Punching Buttons: Mobile Data and Mass Transit

Now it’s time for a good old-fashioned geekout.

On my Europe trip (from which I will post pictures one day, really), I decided to pick up a (relatively) cheap UK-based pre-paid cell phone, with which I could call both people I was planning on meeting on that side of the ocean, and back to the States. Also factored into my planning was the fact that part of my trip, which happened two weeks before we invaded Iraq, involved France. Fortunately, nothing untoward happened, and I enjoyed my visit quite a lot. As a bit of a control freak, though, I wanted to be in a position where I could make phone calls on the run if I had to, whether they involved finding my way out of a bad situation on the street or getting out of the country entirely (or, for that matter, staying out of France if hostilities had broken out before my Eurostar ride to Paris).

As some of you probably know, European cell phones beat the heck out of their American counterparts. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this: population density and regulation. Higher population density made blanket coverage a lot easier in most of Europe — for example, there is very little coverage difference in the UK between carriers until you get into far northern Scotland or into subway systems like the Underground in London with limited space. Regulations in Europe at the dawn of digital cell phone systems also forced all carriers to build to one common standard, GSM (conveniently designed in Europe), forcing competition on price and service quality rather than basic design. Meanwhile in the U.S., the FCC allowed the market to take control in a tri-cornered battle between CDMA (American-designed by Qualcomm), TDMA (a fairly primitive standard), and GSM (with a side entry by Motorola’s iDEN, the phone/radio combo with which Nextel dominates several narrow business markets like construction and emergency services). While I’m certainly a fan of less government interference in the marketplace, the upshot for American cell phone users has been a nasty patchwork of standards and a majority of phones that are incompatible with what the rest of the globe uses.

The impact of all of this on me was my discovery that even on my low-end POS Siemens phone with a pre-paid plan, I was able to access specially-designed versions of many Internet sites via WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Sure, it wasn’t anything special given the phone’s five-line screen (four for text, one for navigation) and the approximately 9.6kbps connection, but it was certainly enough to get news headlines, sports scores and the like. It was curiously addictive, particularly while I was in Blackburn and didn’t have much else to do past going to the Rovers game, wandering the town (roughly the size of Roanoke), and discovering unlikely KFC locations.

Mobile Internet has never really caught on here in the States — certainly not to the degree it has in Europe or Japan. After I saw plenty of people poking at their phones walking up to Kings Cross and Euston train stations in London, a reason why started formulating in my mind.

My theory is that, within the world’s economic first-tier, takeup of mobile data services has a correlation to the use of mass transit in a society. I know anecdotally that Japan has both the world’s most advanced cell phones and the world’s best train system. Conversely, American mass transit is rock-bottom, and our cell phones (particularly in their data capabilities) are pretty close to bottom among industrialized nations. The connection that I think exists is that for most Americans, our car-based, solo commutes generally prohibit us from doing anything other than talking on our phones (and we have trouble enough with that, if you believe the statistics on phone-related car accidents). It’s a lot easier to poke around CNN.com while sitting on a commuter train.

One way to test this would be to examine whether American cities with functional mass transit exhibit higher data service usage than those without. I’m thinking Boston, New York, Chicago, maybe Washington, maybe Philadelphia — and compare them to, say, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, St. Louis, Charlotte, and Minneapolis.

So there you have it — my crack-brained geek theory for the day. If you’re a graduate student in communications with an interest in transport planning, and you’re desperate for a research topic, go for it. I’d be curious to see results, but I’m honestly way too lazy to try to find out myself.