Dan rants: What wireless needs

Having played with the OmniSky Minstrel for the Palm for several months and the cellphone for a few days, I feel qualified to make some ridiculous pronouncements which everyone who's even carried a pager within the past few decades will undoubtedly think are obvious.

Radio is inherently a broadcast medium. The spectrum auctions happening today, while I'm typing this, are going to be used by wireless providers to relieve existing congestion. Giving customers services without further loading those networks seems to be a good idea.

It's been a while since I've looked at the protocols put on the antenna, but back in '91 or '92 the cheap POCSAG chipset from Philips was able to detect two IDs in the message stream, with the thought that you'd put news or similar on the second.

The OpenTV application framework for set top boxes is built around the idea that each satellite channel has twice the bandwidth necessary for a full signal, so use the second half to send ancillary data and the applications to use it. Thus a baseball game might be sending a few quarter screen alternate camera views, stats for the teams and a bio for the current batter, and an app that can let the user display these in a few different ways.

The recent Nielsen Norman Group WAP study listed latency as a prime user complaint. But the study listed two types of data the users ended up looking for (quote):

(from page 6 of the PDF).

In both of these scenarios the server-to-user data is geographically centric, but is something that lots of people are interested in. Many wireless applications are intent on knowing where the user is. Who cares? We know where the cell tower is, and we can add the RAM to the phones to cache information, why isn't each tower broadcasting local weather, maps, traffic, restaraunts, and maybe nearby airport flight info? Tell the phone you're interested in sports and airline conditions and let it filter from a huge amount

Think Tivo in 160 byte chunks.

I think the killer phone, and maybe even PDA add-on, app will be a filtering environment which lets the user cache selected bits of a huge broadcast stream, link between those bits, and have a small web-like browsing environment for the few situations which aren't covered by that (like changing that airline reservation now that you know the flight's been canceled).

And good filtering will be useful when BlueTooth spam starts proliferating.

(you can comment on this rant )


Tuesday, December 12th, 2000 danlyke@flutterby.com