Next-Gen Mobility — a Step Back, then a Step Forward

The past ten years have seen near universal adoption of mobile phones in the developed world and billions of people in emerging markets with mobile phones as their first phone. This mobility revolution has been about personal communications — voice and text messages (SMS). Now with the advent of 3G networks, the Blackberry and then the iPhone (News - Alert), we can see the outlines of a next generation of mobility. It’s still early, as few devices have completely open mobile Internet access — even iPhones have restrictions on applications and how they access the mobile Internet. But the flood of apps in the iPhone application store indicates what’s ahead.

Mobile phones have changed the way we communicate by adding mobility to a single purpose application — telephony. The Internet is a far richer application space. Open mobile Internet connectivity will enable a range of apps that far exceed anything we’ve seen with telephony or the fixed Internet. But there are a few bumps in the road, as neither mobile WiMAX nor Long Term Evolution (LTE (News - Alert)) handle voice with the performance of today’s 2G and 3G networks, which were designed for voice telephony — SMS was an accident and IP data was an add-on. Next-Gen radio networks, WiMAX (News - Alert) and LTE, are designed for data — they’re 100 percent focused on IP, with little thought to voice and no thought to SMS. The need for data is clear and the IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) was going to handle voice telephony. Unfortunately, IMS is complex and even partial implementations are not widely deployed so, today, there is no agreement on how to provide voice services over LTE or mobile WiMAX.

There are three proposed solutions for LTE: IMS, Voice over LTE via Generic Access (VoLGA), and keeping 2G/3G networks for voice while LTE carries just data, a hybrid strategy referred to as circuit-switch fallback. IMS is doing poorly, while VOLGA and circuit-switch fallback are still being standardized. So there will be a multi-year delay. Does this matter? Yes. The mobility revolution will come when we combine the innovation the open Internet fosters, with the intimacy and interactivity of a personal mobile device. In the near future, the video experience on a mobile device at 15 inches will match that of a TV set at 6-8 feet, and you won’t have to fight over the remote control! With 4G wireless, you can think about streaming video from your handset to your friends — “Hey Joe, we just reached the Everest base camp, check out this view!”

Now if we could just agree how to make voice telephony work on LTE, we could get on with the next mobility revolution. IT

Brough Turner is Chief Strategy Officer of Dialogic (News - Alert) (www.dialogic.com).

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