Newsbite: Telenor's Edge

Telenor's latest advertisement promoting their EDGE offering in the bigger cities of Pakistan.

Mobile Internet will be an high growth sector in Pakistan. Once, arond 1997, SMS was the only 'data thing' the general public could do on the bulky handsets. Today, in just less than a decade, even the Pakistani market is getting its taste of EDGE (left) and even faster CDMA2000 1X (153 kbps/Telecard) and CDMA2000 EVDO.

GPRS gave the first glimpse of Internet on your phone experience to the users. At 20 kbps, that's hardly of any use unless you have good WAP applications to make use of. Nobody is interested in the Wall Gardens of cellular operators anyway.

While moving towards the utlimate UMTS scenario, GSM operators will follow the GSM-GPRS-EDGE-WCDMA route while the CDMA 2000 operators will probably follow the CDMA2000 1x (153 kbps), CDMA2000 1xEV-DO (800 kbps), and CDMA2000 1xEV-DV (2 MB) route.

In between these 'arranged marriages', there are these forth generation disruptive technology heroes of HSDPA and Wimax (Dancom) who promise to 'pluck' the bride (the market and its mindshare) from the GSM and CDMA operators.

Wireless IP - May you live long!