Australia Aims to Be Tops in Java Games

Australia is positioning itself as the testbed for the new generation of wireless games and entertainment with the establishment of advanced Government and industry backed developer sites.

According to Atari Australia's MD Adam Lancman: "The mobile game market is about to take off with phones now being released in Western markets which are able to support amazing quality for mobile games.

"It's a great opportunity for Australian developers to use their creative and technical talents to provide great content for this burgeoning market," Lancman said.

Australia's Senior Investment Commissioner for North America, Robert Hunt, said the Australian Government had already committed USD$24 million to fund the creation of a range of testbeds for next-generation telecommunications networks and applications.

He said this included application developer company m.Net Corporation, a consortium made up of companies including Cisco, Alcatel and Motorola.

"Other significant, government backed research sites include ongoing work in the wireless area by CSIRO's Telecommunications and Industrial Physics group and the Australian Telecommunications Cooperative Research Centre (CRC)," said Hunt.

"The CRC has over 50 researchers in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney working on key questions such as 3G network throughput and quality of service.

"Australia's advanced wireless environment and its booming games developer industry has created a dynamic hot-bed of innovation and creativity," Hunt said.

Australia has a cell phone penetration rate of 64.5 percent. This high level of wireless connectivity, combined with high levels of internet penetration and technology skills, has seen Australia placed in the world's top 20 nations in the ITU's 2002 Mobile/Internet score.

According to m.Net Director of Sales and Marketing Paul Daly the m.Net developer site offers application developers a real 3G pre-production environment which is not tied to carriers or vendors. "It is completely independent, and exists primarily for the benefit of developers," said Daly.

Daly said m.Net was already working with companies exploring the development of advanced games for deployment over wireless applications networks.

U.S.-based mobile applications company ActiveSky conducts all its R&D work in Australia and according to CTO Ruben Gonzalez, the Australian engineers are "as good if not better than any in the world.

"They are highly skilled and can work across multiple technologies from our markets in Japan, Europe and the U.S.," Gonzalez said.

CSIRO's Mobile Communications Team Leader Dr. Alan Young said the key issue for wireless enabled games had been the handset display systems.

"This is now being resolved and companies can offer games applications that leverage off the display rather than the bandwidth, making compelling business propositions without necessarily using the full extent of 3G technology," Young said.

"Australia is an ideal testbed environment with a population of early adopters, high penetration of wireless and a relatively small market compared to the U.S."

International companies with a major presence in Australia's expanding USD$3.2 billion annual wireless communications market include carriers and technology providers such as Alcatel, Avaya, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Nortel Networks, NTT, Hutchison Telecoms (Orange), Siemens, SingTel Optus, Sony Ericsson, Telecom New Zealand, Virgin and Vodafone. They join Australia's largest telecommunications company, Telstra Corporation. Hutchison Telecoms has just raised the stakes with the launch of its third generation (3G) network '3' placing Australia among the very first markets to deploy this technology commercially.

The Australian wireless market continues to grow at more than 10 percent a year and the games industry sales grew by 30% this year."

Posted to the site on 16th May 2003