The GSM Association-the body behind GSM and GPRS networks, as well as the popular short message service-announced last week another standards effort, one that some industry observers believe will be a major catalyst for the worldwide uptake of the mobile Internet.
“We view the creation and adoption of the M-Service guidelines as one of the most significant milestones in the evolution of mobile data services as it creates an open architecture for implementation of mobile Internet platforms and applications,” said Credit Suisse First Boston in a report.
The GSM Association introduced its Mobile Services Initiative, or M-Services, last week, and the association drew from its long membership list for some big-name support. Manufacturers Alcatel Althsom, L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Sagem, Samsung and Siemens AG announced their support for the initiative, as well as operators Telecom Italia Mobile, France Telecom Mobiles, Telefonica Moviles, BT Wireless and Vodafone. Other wireless companies, including software and platform company Openwave Systems Inc., also voiced their support.
The M-Services initiative is an attempt to unify and standardize the mobile Internet experience users will have over GPRS networks. The initiative covers a variety of GPRS applications that are expected to be popular, including enhanced graphics, music, video games, ring tones and screen savers. The standard also includes SyncML, Multimedia Messaging, WAP and WAP 2.0 for WML and xHTML.
The GSM Association is looking to replicate the success of NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode wireless Internet service in Japan, which operates one single, accepted standard and benefits from a packet-based network. The M-Services initiative is designed for a GPRS network, which is also packet based.
“The rapid adoption of these guidelines by the GSM Association signals the collective groups’ desire to generate the data traffic experienced by NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service, and we believe lays the framework for an inflection point in mobile data adoption,” CSFB wrote.
In its report, CSFB said the M-Services initiative is an extremely significant standards push, and overshadows other standards efforts, including the recent Wireless Village and Enhanced Messaging Service announcements. The Wireless Village initiative focuses on instant messaging and presence applications, while EMS is an enhanced version of SMS messages, which are extremely popular in Europe. M-Services includes support for EMS.
While some see M-Services as an important step for the worldwide mobile Internet, others don’t put as much weight in it.
“It extends the basic WAP propositions,” said Jane Zweig, chief executive officer of the Shosteck Group. “It’s still based on WML.”
Zweig said M-Services is an enhancement and an extension of the current mobile Internet standard, WAP, which has met with a significant amount of criticism since its introduction. However, she said, the M-Services initiative does bring more consistency to the GPRS mobile Internet effort.
Most agree that one GSM Association member has the most to gain from the M-Services initiative.
Openwave contributed significantly to M-Services’ WML extension for the graphical user interface, and the initiative also includes Openwave’s Download Fun architecture. CSFB said the aggressive timeline for the rollout of M-Services-mandatory compliance is scheduled for October-will push handset vendors to use Openwave’s browser rather than investing in their own, which has so far been a common move.
“Openwave stands in a better position to ensure that its carrier customers receive the maximum benefit of their mobile Internet gateway and have applications and services that are more attractive than its competitors,” CSFB wrote.
The adoption of the M-Services initiative seems to be moving quickly: Alcatel, Sagem, Samsung and Siemens have all said they will commercially ship M-Services phones using the Openwave browser by the end of this year. And, even more surprisingly, the first batch of handsets is scheduled for release this summer.
“We view the GSM Association’s embrace of the M-Services guidelines as alleviating service provider concerns on the viability of mobile Internet technologies and view it as a significant catalyst for the aggressive adoption of mobile Internet services by carriers throughout the world,” CSFB wrote.
