Wifi Revolution

Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) – a standard 3GPP technology which facilitates the seamless handover of calls between GSM and WiFi (News - Alert) networks – is becoming an increasingly important for mobile operators seeking to deliver next generation mobile services to their customers. As such, software and equipment makers are increasingly working together to bring “dual mode” capabilities to mobile handsets and the networks they connect with.

Today, Kineto Wireless Inc., one of the original innovators of UMA technology, announced that it is working with Texas Instruments (News - Alert) Inc. (TI) to enable UMA support on TI’s OMAP-Vox platform. This will enable mobile handset manufacturers to rapidly develop UMA-enabled Microsoft Windows Mobile smartphones and UMA-enabled feature phones based on TI’s popular OMAPV1030 GSM/GPRS/EDGE solution.

More specifically, TI will be integrating Kineto’s UMA technology into its OMAPV1030 processor – which is already being used in handsets shipping today. This baseband processor - the first product on TI’s new OMAP-Vox wireless platform - incorporates TI’s high-volume 90nm digital process technology and enables handset manufacturers to reduce costs and speed time to market.

Based on TI’s OMAP1710 architecture, the OMAPV1030 includes an integrated GSM/GPRS/EDGE modem and applications processor on a single OMAP core, thus delivering a high-quality, multimedia mobile experience. Not only does the chip use significantly less power than it predecessors - thus delivering longer battery life for users - it also delivers improved performance, particularly for multimedia applications such as mobile TV and mobile gaming. Also, because TI’s OMAP-Vox solutions share a common software platform, software re-use can be maximized - which, in turn, helps reduce development costs.

Through this collaboration, mobile handset vendors can combine the OMAPV1030 solution with Kineto’s UMA technology to quickly build UMA-enabled handsets.

“Operator demand for UMA-enabled handsets continues to grow rapidly,” said Avner Goren, marketing director of Texas Instruments Cellular Systems Solutions, in a press release. “With its proven track record in UMA, Kineto helped deliver a combined solution based on TI’s OMAPV1030 processor to meet handset manufacturers’ needs.”

According to the press release, the two companies will be extending the UMA collaboration to other operating systems and potentially other TI mobile handset platforms.

“We are delighted to be collaborating with Texas Instruments on UMA technology,” said Mark Powell, vice president of the client business unit and co-founder of Kineto Wireless. “TI is a leading supplier of baseband platforms to handset vendors and partnering to leverage the excellent OMAPV1030 processor is a tremendous way to help the mobile handset industry satisfy the growing operator demand for more UMA devices.”

Because unlicensed mobile spectrum is free for all to use, mobile operators generally do not charge for the minutes a user spends on a local network. This gives the user several advantages: Once their handset comes within the range of a WiFi hotspot, the call will automatically switch over to the local network, and thus the call will be “free.” Furthermore, once the user is connected to the local network, they will be afforded the opportunity to use advanced new services which might not be available through the GSM network, such as mobile VoIP, mobile video and mobile gaming. Although carriers have been trying out different billing schemes for delivering these dual mode services, one thing which remains problematic is how to bill the user for the actual minutes used. For example, in theory the carrier is supposed to stop billing the user for minutes on the primary network once the user enters a “hot spot” - however, the user basically has to put their trust in the carrier that they are, in fact, billing them only for the minutes used on the primary network. Users will be hard pressed to “measure” how many minutes they spend on the primary network and how many on the local network, and furthermore their bills could potentially become extremely complicated to understand, should a carrier decide to provide that level of detail. Should the carriers decide to err on the side of charging for more minutes on the primary network, and less on the local network, that would mean they would be taking advantage – albeit perhaps only to the slightest of degrees – of the fact that the user in fact spent some of those minutes on the local network. If you multiply these slight discrepancies by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of users on the network, it becomes easy to surmise that this would work significantly to a carrier’s advantage.

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Patrick Barnard is Assignment Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.

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