Trip Report: Convergence Oceania '05

Today I attended Convergence Oceania '05, an expo run by the Wireless Forum of New Zealand. It was an expo hall in the shiny Sky City building with about thirty companies exhibiting. I avoided the ruggedized handsets vendors (a surprisingly large number were there) and went for the companies selling gizmos or offering mobile/location services It was interesting, my first glimpse into the market down here in New Zealand.

Advanced Portable Technologies

There were a few companies selling clunky ugly handhelds for reading sheep tags or warehouse barcodes or what have you, but that didn't interest me. I liked the gadgets, stuff I could hack with. These guys had some good stuff with CDMA, GPS, and so on. The EMII-800 seems their superstar: all the America's Cup yachts had one. Earthquake monitoring stations have them. Many thousands of New Zealand dairy farms are getting them, one on every milk vat machine in the country eventually. You can talk to these gizmos in three ways: (1) on all the time through CDMA, (2) cron-style scheduled reporting in through CDMA, (3) you SMS them and they connect in to be interrogated.

Their Hantel gizmo is CDMA phone with a connection to a regular handset: turn a mobile into a land-line, basically. One box per active call, so they can't do trunking themselves--it's not VoIP, it's just a CDMA mobile voice call. Nobody seems to be thinking about VoIP over NZ wireless, probably because of the exhorbitant gouge that the operators are taking from the customer.

RT Wireless

Sell USB devices ("Minimax") that do voice, data, and SMS. Work in NZ-Au-India only, no US. NZ$495. Does EVDO. There's a Mac driver. I'm in love.

Their products are Telecom only (Telecom's network is CDMA, Vodafone's is GSM--yes, there are only two mobile phone choices in New Zealand).

Another product: MM5500 Pro: ADSL over EVDO. 3Mb, ethernet out. Unpriced at the mo, but probably about NZ$600.

TerraLink

I had a good conversation with the managing director, Mike Donald, after his talk. Their big business locally is data, and they're a little like Navteq in that they sell their improved version of the free LINZ data. They have a free product, Fisheye. They want to sell their improved data to police, emergency, etc. who need the accuracy.

They talk up the accuracy of their data: 50% of the time, they say, you'll get a more accurate result with TerraLink's data than the competition's (the other 50% you'll get the same result). They have 30k more roads than official source, their improvements coming from driving the roads and lots of satellite imagery. They have 30k more address points than official sources. They geocode to actual building location instead of just middle of boundary points, important for flats and big properties--they can get you to the driveway and not just to the centroid.

They're part of the LISI cluster (Land Information Systems International) of companies in NZ. They work mainly with real estate (cadastral) databases and companies in this group, it seemed to me. (A lot of GIS bread and butter is real estate--hugely lucrative industry for almost everyone it touches, except the poor buggers like me who are selling their houses in the early stages of a real estate bust not that I'm bitter).

They also want to expand overseas where they don't have this kind of data privilege. So they're looking to develop software and services that they can take overseas.

SimWorks

Two products based around mobile and security. First is backup onto which they've bolted an awkward social networking system (invite others to add you to their address book, exchange details) fuelled by corporate sales (because no consumer in their right mind would sign up for it). They're hoping to get operator bundling for this.

Other product is mobile antivirus for Symbian, one of only two companies offering such a beast. S60 and UIQ phones. Very traditional products (semi-buttocked social networking possibly excepted) and so didn't interest me that much.

Kalooma

Lot of 802.11 security and management products, an importer and distributor. They work with HP and other integrators--don't sell straight to consumers. They specialize in wireless crypto and user management. Their AirFortress is a product behind "the largest wireless network in the world", Iraq.

Higher education is apparently pushing the wireless envelope here in New Zealand. St Kentigern College is one of the biggest wifi installations in NZ: 70 APs, 1700 users, enterprise and school. Wifi is spreading to enterprise as kids enter the workforce and as CEOs get it at home and say "we could save a ton on cabling when we move employees around".

McDonalds is also a huge wireless consumer. All their POS systems (and some kind of "queue-buster" that I didn't ask what it meant) is all wireless. Not offered to customers yet (see below under Telecom). All corporate offices all wireless.

Telecom Wireless Hotspots

Telecom want to become the T-Mobile of New Zealand when it comes to wireless hotspots. They're dropping APs into businesses with a steep charging model behind them. Each box is powered by a 2M synchronous DSL (only mention of synchronous I could find--everywhere else you're gasping to get 128k upstream). Three plans at the moment:

• free if you're an xtra customer, but only until the end of the year. Possibly it'll be bundled with your broadband bandwidth cap (e.g., use 500k on wifi, that counts toward your 2G monthly limit).
• prepaid cards ($9.95 per hour!)
• credit cards ($9.95 per hour!)

Did I mention it's $9.95 per hour?! Bloody hell! Apparently the infrastructure whose costs they're recouping is entirely built out of fibre spun from the eyelashes of Indonesian princesses and each packet is transmitted in a 24 karat solid gold envelope.

I ranted to the "Wifi Product Innovation Manager" from Telecom about the idiocy of metered access, and he tried to assuage me by saying that the top dog at Telecom had said this morning that convergence meant that such things would disappear. Riiight. Show me someone holding their breath for convergence and three minutes later I'll show you a dead fool. Telcos are all about metering, trying to screw every last penny out. They meter where the competition has no flat rate plan, and in NZ the mobile company is the landline company is the DSL company. Competition? What's that? They own the last mile. They meter DSL, they meter mobile networking, they meter their 802.11 hotspots. If they could strap a counter to your lungs and bill you for each breath you take while talking on the phone, the buggers would do that too. Ok, deep (unmetered) breaths, Nat. Time to let this go and move on.

Initial locations: Starbucks, McDonalds, hotel chains, airports. Roaming relationship with iPass. Telecom's funding the placement of these initial ones: they'll pay for the line, the box, everything. You just offer it as a service to your customers.

I can't help feeling there's some kind of opportunity here, partnering with a DSL provider to offer free unmetered roaming to customers of the DSL provider and much cheaper access to everyone else. Everyone's getting laptops with wifi cards, so the client-side infrastructure is in place. There's possibly a 1998 business model, too: give away the wifi but 0wnz0r the users. Where's Battelle and his joints after midnight when I need them?

Vodafone

Vodafone are The Other New Zealand Mobile Operator, but were the first to introduce 3G. They had two new phones on display, the K-JAM and the Jazjar. They look a bit like they're straight from China: not entirely aesthetically pleasing. The K-JAM is a Sidekick knockoff without the character that made you want to have a Sidekick. They both ran Windows CE 5. The Jazjar had a touch-sensitive screen and a more computery form factor, but neither made me rush out to buy them. The lack of rushing wasn't helped by the price tag: about NZ$1500 for the Jazjar. With a 36 month plan (36 months! That's how long banks advertise home loans for! Do you want your phone plan to end when your mortgage is repaid?!) you can get that down to $799 (before tax). The concept of operator-subsidised handsets has a long way to go here.

I asked about the Vodafone Mobile Connect, which is their 3G offering. NZ$79/mo for 250M. Compare US$60/mo flat rate plans from Sprint and Verizon in the US. I go through 250M in email in a week, easily. New Zealand data plans aren't ready for me yet :-)

Lucent

In the sessions there was a Brit from Lucent talked about "blended services" which sounded an awful lot like mashups. He began by talking about existing silo services (messaging, e-mail, web, voice, location) and how users want an integrated ("blended") experience. He went so far as to say "you can take any two of these, blend them, and get an application that users want"--has he been reading the Programmable Web Mashup Matrix?

But then he diverged from the mashup line. In his world, Lucent creates applications that the operators get to resell to users. They're selling the infrastructure to operators to offer these services, and the Lucent guy spoke in the evil operator language of mobile phone operators, treating users like infinitely milkable cash cows to be herded and drained. Your humble author was spewing. These mashups were intended to be apps created by Lucent that the mobile operators could resell--no mention was made that if the platform were actually open, ISVs would rush to offer these blended services like they have on the web.