thought it was best to wait until CDMA 1X handsets were freely available."

He said the handsets for each service were incompatible with each other.

This meant that CDMA users who wished to upgrade to CDMA 1X would have to replace their phones.

"That will be a choice that customers have to make."

Mr Sowry said Telecom was still working through the various permutations and would be able to present the options to its customers with much greater clarity closer to the launch.

He was unaware of any concerns that radiation emission levels might restrict CDMA speeds.