stedavies.com - communications consultant

The BBC is reporting that mobile phone operators have acknowledged that mobile data speeds need to increase and have plans for several technologies that could potentially do it.

It goes on to say that operators are aiming for phones to have a network response time of 100 milliseconds which is the point where humans stop noticing a delay. Current 2G models that the majority of people use today can’t handle the planned response times but with some tweaking and upgrading, 3G models will be able to.

One technology that is in the pipeline is 3G-LTE (Long Term Evolution) which could give bandwidth speeds of up to 100Mbps. Okay, the laptop I’m writing this post is running on a speed of no where near that but still ample for my needs – surfing, downloading, uploading and streaming.

Think about that for a second and imagine the possibilities and threats it could pose for PR. Before I go on, I must point out that after a little digging around I found that the 3G-LTE isn’t planned on being introduced until 2009 and there are still one or two issues regarding the infrastructure and costs that the network providers will have to overcome.

However, it seems that the major mobile players are up for it as demand for mobile TV and video is increasing. There’s even note saying these speeds could introduce higher VOIP usage among mobile phone users which would be beneficial to mobile operators due to cost savings and the ability to introduce multimedia services. How that part works I don’t know?

So what can PR do to capitalise on this emerging technology? Users will be able to effortlessly stream and download video and audio direct to their phones; there will be an abundance of on-demand TV shows, radio stations, podcasts and video blogs. Users will be networking with one another and seamlessly sending high definition video to each other and to the web. Viral video will spread from mobile to mobile as they do now through email.

In short, what’s happening on the Internet now will happen on mobile phones in the future – adding roughly 1.5 billion extra devices to distribute content to.

Now, I don’t know if I’m unwittingly over-hyping this but there is a lot of potential here and an even greater need to embrace social media, because when (or if) it happens, PR needs to be at the forefront distributing content offline, online and to the mobile web.

UPDATE:

Read this piece in the Technology Guardian on how the consumer will decide the success of mobile TV.