The communication industry has seen unsurpassed technological evolutions in the last two decades, and has witnessed the introductions of unprecedented means to deliver voice, data, and entertainment services to consumers. Although technology continues to play a crucial role in changing the dynamics of this industry, such technology is quickly made available for anyone to take advantage of in terms of manufacturing as technology immediately represents itself in the form of chipsets and modules. And once hardware deployment is complete, the world is changing to rapidly chase after residual revenue business model through an offer of services or applications or the ultimate “service offer” is the bundled services on one hardware platform that is simple to deploy by regular consumer. Hardware only play has limitation and should not be the aim for a company anymore but rather a hardware should be a means to deliver value added services or application to the consumer through that easy to use box that all of the technology only engineers understand is economically configured.
For this basic reason, in the area of manufacturing of hardware, main focus should be placed more on conception rather than execution. The world has seen more of a dichotomy between the maker and the marketer, and this division of labor in a broader scale as compared to that in the world industrialization has ensued the constant emergence of many small outfits with superb ideas and concepts and enabled them to position in various competitive industries swiftly including the communication industry that AirTouch poses to debut.
The technology evolution and selection process is also going to converge not just the diverse services into one hardware but many players in the different fields of technologies and service industries into one common hardware platform. More than any hard-wire distribution, wireless distribution of services has always been the most cost effective and easiest to deploy and the wireless technology has basically become the predominant media of distribution of choice for anyone. And unlike in the past where even introduction of new consumer electronics had to undergo progressive deployment starting from advanced countries to less advanced to developing nations, when it comes to infrastructure of wireless technology, what is available in New York, London for example is available in Sao Paulo or Jakarta. Therefore, we can expand our scope of activities globally once wireless hardware is available, and WHO is estimating 2.5Billion people in BRIC and Next 11 countries to be in the middle income bracket that we can provide access to various services/applications in demand through our wireless hardware.
In various parts of the world, there has been a blur in the delineation of territories for services from various service providers. Cable companies have poised to offer from its infrastructure of cable access to each home a home telephone service , and bundling its original entertainment service that has yielded a blow to the movie theater industries as well as video stores, and telephone carriers who were prevented from providing video/entertainment service to protect then the infant industry of cable companies are now providing video/entertainment services on top of its high speed internet access service as well as conventional home communication service and competing head to head with the cable operators. Now wireless carriers with its low cost infrastructure per subscriber have surpassed the landline carriers in terms of subscriber population and they are now, with its new 4G technology, threatening both cable operators and landline carriers for future migration of voice/data/entertainment/security services all in one bundled service. Cable companies and landline carriers have no choice but capitalize on the wireless broadband services/infrastructure to keep up with the mega waves of migration. Satellite operators were good enough to take cable companies entertainment subscribers, but have not been effective in terms of offering low cost access to broadband and voice communication as it requires a voice and data up-link, and it is not technologically easy and cost effective to be implemented for home DBS devices and they will also have to find arrangements to vie for the position in the bundled services for home and office in the future or their demise or integration into something bigger is destined.
Our aim is to provide a uniquely designed and politically well-positioned product for content providers of any background as described above to service consumers with an easy and well-orchestrated access method for many new emerging services at their home and office environment, and also become a recipient of recurring revenue from the hardware once deployed at user premise by way of offering them additional services or applications downloaded to our hardware. With the 5Billon+ mobile subscribers worldwide and 3 more billions expected to add in the next decade, the precipitation of ownership and thus identity to individual user has dethroned the home identity or group identity, but with the more and more services to be converged on the hardware and more robust data poised service to follow, there will be a return of justification and practicality to a home centric and office centric device as wireless technology becomes more core media for various services including home security, common data access, entertainment for the family, communication for the common work place. The advent of 4 G Services will make even more prominent the usage concentration of mobile voice and data at fixed location worldwide.
We also aim to provide a rapid and economical deployment of both voice and data services to underserved areas of the world where there is not an adequate infrastructure of communication and make the communication osmosis without the social, cultural and territorial membrane. AirTouch name was adopted by our company to describe our corporate mandate to expand the scope of our business activities beyond the hardware supply to supply of services and applications for additional value in our own way.
We are devoted to meet the needs of expected applications and provide the concept of adaptability in our hardware offering. Our next generation HomeConneX, X1500, X500, X2000, X3000 and SmartLinX U250/300, and our ultimate home gateway product FocalPoint will prove to be useful implementation of our concept of worldwide communication osmosis.
Hide Kanakubo
CEO, AirTouch Inc.