Cellphone users are mostly all talk

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 15 December 2004 17:00

IT Industry - Development

One of the most popular new cellphones in the US this holiday season is the Razr, an ultrathin model that stresses style over services. While that’s good news for Motorola, which makes the Razr, it’s bad news for wireless carriers that are spending billions to build high-speed networks in the hopes that their customers will do more than just talk.

The New York Times reports (13 Dec.) that carriers like Cingular Wireless and Verizon are hoping that faster speeds will entice customers to use more data services – trading photos, downloading songs and surfing the internet on their handsets.

Such services, reports the NYT, can add more than $US10 a month to subscribers’ bills and help defray the cost of extra voice minutes that carriers are offering customers to keep them from jumping to competitors. The paper says, however, that users in the US continue to think of a cellphone as a device for talking, not text messaging. Phones like the Razr and other popular models from Nokia focus on slim good looks and less on function like web browsing and email, although the handsets are capable of handling data services.

The NYT says data services account for only 4.7 per cent of the revenue of American carriers, up about two-thirds from 2003, and one carrier, Verizon Wireless has just 70,000 of its 42 million subscribers signed up for its high-speed data services.