Q: Fortunes have been spent on third generation mobile licenses in the UK. Just how viable is the market for non-voice mobile services? What is the WAP experience to date?

A: In Western Europe, ADSL can reach around 80% of the current ISDN/POTS subscribers if the downstream bandwidth is limited to 2Mbit/s. With a maximum DS bandwidth (8-9 Mbit/s) the ADSL penetration will be less than 50% mainly due to the long local loop distances and thin copper pairs in the primary twisted pair access network.

The simple plan from an operators perspective will be phase 1 where they deploy as much ADSL equipment as possible within the limitations of their legacy network. When higher penetration and higher bandwidths are required, the operator will initiate phase 2 and deploy next-generation VSDL headend equipment in street side cabinets placed maximum 1.5 km from the Farthest subscriber. This scenario can support up to 12-13 Mbit/s in a symmetric configuration.

Especially in the largest German cities, the local loop is no longer than 1 km which is why DTAG in specific areas can launch phase two in parallel with phase 1.

Before launching phase 2, the operators will wait until interesting broadband services and content provisioning create a subscriber pull for more bandwidth. In the first two to three years, 2Mbit/s will be enough for most residential and SOHO subscribers.

The general information about the length of the local loop with 35 operators in Western Europe is the following:
     0km-3km 62%
     3km-6km 25%
     6m-beyond 13%

The problem with this data is that each operator has the same statistical weight, example: DTAGs network represent the same weight as Tele Danmarks even though DTAGs network is around 16 time larger.

(Frank Fabricius, Gartner analyst)

Q: Fortunes have been spent on third generation mobile licenses in the UK. Just how viable is the market for non-voice mobile services? What is the WAP experience to date?

A: Initial WAP growth in the UK has been disappointing but not surprising given the lack of meaningful applications and poor range of available products.

As new and far more compelling products become available, Gartner expects to see a significant growth in shipments of WAP capable terminals - particularly in the fourth quarter. However, we further believe that only a limited subset of users will activate and regularly use the WAP service. The balance will either not activate the service or will activate the service but only use it on an occasional basis.

In the UK cumulative WAP shipments were well over 800,000 units by the end of June 2000, but only some 300,000 of these were actually using the WAP service.

BTCellnet currently has a clear lead in the mobile Internet space - but this will have been achieved at considerable initial cost. It maybe sometime before pay-off for this early lead is realised, but given the strategic importance of non-voice services the remaining operators should not be complacent.

(Phoebe Leet, Gartner analyst)

Q: A large multinational company is approaching the end of its current WAN contract for international Frame Relay services. Its WAN is used to support a wide range of applications from E-mail and WEB surfing to legacy transaction applications and ERP software. They have heard about new IP services, based on MPLS and would like to know if their proposal for a new WAN should demand this technology or still be based on Frame Relay.

A: Gartner predicts that MPLS services, which use "labels" on IP packets to segment a shared IP network between multiple entities and can deliver multiple classes of service, will become the dominant WAN technology for enterprise WANs within five years. However at present very few operators have MPLS networks in service and those that do have few nodes in service. In addition MPLS is a complex new networking technique and although the majority of network equipment vendors plan to offer it only one is currently shipping products. Gartner therefore recommends that users should not deploy MPLS for mission critical backbones before the second half of 2001 and that even then they should seek reference sites. The other protection enterprises should employ is to negotiate strong service level agreements (SLAs) with meaningful penalties.

Gartner recommends that provided an appropriate set of SLAs is in place, the best course of action is to issue an RFP which is technology neutral and accept both Frame Relay and MPLS responses based on their price/SLA merits

(Neil Rickard, Analyst)