Mobile phone subscribers will begin to use digital cellular infrastructure for text, data and eventually video transmission throughput, according to Jouko Paivinen, managing director of Nokia Telecommunications in Hong Kong.
This in turn, would dramatically reduce the percentage of voice traffic carried on mobile phone networks.
Mr Paivinen said the penetration of mobile phones and the acceptance of the phones had risen to a point where they were becoming more useful and subscribers were looking to utilise their phone networks for specific applications.
He cited the recent introduction of the Nokia N9000 Communicator, available in Hong Kong this month through Hongkong Telecom CSL, as a major step towards raising awareness and adoption of text and short message services (SMS) functions on mobile phone networks.
Mr Paivinen, who took up his position as managing director of Nokia Telecommunications, Hong Kong - the local infrastructure division of the Finnish group in November - last year, said the number of pager subscribers in Hong Kong was falling.
'This may sound biased coming from a mobile telecommunications company, but this innovation in text transfer is the very thing that will eat away at the pager market,' Mr Paivinen said.
'A few operators have begun Chinese character SMS and this will be the driver for people to move to a phone away from the pager market.' Scandanavian network operators had to increase their capacity for SMS recently. While it was an easy procedure, there was a growing capacity requirement for data because image files and data required more bandwidth than pure voice traffic.