The GSM Association announces "Mobile Services Initiative" to push QoS of the mobile economy
At their press conference in London on June 13, 2001, the
GSM Association (GSMA) launches the "Mobile Services Initiative" (M-Services) to push the total Quality of Service of today's and tomorrow's mobile economy user experience. M-Services is not a new standard but a mere set of guidelines especially directed to handset manufacturers recommending them to build handsets that include best of breed, currently available wireless standards and technologies. We are not talking about time jumping directly into the heart of the flashy 3G future but rather basic stuff like ringtones, enhanced graphics, music, video, games, wallpapers, screen savers or messaging. The M-Services
guidelines can be downloaded at:
http://www.gsmworld.com/presentations/m_services/aa35.doc.
The GSMA looks like the right organisation to push such an effort. Their motivation is twofold: Next to pushing the adoption of money making mobile services it is all about keeping away i-mode in Europe by enhancing the general quality of mobile services. The better you are, the tougher it is for your competitors to beat you.
Fair enough, the GSMA is the world's leading wireless industry representative body, consisting of more than 538 2G, 2,5 G and 3G wireless network operators, key manufacturers and suppliers and spanning members in 169 countries of the world. With 537 million customers (as of end May 2001) the GSM platform accounts for approximately 70 percent of the total digital cellular
wireless market. They should be able to do it - if not the GSMA, who else? I can easily imagine the thousands of daily complaints of their members concerning lack of handsets, WAP failures, high tariffs,
runaway customers or other good news. Enough motivation for some good little mobile Kaizen, isn't it?
M-Services is a reaction to the widely appreciated competitive advantage of i-mode, the driving operator behind it and the superior handset technologies of NTTDocomo's inner device circle that build the hardware to make the mobile customers more happy than here in Europe. As we don't have
a single strong operator here in Europe, we need the operator-driven GSMA to bring everybody to the same table. As the delay of new generation handsets is among the major factors slowing down the evolution of the mobile economy in Europe, the handset manufacturers clearly look like they need some
help from the people that are closer to the customers as they deliver the services and bill them for it.
Not surprisingly, once againg Openwave plays a big role in this one, the same way they did during the wapforum's foundation. Back in 1997/1998 they contributed a lot of specifications of their HDML into WML
which was jointly developed by the leading wapforum members but mainly influenced by few of them, among them Openwave. This time they open up some intellectual property including GUI recommendations as they can be found in their Mobile Browser, "Download Fun" mobile service delivery specifications
and some more. Thus we can conclude:
a) Openwave is a master of driving the industry forward with wisely selected pieces of their technology that they open up from proprietary to standard. Thus they trade intellectual property for marketing power. A move that is not only appreciated in the open source community but also increasingly among a wider range of (software/hardware) marketers.
b) The GSM Assciation is aware of the superiour market success of i-mode and its underlying marketing and technologies. The GSMA seems to know that supporting the weakest link in the chain, currently the device manufacturers, is crucial to the success of the wireless industry. This is a good move as we are all aware of the need for closer cooperation between device manufacturers, operators and application developers.
c) The Mobile Service Initiative includes a set of short-term guidelines to push GPRS, GUIs on the handset, download of "fun media objects" and messaging (SMS, EMS, MMS, EMail, UMS, ...). At the same time, M-Services co-exists with the various crucial standards enabling the mobile economy, like WAP, SyncML, SAT, etc.
Any initiative that increases the QoS of the mobile economy for us, the protagonists trying to use it every day, is welcome. And we as users just want the best services for the lowest prices. Whether the operator or handsets are Japanese, we don't really care.
