Voice, wireless-data advances buoy GSM standard
By Peter Clarke
EE Times
(02/22/99, 3:15 p.m. EDT)
CANNES, France — As the GSM World Congress opens tomorrow, two developments will highlight progress in both the voice and data aspects of mobile telephony.
With the latest development in the Global System for Mobile communications standard, the days of talking into a telephone tethered to the wall by its fixed line are numbered, at least in the regions that use GSM standards.
A cordless telephony option has been added to GSM by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) based in Sophia Antipolis, France. The option, GSM-CTS, allows a person to make calls from home with the same cellular phone used when roaming outdoors or overseas but with the cost and line quality of the fixed network.
For wireless data applications, STNC Ltd. (Bury St. Edmunds, England) will launch a version of its small-memory-footprint HitchHiker Internet browser customized for Microsoft's Windows CE OS. That will allow a browser and e-mail to be added either to Windows CE handheld computers provided with a suitable wireless interface or to smart phones and wireless terminals designed to run Windows CE.
The GSM Cordless Telephony System was approved at a meeting of ETSI's Special Mobile Group in Milan this month, clearing the way for mobile-phone manufacturers to develop combined GSM and cordless telephones that together with home basestations can provide a completely wireless world for voice communications.
"Because it is easy to implement and because GSM-CTS corresponds to clear end-user and operator expectations, soon all new GSM mobiles produced should support this feature," said Michel Galligo of Alcatel (Paris), who acted as the GSM-CTS standardization program manager at ETSI.
Software-only upgrade
"One of the main advantages of GSM-CTS compared with other one-phone solutions is its small impact on GSM handsets," Galligo said. "It does not require any hardware modifications, extra central-processor unit or large memory space. It just needs an upgrade of the GSM software. Therefore GSM-CTS is accessible for all mobiles without affecting the manufacturer's cost or mobile performance, weight, size or battery life. GSM-CTS should become a standard GSM feature offered by all manufacturers on all GSM phones-from low-price handsets to high-end mobiles for executives.
"The GSM-CTS solution is the answer to a very strong market demand for the use of the GSM phone at home with the price and quality of the fixed network," he said. "It brings to the GSM standard a unique advantage compared with other second-generation mobile standards and paves the way for third-generation standardization, since the CTS concept is already one of the basic building blocks of the UMTS [Universal Mobile Telecommunications System] standard."
Fixed wire links for PCs will remain important because of the limitations on data-transmission rates in mobile telephony. In basic GSM, this is 9.6 kbits/second, although the achievable data rate is upgraded to 384 kbits/s under proposals called GSM-Edge. Alternatively, computer users await deployment of the 1-Mbit/s "Bluetooth" systems and third-generation wireless services, which aim to offer data rates as high as 2-Mbit/s.
For those who can tolerate lower data rates, STNC's HitchHiker software provides a graphical HTML 3.2 browser and e-mail client for a mobile handset in less than 350 kbytes of ROM and requires only 1 Mips of CPU power, the company said.
Although the latest port of the software has been made independently of Microsoft, which has its own browser technology, it will provide a boost to Microsoft's aspirations for Windows CE in the smart-phone and wireless-terminal market. HitchHiker is the default browser for the rival Epoc operating system from Symbian plc (London).
Symbian, a joint venture of Psion, Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola, was formed to develop and license the Epoc OS and is seen by observers as an attempt to block the progress of Windows CE in mobile communications.
"HitchHiker for CE provides the most compact information-access solution available for manufacturers creating telephone handsets based on Windows CE," said Amy Mokady, marketing director at STNC. "The development of this product demonstrates the flexibility of STNC's software solutions, and their ease-of-use on any mobile platform."
The software is being demonstrated for the first time at the GSM World Congress this week in Cannes, France, and will be running on Windows CE-based palmtop PCs from several manufacturers, the company said.
The demonstrations will highlight STNC's relationships with other companies specializing in mobile communications.
To allow text to be input from a numeric keypad, STNC has worked to interface HitchHiker to Tegic Communications T9 software, while GSM connectivity can be added to handheld computers by a GSM phone with a PCMCIA card developed by TTP Communications (Cambridge, England).
The announcement adds Windows CE to Epoc and Microware's OS9, to the operating systems supported by HitchHiker, though the software is also running directly on a range of hardware platforms, including TTP Communications' WebWalker reference design and a variety of ARM processor-based platforms.
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