Intro & Opening Remarks from GSMA January 2000 Application Providers Workshop
>> Report on GSM Association January 2000 Application Providers Workshop
Ben Wood
Mobile Lifestreams
15 January 2001
The GSM Association (GSMA) hosted a workshop targeted at the Application Providers community in London during January 2001. This event was sponsored by Vodafone and was designed to "bring together the GSM Operators and Applications Providers in order to explore the common benefits that exist and to explore the opportunities for future cooperation." The GSM Association have recognised that Application Providers will play a key role in the delivery of future "non-voice" services and were keen to use their position at the head of the industry to provide a forum for feedback where "senior and technical executives within both Mobile Applications Providers and Network Operators could meet to share their vision of how business and technical challenges can be mutually achieved."
Mobile Lifestreams attending this event and this report provides an overview of the presentations that were given as well as the outcomes of the meeting.
The meeting was attended by approximately 80 delegates with a roughly 50 / 50 split between Application Providers and Network Operators. Companies in the applications area included: Bluekite.com, Celltribe AB, CT Motion, Fenestre, Kizoom, Paybox, Signalsoft, Getronics, WAPit, Worldzap and Wysdom.
Opening Remarks
Rob Conway
CEO GSM Association
The workshop was opened by Rob Conway, the CEO of the GSM Association, who gave an overview of the GSM Association and its current role in the mobile industry.
Today the GSMA has 501 members spanning 160 countries comprising of over 400 2G and 3G Network operators.
More recently the GSMA have included partnerships with the supplier community with over 75 associate members including all key Infrastructure suppliers and so called "new wave" wireless players such as Compaq, IBM, Cisco, EDS, Bull, Psion, Sendo etc.
The speaker promoted the benefits of Seamless Roaming across the GSM Family of Technologies (GSM, GPRS, EDGE, 3GSM / "W-CDMA") and stated that a key area (and role that the GSM Association can play) is to ensure interoperability between these technologies so customers can roam across borders seamlessly. The GSM Association see their continuing role is to promote interoperability particularly in relation to" inter-generational" roaming as new technologies like GPRS are introduced.
Current Market Status:
GSM technology now has over 405 million subscribers (69% of global digital market) with a forecast of 500 million customers by mid 2001 which is considered conservative - particularly with the rapid growth in Latin America (Brazil, Chile etc.) and market potential of China. This means that 1 in 15 people in the world are connected to GSM.
In addition 85% of 3G networks will be 3GSM / W-CDMA and it is now emerging as THE global standard for 3G. Korea, China (China Unicom) etc. have now chosen to go for W-CDMA (this decision differs from previous intentions to use other standards).
The GSM Association (in addition to promoting inter-operability and roaming) sees itself as a "services hub" with its involvement in:
· Roaming - still the biggest issue for GSMA
· SIM / Terminal technology
· Billing etc.
· Fraud and security
The future challenge for the GSMA is how they can forge relationships with the Application Providers as new standards come to market. The workshop was designed to start this debate.
GSM Association Overview
Philippe Lucas
Chairman of Services Group (SerG)
GSM Association
Following Rob Conway’s presentation, Philippe Lucas gave a more detailed overview of the GSM Association’s role and mission as well as its roadmaps for its future.
The GSM Association’s stated aim is:
"To be the leading representative body in the wireless industry".
With a mission of:
"orchestrating the never ending improvement and evolution of wireless communications for the overall benefit of system operator, customers and suppliers around the world"
Membership is divided into two categories:
Full Membership:
- Operators with GSM / UMTS licence & Government Regulatory bodies
Associate Membership:
- Companies that manufacture GSM equipment (Infrastructure players, terminal vendors, SIM cards, Security Systems, Billing etc.)
There is also a new group in the GSMA called the GGRF - GSM Global Roaming Forum - where GSM operators and other non-GSM operators are working to improve roaming relationships with other technologies.
The group within the GSM Association most relevant to the Application Providers is SerG - The Services Group.
This group (comprised of people from strategy, marketing and technical backgrounds within the operators) focuses on the definition of requirements for operators to deliver services. SerG is responsible for the definition and specification of GSM / GPRS services as well as 3GSM.
On a day-to-day basis the group defines services requirements to ensure inter-operability - especially when roaming. The Group tries to drive the standards bodies such as 3GPP and WAP Forum as well as promoting the services to external parties such as the application community.
Evolution of Wireless Industry Services:
Increasingly there is a requirement to shift the attention from Network Operators paradigm to the applications world with the following areas being examined:
· New roaming scenarios
· New business models
· New types of Mobile usage and users looking for services
· New Services
The GSMA is trying to encourage operators to shift their attention from voice to new business (data) in order to sustain the future growth of the industry as a whole. The GSMA is concerned that some members are waiting for UMTS to introduce these new services and feel this is not good enough in today's rapidly moving market (e.g. the introduction of GPRS / WAP etc.).
GPRS will change the focus of operators to IP (as a technology) presenting a steep learning curve, which will transform wireless networks into bit-pipes by virtue of the fact that GPRS (unlike GSM) does not include any specified services and the key challenge is to build this service layer on top of this new bearer.
SerG believe that WAP can start this process - with GPRS and WAP giving a compelling combination for network operators to start to deliver this new service portfolio.
The next key step for the industry is the introduction of 3GSM (UMTS). GPRS will have played a role to enable a paradigm shift towards non-voice services but will not be able to sustain mass-market growth due to limitations in bandwidth and capacity. 3GSM will add another order of magnitude to data rates (but it was clearly stated that it is not going to be data rates of 2MB!) pushing the personalisation of services and new types of interaction e.g. video.
The speaker expressed a concern that services for 2.5G and 3G will no longer be standardised, due to the fact that a services architecture has been defined giving operators and application providers to flexibility to implement services as they wish, in order to encourage differentiation. In addition there is some flexibility in the infrastructure design that may cause issues in the future.
With respect to this Application Providers and Operators need to recognise that users see services, not technology, so the key challenge is to hide the technology as much as possible with usability being paramount in service design addressed the mass market opportunity that is predicted. <<
- Eric - |
