SAN FRANCISCO -- Sprint PCS may face an uphill battle to sell its new high-speed Internet services for mobile phones.
The wireless phone company (PCS) will release its next-generation 3G services on Sunday. The services will give customers high-speed Internet access, e-mail and full-color digital photos on their mobile phones. The company is promoting the release of the services as if it were a watershed event that will stimulate the industry and the economy.
However, Sprint's competitors have been selling similar services. And their customers have given them a lukewarm response.
"The adoption rate is not what we expected it to be," said Ritch Blasi, spokesman for AT&T Wireless.
Blasi said that AT&T, which runs a next-generation system that is slightly slower than Sprint's but is based on the world's dominant wireless technology -- Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM -- has had a couple of marketing challenges. One is undoing the hype of two years ago that wireless Internet is the pocket-sized Internet. Another is changing the mindset that the cell phone is simply a tool to make calls, he said.
"People just have to get used to what the wireless data market is about," Blasi said. "If people think they're going to have the same experience as they have on a desktop computer, then they will be disappointed."
Industry experts agree.
According to Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Joe Laszlo, Verizon Wireless has been offering services like Sprint's in more than 300 cities and towns for the past two months. Yet, most cell-phone users don't even know the services exist.
"The really key thing in marketing is to hide the technology," Laszlo said. "No one wants to know what 3G is. They want to know what they can do with it, what its value to them is."
They also need an incentive to pay for it, Laszlo said.
While Verizon, Sprint and AT&T offer pricing plans for 3G services comparable to a calling plan with no data services, many customers wonder why they should pay for wireless Internet access, especially in an uncertain economy.
"It's not the best time to launch a new business," said Alan A. Reiter, president of market research and consulting firm Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing Consulting. "People will say, 'The hell with this. You have to pay this much for this content?'"
AT&T, Sprint and Verizon still make their customers pay per-minute charges to talk on their cell phones. However, each one has a different method of charging for high-speed data on the phones.
Sprint PCS' new service plans, which range in price from $50 to $120 per month, include both voice minutes and megabytes for data usage. For example, the $50 plan includes 4,000 minutes of talk time and 2 MB of data, which lets cell-phone users send 150 e-mail messages, 100 instant messages and download 100 Web pages a month, according to the company brochure. The company is offering a three-month promotion of free wireless Web access to help customers adapt to the new calling plans.
Verizon, however, charges lower-end users airtime to retrieve Web content on their mobile phones. Businesses and on-the-go professionals can purchase megabytes of content.
"The reason we only offer it to business customers is because people don't understand how many megabytes it takes to send an e-mail," said Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson.
Under its mMode brand, AT&T sells megabytes of content starting at $3 a month.
With Verizon and Sprint's 3G systems, cell-phone users can retrieve data like e-mail messages, games and Web pages at, theoretically, 144 kilobits per second. But they are likely to surf the Web at an average speed of 40-to-60 Kbps.
Blasi said AT&T customers could theoretically retrieve information at 144 Kbps too, but that the average speeds of the network generally topped off at 45 Kbps.
AT&T and Sprint also sell camera attachments so that customers can take pictures with their cell phones and e-mail them.
"My understanding is that sales of the camera attachments are going very well," Blasi said.
Whether their use will become widespread is another matter.
"It's a marathon on Sprint," said Charles Golvin, an analyst for Forrester Research. "No pun intended.
"There's a whole educational process that will have to take place.... It will take a while. It will take a couple of years."
