Thread: Here's a basically SUNW article that Ruffian posted on one of the QCOM threads:
Cellular world girds for
Internet-era overhaul
By Rick Merritt
EE Times
(03/31/00, 11:02 a.m. EST)
SAN DIEGO ? The coalition of companies that make up
the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum hopes to draft a
reference architecture based on the Internet Protocol for
cellular networks before the end of the year. Sun
Microsystems, meanwhile, will roll out a fresh spin of its
Jini software in June tailored to deliver data services
over cellular handsets. The two efforts are part of a
broad landscape of changes coming for the cellular world
as it retools for the Web era, according to speakers at
this week's Mobile Internet 2000 conference.
Charles Lo, a technology director for Vodafone Airtouch
Plc (Newbury, England), one of the world's largest
cellular network operators and a member of the
coalition, said, "We need to make our networks much
more economical to speed adoption of wireless data, so
it's very important for us to decrease capital and
operations costs." It currently costs about $3.47 to send
a megabyte of data over the cellular network compared
with $0.013 over wired phone lines, Lo said.
Lo also heads the architecture group of the Mobile
Wireless Internet Forum (MWIF). By drafting the new
IP-based design, the group hopes to accelerate the
move away from cellular nets based on centralized
circuit switches to an architecture of distributed Web
servers linked on a broadband routed backbone.
"We are planning for a next-generation network that is
IP- and server-based," Lo said. He also lobbied for an
open interface between basestations and basestation
controllers, which could allow a broader group of
systems makers to participate in that market. With 70
percent to 80 percent of network costs in the
basestation gear, "we have to make the radio
subsystems more open and distributed," Lo said.
The MWIF will not develop new protocols and interfaces
itself but will indicate where standards are needed in a
broadly defined next-generation cellular-network
architecture. Other members of the group, formed earlier
this year, include Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Compaq,
Ericsson, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, Motorola,
Nokia, Nortel Networks, Qualcomm, Sony, Sprint PCS
and Sun Microsystems.
Cellular Jini
While the coalition defines the back-end network, Sun
Microsystems is preparing a version of its Jini software
for cellular handsets. Although it has yet to be named,
the new version of Jini will fit into 40 kbytes of RAM and
be officially released at the JavaOne conference in June,
said Jon C. Bostrom, manager and lead architect for
consumer and embedded, at Sun.
"These are a different set of Jini protocols tuned to the
low-speed, high-latency environment of the cellular
network, where you need a different way to load Jini and
Java services on devices," said Bostrom, who was a
technology manager on the original Jini project.
In tandem with Jini for cellular, the company is porting
its K-Java virtual machines to a variety of handset
environments including those of the major cell-phone
manufacturers. A port of K-Java to the Palm Pilot will
also be announced at JavaOne, said Bostrom.
Jini is a software architecture for delivering Java-based
services automatically across a range of networked
devices. Bostrom said the cellular spin of Jini was the
first of a family of Jini versions tailored for unique
environments that would all work together.
Next up is what Bostrom called "Jini for the dot-com
home," a version of the software pared down to the
requirements of appliances that can be remotely
controlled. A version of Jini for a smart-card environment
is also in the works, Bostrom said.
"We see this as the second coming of Jini and the next
big thing," Bostrom said of the cellular effort.
The Sun designer played down performance problems
that continue to dog Java, noting that it would not take
much processor oomph to handle the requirements of a
40-kbyte stack. However, developers at this week's
Mobile Internet conference said that they still use C++
for performance-intensive tasks and reserve Java for
GUIs and other projects that can make use of Java's
platform independence.
"For a GUI, Java's platform independence is great, but
for graphics and performance-sensitive apps, Java is
terrible," said Mike Thomason, a software engineer
developing mobile Internet tools at Alcatel's Plano,
Texas, office. "I wish Java was as fast as C++. What I
really want to do is take my Java code and compile it,"
Thomason said.
One dynamic that plagues mobile Internet services is a
lack of data-friendly handsets; there are too many
software environments and too few applications.
John Yuzdepski, vice president of product management
and development at Sprint PCS (Kansas City, Mo.),
complained about the dearth of phones that can handle
Web services.
"This is a podunk device to use to surf the Internet," he
said, holding up a cell phone, "but it is a good thin
client." Yuzdepski's wish list for a data-capable cell
phone includes a model that uses an open software
kernel, can run Java applets, has a small external screen
for reading caller ID numbers and opens into a larger
PDA with a fuller display and speaker phone. LG
Electronics (Seoul, South Korea) will roll out a device
with many of these specifications next month, he said.
No model
"We are still trying to figure out the integration of the
Net and handsets to make it seamless, but there is no
model that exists for this yet," said Donna Montgomery,
vice president of Genie Internet, an Internet data unit
of BT's cellular service arm.
Currently, data services ride a variety of transports for
cellular, including the very popular Short Message
Service (SMS) used in GSM phones, HTML, HDML from
Phone.com and the emerging Wireless Application
Protocol (WAP).
"SMS is a real pain," said Locke Raper, director of
business development for CNN Interactive (Atlanta),
which delivers mobile data via 20 operators around the
world on all the various methods, with SMS accounting
for about half the traffic. "As a content provider we'd
much rather have a single standard."
Operators expect cramped 126-character circuit-switched
SMS services to evolve to 384-kbit/second IP-based
packet data methods such as General Packet Radio
Services, then to 3G techniques at up to 2 Mbits/second.
But few are certain of the milestones on that road.
Indeed, "the actual deployment of 3G will not occur
homogeneously. Implementation timetables will vary by
geographic region," Ray Jodoin, a senior analyst in the
wireless group at Cahners In-Stat (Phoenix), said
separately this week. That's creating a business for
companies like Aether Software (Vienna, Va.), which
develops proxy servers to translate HTML data from the
Web into WAP data for cell phones.
Despite the problems, most speakers here were upbeat
about the growth of a broad range of mobile Internet
applications being deployed on Europe's GSM networks,
including e-mail, e-commerce, location-based services
and games.
"There is no limit in the growth of wireless data when
you consider multimedia," said Lo, whose network
carries 2 billion SMS messages per month. Data could be
one-third of all cellular traffic by 2005, he said.
"Merchant services are the Holy Grail," said Yuzdepski.
"One day airtime may be free and we will be making a
percentage of transactions."
eet.com
Lynn |
