Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Mar 20, 2003
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Mar 20, 2003 |
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Info-Tech
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Telecommunications Global mobile alliance awaits Indian presence G. Rambabu
HELSINKI, March 19 MOBILE consumers in the country are certainly a confused lot today, what with so many acronyms being thrown around by the cellular and limited mobility operators - GSM, GPRS, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, UMTS, MMS and what have you. As far as they are concerned, the connection must provide value for money, whether it is plain vanilla voice service, multi-media messaging or Internet browsing on the phone. But more importantly, it should enable the user to communicate with anyone who has a phone irrespective of the technology platforms. Something that is sadly not possible today. For instance, customers of Reliance India Mobile cannot send an SMS message to subscribers of other cellular networks and vice-versa. What is more, they cannot share photographs, music and video clips. In other words, the market is being divided into two independent groups - cellular and limited mobility customers, who can at the most talk to each other. Though they have reason to be disappointed, consumers can take heart in the fact that this is the case across the globe. The different technology platforms on which the mobile services are based are not fully compatible. But things are slowly changing, thanks mainly due to telecom biggies such as Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung and Siemens, not to mention IT majors such as Hewlett Packard, IBM Corporation, Intel, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft Corporation, Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems. These familiar names have all come together under the banner of Open Mobile Alliance in order to minimise the fragmentation of the market and enable seamless interoperability. According to Ms Kati Riikonen, Head of Industry Relations, Nokia Mobile Software, this is particularly important since the next wave of growth is expected to come from mobile services. Therefore, implementing open and global standards in unified service platforms will play a key role, enabling vendors to implement their branded products while maintaining the interoperability of personalised services across markets and a wide range of mobile terminals. "The Alliance aims to grow the market for the entire mobile industry by enabling subscribers to use interoperable mobile services across markets, operators and mobile terminals," she said. "This is achieved by defining an open standards based framework to permit applications and services to be built, deployed and managed efficiently and reliably in a multi-vendor environment." The partnership was formed in June 2002 by nearly 200 companies representing the world's leading mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies and content providers. It is designed to be the centre of mobile service standardisation work, helping the creation of interoperable services across countries, operators and mobile terminals that will meet the needs of the user.
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