Top players in both the vendor and carrier space are pitching in to advance GAIT-GSM ANSI Interoperability Team-a new network standard that fuses TDMA and GSM technologies to enhance roaming, preserve TDMA and serve as an interim solution in the sojourn to the third-generation...
STOCKHOLM-L.M. Ericcson has signed an agreement to market and sell Aspiro's portfolio of WAP, SMS and GPRS applications and concepts for entertainment and messaging as part of Ericsson's WISE Portal.The portal offers mobile operators solutions for launching mobile services to subscribers."The collaboration with Ericsson...
NEW YORK-With up to seven competitors in some large markets, price wars have begun that are not sustainable as a long-term business case for carriers, telecommunications executives said last week at the "Kagan Wireless Telecom Summit.""Verizon missed its additions significantly. When the big guys...
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina-With a growth rate above 50 percent during 2001 and a 20-percent penetration, cellular telephony has proven itself as the main communications vehicle in Paraguay.Four operators compete nationwide. Telecel and Personal together control 95 percent of the market share, offering traditional cellular...
NEW DELHI, India-The Asia-Pacific region is witnessing a rapid growth of short message service (SMS), which is not only beginning to contribute significantly to operators' revenues, but is also setting the stage for future mobile data services. The Philippines continues to be the most...
In Beijing, it is uncivilized for a lady to talk on a mobile phone while walking, according to a report on the Beijing Evening News. It seems cultural rules of society can be seamlessly translated to the mobile industry and should be given adequate...
Three industry heavyweights announced plans to create universal standards for mobile instant messaging and presence services, a move that further validates a small but growing segment of the wireless industry.L.M. Ericsson, Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp. established last week the Wireless Village, which the...
SAN RAMON, Calif.-Short message service company MobileWay Inc. today announced it is moving into the more complicated U.S. market.The company, which offers an SMS product that allows messages to travel over diverse networks, now offers its product to European and Asian carriers, areas where...
I've seen the future and it is m-commerce. M is for money, isn't it? Money or mobile, same thing, different pronunciation. At Accenture's Global Communications Forum last week in Miami Beach, the promise of m-commerce was underlined over and over by diverse executives in...
NEW YORK-Nexthaus Corp., Raleigh, N.C., plans to help wireless carriers "squeeze as many dollars as possible from existing 2G networks" with its new SyncSuite synchronization software, said Rob Lease, co-founder and vice president.The company based its product on the premise that people will continue...
HELSINKI, Finland-New World Mobility, a mobile operator based in Hong Kong, has selected the Nokia Artuse Unstructured Supplementary Services Data Centre, a platform that offers faster interactive messaging services within GSM networks.According to Nokia, the USSD operates up to seven times faster than existing...
While the digital divide holds out hope of shrinking in the next half decade, signs persist that vendors and operators have yet to come to grips with the special needs of the burgeoning numbers of minority users.Two new studies reflect the optimism and obstacles...
SAN FRANCISCO-Aspiro and Wysdom Inc. signed an agreement that enables Aspiro to deliver short message service traffic within North America and Wysdom to deliver SMS traffic to the European market.Meanwhile, Wysdom customers will be able to reach more than 200 GSM carriers in Aspiro's...
BEIJING-Mobile-phone subscribers in East China's Zhejiang Province have complained about unwanted or false ads received through China Mobile's and China Unicom's short message service (SMS).Operators have no control over SMS messages sent between subscribers or through the Internet. Software developers are working on solutions...
AudiovoxAudiovox Communications Corp. announced it would start shipping the newest version of its flagship handset, the CDMA-9100 tri-mode Web-browsing cellular phone. The company said the phone operates on the 800 MHz AMPS/CDMA, 1900 MHz AMPS/CDMA and 1900 MHz personal communications services frequencies. The new...
NEW YORK-Some recent developments have brightened the longer-term prospects for smart cards in North American wireless communications, although the picture gets cloudier when framed as an immediate prospect.Opportunity is knocking for expansion of their use in provisioning of telecommunications services. Beyond that deployment, smart-card...
HandsetsSendoEuropean mobile phone manufacturer, Sendo, launched its second product platform, the S200 dual-band GSM mobile phone. Aimed at the young-at-heart prepaid market, features of the small and light phone include a variety of colors, short message service (SMS) picture messaging, ring-tone sharing and games....
OXFORD, United Kingdom-Airflash, a wireless location technology developer, unveiled an interactive short message service location service that it claims is the first within the wireless industry. The firm said that, given the majority of GSM/personal communications service cell phones can support SMS, compared with...
E-business software provider Oracle Corp. has launched the second coming of the Oracle 9I Application Server Wireless Edition to extend its grip on the location-based and personalization segments of the wireless industry."It is now more mature with standardized location-based service capability," said Jacob Christfort,...
NEW YORK-AirMedia has embarked on a common carrier strategy for Internet content provision with the late January introduction of its new "Wireless Hub.""This will be a worldwide automated marketplace, with a back end and front end to enable mobile content and services," David S....
NEW YORK-Domestic wireless operators have begun to take prepaid services seriously, although it will be awhile before they approach the successful benchmark set by their European counterparts.Comfort with credit is a key distinction between American consumers and those abroad, where cash is king. Prepaid...
TOKYO-The millennium bug was squashed in most industries around the world, with one exception in wireless.Due to a Y2K glitch, short message service (SMS) messages on some types of terminals used by Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo's customers were eliminated. About 400 complaints about...
PARIS-Mitsubishi's European telecommunications brand Trium released its new GSM/GPRS phone-enabled pocket PC, Mondo, which the company said will be its flagship product this year.Mondo features a high-powered 166 MHz Intel processor and a variety of Microsoft Corp. software products. It will initially be available...
MOSCOW-Major Russian Moscow-based carriers recently have been expanding their short message service (SMS) capacities to meet the demand of an anticipated boom. However, experts fear the expected SMS incomes will hardly compensate for the average revenue per user (ARPU) decrease registered last year.Mobile TeleSystems...
