Can services successful in one country gain traction in another?

I found this article interesting. It reminds me also of the Mobile Television services that have been successful in Korea and iMode, which was successful in Japan. Text messaging is another example of a technology that was successful in Europe but was slow to take off in the US (it has done so now -- ask any teen or young adult in the US).

These are the latest examples of technologies that have been successul in one country that may or may not translate to successful services in other countries. It is clear that cultural values are a piece of this, but so are living arrangements, communting arrangements, etc.

4G Standards

I found this article in BusinessWeek interesting. The article describes the upcoming technology battle between Qualcom's UMB, GSM-based LTE, and next generation WiMAX for dominance in the 4G environment. One of the interesting things to me is that apparently Verizon Wireless, a CDMA-based carrier, is considering changing its technology to LTE. To me, this makes sense given that it is partly owned by Vodafone, and that its target market is more upscale and is therefore more likely to travel internationally. I am surprised that it has taken this long, and that they haven't followed Korean carriers in moving to HSDPA for the high end. Sprint, of course, has already declared WiMAX as their next generation standard. This seems to leave Qualcomm with few major backers. Still, this battle is far from over, it seems ...

Update (2007-11-8): I came across this item that is relevant to this topic. Does this change your sense of where this is going?

US Broadband

There are no shortage of articles like this one in the Washington Post. The theme of these articles compares the state of broadband in the US to Japan and South Korea, where access speeds and prices are better. Quoting the article:

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States -- and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world's fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country -- as well as in South Korea and much of Europe -- is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

The reason for this is given to be (again, quoting the article):

Japan has surged ahead of the United States on the wings of better wire and more aggressive government regulation, industry analysts say.

The copper wire used to hook up Japanese homes is newer and runs in shorter loops to telephone exchanges than in the United States. This is partly a matter of geography and demographics: Japan is relatively small, highly urbanized and densely populated. But better wire is also a legacy of American bombs, which razed much of urban Japan during World War II and led to a wholesale rewiring of the country.

In 2000, the Japanese government seized its advantage in wire. In sharp contrast to the Bush administration over the same time period, regulators here compelled big phone companies to open up wires to upstart Internet providers.

In short order, broadband exploded. At first, it used the same DSL technology that exists in the United States. But because of the better, shorter wire in Japan, DSL service here is much faster. Ten to 20 times as fast, according to Pepper, one of the world's leading experts on broadband infrastructure.

Indeed, DSL in Japan is often five to 10 times as fast as what is widely offered by U.S. cable providers, generally viewed as the fastest American carriers. (Cable has not been much of a player in Japan.)

Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan's largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT launched a nationwide build-out of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete.

This article (as do others of its kind) raise a number of questions that are interesting to consider:

• Can you really compare developments in Japan and South Korea to the US?


• The article mentions that the developments in Japan and South Korea are the result of government subsidies. Is this efficient?


• The article discusses local loop unbundling as one of the supporting policies. These policies have been in place in the US since the mid-1990s, although recent decisions have exempted newer infrastructure builds from this policy. Telephone companies have argued that the rates that were set were non-compensatory ... that is, amounted to a subsidy of their competitors because they were below cost. It turns out to be difficult to determine the truth of this. There were many competitors in the US in the late 1990s ... many of these collapsed during the dot-com bust ... was that due to poor business decisions or changes in the rates charged by telephone companies?


• Does the US need a different broadband policy? What should it be? There are many opinions on this (see, for example DACA on the one hand and this on the other, though there are many other proposals as well)

Mobile television

This item on Om Malik's blog is interesting, especially in light of the recent EU decision. We appear to be heading into a fragmented technology marketplace, with two competing technologies in South Korea, one in Europe, and another which appears to be a winner in the US (see this).

Update (2007-7-26): You might also enjoy this article in BusinessWeek, which discusses this topic in a bit more detail.

Does it matter that there may be several global standards? If so, why do you think so?

EU Endorses Cell-Phone TV Standard

I guess this has been Europe week ... I found this item interesting:

The European Commission on Wednesday endorsed a Nokia-backed mobile TV standard called DVB-H, saying Europe needed to pick one technology over others and promising to look at ways to mandate its use.

Europe's choice of DVB-H, or Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds, was expected. The move will likely prevent rival standards, such as U.S.-based Qualcomm Inc.'s MediaFLO and others developed by Chinese and South Korean manufacturers, from gaining ground in the world's richest market.

South Korea currently has two rival systems for mobile video and is most likely further along than most on this, both in terms of business models, consumer adoption and deployment.

Do you think it is necessary to have a single standard as opposed to allowing for competing standards? What factors other than licensing fees do you think may have played a role in this outcome?