Oracle Corp has now made clear why it formed Oracle Data and is keen to get into bed with McCaw Cellular Communications Inc on a data broadcasting venture: it reckons that it costs software publishers – including itself – $6 to $7 to mail a program to a customer on floppy disk, whereas using the system it has dreamed up with the Kirkland, Washington cellular kings, the same program could be despatched to its entire customer base via spread spectrum radio at a total cost of $5 for the complete radio-mailing. The details of the company’s plan were spotted by the New York Times in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission for a licence to start technical trials of the system in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the third member of the party is based, and then move to a field trial in the Seattle area where McCaw and the Oracle Data unit live. The third member is Omnipoint Corp, which will be supplying the spread spectrum radio equipment to be installed atop each of McCaw’s 700 cellular towers across the US. The plan is that the one-way transmission service should piggyback on McCaw’s cellular traffic, sending data at 1.5Mbps – in ooh-aah language, that’s sufficient capacity to send a novel to millions of consumers every five seconds. The advantage of spread spectrum is that it is resistant to data errors, and with some parity data, the partners reckon they could get errors to below one bit in 10 Gigabits. It is estimated that the cost of the Data Broadcast Service receivers would fall to under $100 a time if they were manufactured in volume. Each receiver will be separately add ressable so services could be individually customised.
