Dr Cooper says 3G is not working - and will not work so soon

Dr Martin Cooper, the man behind the first mobile phone call in the US talked to CNET before going to Geneva to participate in this year's ITU Telecom World:

"Q: What is the main point you want to get across when you get to Geneva?
A: I'm going to focus on this holy hype around 3G. The carriers have been promising this stuff for the last five years. But those of us who are engineers have known that the key things are just not deliverable.

Q: What are these key things you're talking about?
A: Multimedia is not deliverable. That's been their magic word. We'll all be doing multimedia. But if you think you can experience the power of the Internet on a 1-inch screen, you've got to be out of your mind.

Q: What makes you say that?
A: The carriers are talking about things like 2-megabits-per-second download rates. It's been a history of trying to squeeze applications into a particular technology. In reality, a cell phone channel has a total of 1.1 megabits per second that can be deliverable. So when you get right down to it, consumers are all sharing that same pipe. But they will be lucky to download at a speed of a couple hundred kilobits--and at a very high cost.

Q: So this maximum speed is too slow for things like video? What else? Is their strategy sound?
A: Cell phone carriers' systems were designed to deliver voice. At the moment, they're competing only on the basis of price, and prices are so low, they aren't recovering their investment. On the data side, they haven't worked out their strategies."

Read more following the link below to CNET.