GPRS operators set to outsource service R&D
By Simon Marshall, Total Telecom
22 August 2000
The GPRS debate has switched focus from handset delivery to the problems and decisions surrounding high-speed mobile data services development.
This was the message coming from delegates at an inaugural GSM Association conference on GPRS in London this week. And that mood was exemplified by the willingness of a Motorola executive to wave his company's GPRS mobile phone in front of the 400 attendees from around the world.
The predominantly operator-based gathering learned that outsourcing application development to third parties offered the most benefits to operators whose experience of GPRS stretched only as far as providing the network. However, when it came to building portals, consensus was that in-house development represented the best way to monitor the success of those applications and services.
Stephan Keuneke, strategic 3G product development manager at German operator T-Mobil said, "(Operators) have to cooperate with the Microsofts and SAPs of this world, which already have corporate customers. Operators certainly can't develop Internet applications for GPRS on their own."
Keuneke also highlighted the contradictions involved in outsourcing in this way. "Operators have to be more than just 'pipe fillers' and must differentiate with applications, but it's hard to find a company to provide those applications on an exclusive basis. T-Mobil's in a good position because we have the expertise of T-Online."
According to Keuneke, although the cross-pollination of expertise from operators' Internet arms could provide a third way to tackle the problem, deriving funds for development from spinning-off these arms was not essential. "Developing apps and services in-house presents not so much a cash-flow problem as a people problem. Partnering with a third party is generally the only way to get the right development people on board," he explained.
It also became apparent as the debate broadened that establishing third party relationships could help operators compete with search engine specialists such as Yahoo and Lycos, which are currently thought to be developing mobile browsers.
The question of whether the network carrying GPRS traffic will be IP-based or circuit-switched SS7 stirred the delegates, with some expressing concern about security and quality of service (QoS).
Nick Hutton, mobile future technology specialist at UUNet said, "Mobile circuit-switched networks are no longer the factor they used to be in winning customers. On a basic level, mobile networks must be migrated to IP to take advatage of the economies of scale they offer. In fact, 70 to 75% of the work to get 3G networks up and running has already been done by the IP industry with protocols like MPLS, RSVP and IPSec already in place."
He accepted, however, that mobile operators' concerns over quality of service were well-founded, since even fixed-line IP networks still have some way to go to iron-out QoS problems, and that streaming in particular causes difficulties.
The GSM Association has recently appointed a number of specialist technical directors, a move which it hopes will better facilitate talks to resolve these issues. The Association's chief executive Rob Conway said, "We've significantly increased our focus and increased the number of experts we employ. Our chief goal now is to ensure commonality of GPRS transport to ensure global roaming through our working groups. We're also going to engage a representative sample of m-commerce forums to explore application development." |
