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The Future of Mobile Phones

There has been a rapid growth in the UK mobile phone industry. Once considered a product for the your rich businessman is now a commodity to all generations, business people and students.

There are now more mobile phones than households in the UK and numbers are still growing fast.

We are approaching the time when it will be considered unusual not to have a mobile phone. Projections suggest that the majority of voice calls will be made by mobile-mobile within a few years, resulting in landlines mostly used for transferring data.

New Costs

All this depends on pricing, of course. HSCSD was booming on Orange, then they changed the pricing structure. The cost of calling a mobile phone from a fixed phone is prohibitive to many people. A marketing decision to alter charges can have a big effect on how services are used.

SMS text messaging has become the communication medium of choice for many in their teens and twenties, despite the very high cost, and is the only really new form of communication to have emerged in decades.

New Services

As price competition forces margins down, the mobile networks are moving to offer additional services to increase revenue and customer commitment.

Internet access, information by SMS and WAP and services such as Orange's Wildfire are applications for existing technology, but provide new services. We have HSCSD and GPRS (giving faster data speeds), though priced rather too high for widespread use. Just arriving are mobile videophones, built in PDAs and email clients, and probably much more than that, following from 3G networks being launched.

New Technologies

Mobile phones are evolving at a rapid pace and new handset models are being released everyday and have a life span of a few months before becoming obsolete due to further developments. The network technologies are developing just as fast. The next generation of mobile phone systems has reached the point where the five UK licenses for the "third generation" (3G) frequencies have fetched over £20,000,000,000 for a 20 year allocation. This new Universal Mobile Telecommunications System network will offer much faster data access, more capacity and more. It is likely that it will supplant some of what we have taken as the work of fixed-line phones, as well as mobile phones. However, the huge price paid for the licenses suggests that these facilities won't come cheap!