Yau: Business communication, personal correspondence, and entertainment. The high-usage market for voice is the businessman around 40 to 50 years of age, whereas the market for data and content usage are teenagers or young executives. GPRS is targeted at that segment. They like the entertainment and the games offered via GPRS services. That will be a major revenue source.
The wireless application protocol [WAP] services all over the world have not been very successful because they had to go via a modem and, more importantly, it doesn't have the always-on function nor is it packet based. With packet-based services you only pay by volume of content downloaded irrespective of the time spent on the air. But with WAP you pay for every second of air time. Another point is the always-on function. This function means that, for example, while I'm reading some content I get a call, with the always-on function I can take the call and afterwards immediately return to my reading. These services are now available for GPRS, but it is not taking off that rapidly because of the devices. The second generation handsets should be available from vendors like Nokia by end of the second quarter or early in the third quarter this year. Taiwan has the devices, the GPRS infrastructure and the content, so I believe that GPRS will take off as fast as in Japan.
Wang: There is a tremendous variety of services available to a TCC subscriber today. TCC subscribers can buy and sell stocks, check weather, make travel reservations, check their horoscope, play games, etc. As transmission speeds over mobile networks increase and data is delivered in a packet-based always-on format, customers will be able to use existing services and an ever-growing variety of services more economically and at faster speeds. TCC mobile phone customers will have an always-on service to conduct transactions, experience entertainment, find information, or access the Internet with faster speeds and volume-based tariffing.
O'Konek: We're probably going to see two segments generate most of the interest.
The first is going to come from the youth market who as the handset size for GPRS; if it comes down to a reasonable good looking handset we can transport a lot of the gaming and entertainment features off of SMS and off of Fetnet to the GPRS platform. The key is going to be the handsets because the technology will be there -- the speeds will start coming with the four-by-one handsets which will come out later this year. The question is will that handset be attractive to the youth market? If the handset's attractive we think we know enough applications that will begin to drive usage.
The other side is purely business related and we have our enterprise solutions division that we launched this year. We signed 120 contracts with the Fortune 2000 companies in Taiwan, using GPRS for these companies to access their companies' Intranets. The first and easiest thing to do is put a GPRS modem into a laptop so you don't have to reconfigure applications at all. Whether it's sales force automation or individuals wanting to do banking and stock trading we think that [the potential of GPRS] is unlimited.
So you're not going to grow your GPRS by mass market because it's a migration, the products have to be attractive, the applications have to be intrinsically simple to use ... and then it will take on a life of its own.
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