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Your advert here!!! Our Guides Technical Editors:
Last modified: | Mobile Insight Vol: 8 Issue 332 August 28th 2006Taiwan may fill LiON battery gap
The full Inquirer story ... Taiwan to fill the battery gap Carphone readying its fixed/mobile offeringThe Carphone Warehouse group should launched a converged fixed-line and mobile tariff in the next six to nine months, according to Clive Dorsman from the company's fixed-line arm, Opal Telecom. Dorsman revealed the motivation behind the Carphone Group's recent acquisition of a 'low power' GSM licence. This will enable it to put so-called 'femto' base stations into businesses and eventually residential properties. The scheme will therefore much more closely resemble the service O2 offers in Germany – known as Genion – rather than BT's Fusion offering. Genion makes use of cellular technology to distinguish when a mobile handset is in a 'home zone' as against Fusion which uses Bluetooth/Wi-Fi to connect to a broadband router when 'at home'. Fusion employs a standard called UMA (Universal Mobile Access). Yet UMA compatible handsets are so few and far between that Carphone wouldn't possibly countenance such a narrow offering, Dorman said. The Carphone Warehouse is currently struggling to cope with demand for its 'free' broadband service – for which Opal effectively provides the backbone. It appears that some 50 per cent of the Carphone Warehouse's existing 2.6 million (TalkTalk) users are interested in adding the broadband option. Dorsman was speaking as he revealed that Opal has invested heavily in the latest (NGN) telecoms gear from Sonus Networks. This deal shows how much opposition the new Nokia Siemens Networks is up against, for example. Sonus reckons it is number one in the supply of networks which actually carry voice over IP. It means Opal's own network will be ready for when BT actually implements its own NGN telecoms network which it calls C21N. Having Sonus' gear sitting on its own backbone network, allows the Carphone Warehouse to potentially offer loads of innovative services across its own MVNO, Fresh. Dormand revealed that the mobile network operators are reluctant to provide the kind of tight integration such offerings would take between the Opal network and their own mobile networks. By contrast, BT Openreach – the arm of BT which provides physical access to the traditional BT copper (PSTN) network, is bending over backwards to help the Carphone group offer services over its networks.
The full Inquirer story ... Carphone to offer converged fixed/mobile tariff Children unnecessarily at risk from pervertsThe recent conviction of Royce Roberts from Caernarfon in Wales for sending indecent pictures of himself to children's mobile phones exposes how the UK's mobile networks are vulnerable to this kind of attack. The scandal is that such events are entirely avoidable. Firms like Ace*comm have already supplied systems in the USA which can prevent children receiving calls and messages from unknown parties. In fact, operators wouldn't even require specialist software if they implemented networks based on the latest technology – such as IMS. According to Steve Edwards, chief marketing officer with Sonus networks, "With the development of next generation (NG) networks worldwide we're seeing great interest in innovative services like parental controls. At the GlobalComm tradeshow we demonstrated parental controls based on our IMX applications platform that would enable parents to apply filters to their child's phone usage. These filters could have blocked messages from any unregistered user such as those this case [Royce Roberts]." It's a big problem because more than one million children under 10 years old currently have mobiles in the UK, according to the consultancy, DhaliwalBrown. As Jock Percy, a senior analyst with Ace*comm. Put it, "Parents need to protect their children and stop them being able to receive distressing communication of this kind, but they seem much less aware of the need for similar protection on mobiles." Royce's methods weren't even sophisticated. He simply ran up a £25,000 phone bill sending the indecent images to random phone numbers. Evidence provided to the court showed that it was impossible to estimate how many children had received the indecent messages but it could have affected thousands.The full Inquirer story ... Thousands of children vulnerable to phone filth www.acecomm.com ICSTIS fines WIN heavilyA company which has previously won serious mobile industry plaudits for its services has just been fined a massive £50,000 by the UK's industry enforcer, ICSTIS. The adjudication reads, "In its capacity as the company responsible for compliance with the ICSTIS Code of Practice, WIN (Wireless Information Network) Ltd were fined £50,000 and issued with a formal reprimand. In addition, access to the service was barred for a period of 12 months and the service provider was instructed to refund all complainants." So that was a bit of a result for all the 46 people who had complained. WIN was acting as the service provider for Summit Technologies. One of the chief complaints was that one consumer had sent the text 'Stop sending me this message’. The rules are that the Stop command should be interpreted as an indication that the recipient doesn't want to pay for anything else. Summit's response was their software had seen the word ‘messages’ and interpreted the letter ‘a’ in that word as attempt to answer a multiple choice question where ‘a’ happened to be the correct answer. Yeah, right.
The full Inquirer story ... Text enforcer hands out heavy fine France Telecom Orange may buy AOL UKA story in the Sunday Telegraph claims that Orange/Wanadoo - operated by France Telecom, should win the auction to buy AOL's UK internet business. The paper believes that the bid from Orange is motivated by fear of the prospect of arch rival, BSkyB, getting hold of it. However, Mobile Insight believes that Orange would be well aware of the chaos that is surrounding the Carphone Warehouse's offer of free broadband for those on its Talk Talk fixed line service. Mobile magazine reports that waiting times at the Carphone's dedicated Talk Talk call centres have typically reached 45 minutes. It also claims that new customers trying to get the free internet service may have to wait up to two months for the connexion to go live. To avoid a similar situation happening with its Wanadoo internet service – now re-branded Orange – France Telecom may be keen to acquire extra capacity through the AOL acquisition. Mobile Insight recently tried to subscribe to Orange's free broadband service but Orange claimed the handset which it desired as an upgrade – the Nokia N70 – was currently out of stock. The company's IVR system doesn't exactly make the upgrade to broadband easy. For example, the literature says a customer must have a tariff of at least £30 per month. But that figure is including tax (VAT). So if your tariff is £29 per month (before tax), you actually qualify. The Carphone Warehouse is known to have bid for AOL UK, but probably concluded that merging it with its own internet business – Opal Telecom - would be too tricky. Opal recently revealed that it has added some 340,000 new users since the free broadband offer first appeared in April. The full Inquirer story ... Orange may acquire AOL UK SnippetsBenQ Siemens has introduced a whole line of the phones including EF81, EF91, S81 and S88. One of the most eye catching ones was a Blackberry-alike phone branded as the P51 which is about to arrive, says Fuad Abazovic. In Site of the Week (by Tony Dennis)This week Daily Telegraph - Alex Media companies are finally getting the hang of the mobile Internet. British national newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, is offering its humorous carton, Alex, to all those with a WAP phone. More to the point, the site even has an advert. The site's creator is Graphico. You can get the cartoons by texting Alex to 82088. Luckily the Telegraph Web site has a page which explains how you can pay for things on the WAP site. It includes instructions for how to pay via Paypal and Bango. Apparently this works for subscribers on international GSM networks who can't pay via reverse premium rate SMS. http://mobilealex.telegraph.co.uk.
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