Interactive Mobile Multimedia Needs IP and Circuits

Mobile Internet access can dramatically improve the Web experience, as mobile handsets are highly personal, interactive devices. It’s not just telephony, SMS, location and Web access, but applications that leverage the mobile handset’s camera (e.g. to capture QR codes, barcodes or live video). And it’s evolving – mobile phones in Japan already incorporate short range sensors, for m-commerce and other interactive purposes. Expect these new interactive capabilities in the EU and US shortly. However, developing applications that fully leverage mobile device capabilities involves extra complexity, extra work and some access to legacy telecom technology.

The first problem is handset diversity. Mobile handsets have different screen sizes, limited browser capabilities and wide variations in how browser capabilities can be extended, plus mobile bandwidth is limited and may vary dramatically during a session. Fortunately, Internet multimedia companies are launching products and services that identify a user’s mobile device and transcode, scale and/or rate-adapt multimedia content to match. The second set of issues concern interactivity and here traditional telecom plays a role.

Consider click-to-call – not widely used on a PC and still not a telephone for most people, but quite natural for mobile devices. But developers must pay attention to details. For example, the telephone number must be explicit text, not text embedded within a graphic element, as typical handset logic can’t read embedded text. More importantly, user interaction requires SMS and USSD in USSD-capable markets. Mobile users prefer text messaging to friends, apps and advertisers, but text messaging takes Web developers into telecom’s messy world. Each mobile operator has different rules on what is permissible over SMS – like lists of forbidden words – with different tariffs for short codes and different rules for use of SMS and USSD services. Finally, mobile operators offer premium rate billing arrangements. Because mobile phone users are accustomed to paying for products and services, this is a powerful tool for the Web developer – but one associated with the mobile device’s phone number, not its IP address. Thus the final complexity – the need to associate a mobile device’s IP address and phone number, as any truly interactive application will use both identities.

As these obstacles are overcome and that most personal of devices, the mobile phone, gains affordable open Internet access, interactive rich media applications will explode. IT

Brough Turner (News - Alert) is chief strategy officer of Dialogic (www.dialogic.com).

» Internet Telephony Magazine Table of Contents