New Toy Hits Mobile Market
The Age
Tuesday July 11, 2000
A Melbourne-based company has claimed a world first in mobile phone technology, launching a system that allows both mobile calls and cheaper local calls to be made from the same handset.
The "local zone" phone system, to be offered to customers around Australia, could intensify competition in the already hotly contested mobile market.
The system has been developed by Orange of Australia, formerly Hutchison Telecommunications, in collaboration with the Korean electronics giant Samsung.
The technology allows a mobile handset to be used in a home or any other designated ``local zone", with calls charged at cheaper wired-line rates. More expensive mobile rates are charged only when the user leaves the local area.
``On the road you will pay mobile rates, but the network will know when you reach your local zone and bill you as if you were using a fixed phone - 20 cents per untimed local call, and cheap wire-line STD and international rates," said Melina Reed of Orange.
``We don't need a black box; the network will know where the handset is positioned."
Its promoters say all phone customers will eventually have just one personal number, accessible wherever they happen to be.
Orange has invested $500million in the past year building a CDMA (code division multiple access) mobile phone network covering the greater metropolitan areas of Melbourne and Sydney.
Outside those areas, Orange subscribers will be able to use Telstra's national CDMA network, built principally to replace analogue phones in regional and rural areas.
``We are targeting a demand that is developing here for second and third telephone lines," said Tim Roberts-Thomson, chief executive and co-founder of Orange in Australia.
``It's being driven by the increasing use of the Internet, which ties up the wired-line into a house, but there is a demand also from home offices, shared accommodation, and adult children - all situations where more than one phone is needed in a household."
The two CDMA networks now set up in Australia by Telstra and Orange run in parallel to the much larger and more commonly used GSM systems operated by Telstra, Cable and Wireless Optus and Vodafone.
The three also resell time on their networks to about 40 service providers around the country, such as AAPT, One.tel and Primus. Orange, for example, is a reseller of Optus GSM services.
In GSM mobile services, Telstra holds the lion's share with about 45per cent of subscribers. Cable and Wireless Optus has an estimated 30 per cent market share and Vodafone is third with about 25 per cent. Market share figures vary according to methods of computing them.
Vodafone has been increasing its market share lately through pre-paid mobile phone cards now popular with the growing teenage market.
Optus recently also introduced pre-paid cards, adding to the fury of the competition in the mobile phone market.
More than six million Australians now carry digital mobile phones, but analysts believe we are fast reaching a stage when, as in European countries such as Finland and Sweden, personal phones outnumber fixed line installations.
Mobile telephony, with always-on Internet access, will come to dominate telecommunications systems, analysts say.
© 2000 The Age
