Mobile industry must learn from past mistakes

Mobile services such as SMS and GPRS suffered at first because they were rolled out badly

The mobile phone industry must learn from its mistakes in the rollout of previous technologies if it is to win customers for a new range of services, according to Ericsson. 

Keith Thomas, head of Ericsson's mobile team, insisted that past mobile services such as SMS and GPRS suffered at first because they were rolled out badly. 

"With SMS the take-up was very low before it was integrated across all the different mobile services," he said. "Once it was integrated the take-up increased."

Thomas also maintained that there had to be compatible handsets on the market if upcoming IP Multimedia Subsystem services were to take off.

"We want to avoid the same thing that happened with GPRS, where people were slagging off the vendors at trade shows for not having any GPRS handsets available," he said.

Thomas suggested that the new IP Multimedia Subsystem platform had to be standardised in order for consumers to take up the services.

He admitted that the market was difficult to predict and that services such as Skype had taken telecoms companies by surprise. 

"The market is unpredictable and when we do try and predict it we usually get it wrong to be fair," Thomas said.

"We have to be flexible. The further out you look the more uncertainty there is, but standards and interoperability will help deal with this."