Carrier Services
A "Wireless Solutions Fast Start" Article

There are three national cell phone carriers, Bell Mobility, Telus Mobility and Rogers Wireless, differing in their coverage, technologies, and support for business or consumer.  In this article, we will describe their offerings and where their services fit into wireless solutions.  In the next article, we will look at the various generations of wireless offerings, and where the carriers provide these services.

All carriers provide core technology services that will play a key role in business solutions that you develop over their networks.  The bearer services are:

• Voice

• Internet access

• Short Message Services (SMS), also known as text messaging or texting,

• Email

Carriers are starting to provide extensions to SMS.

• Extended Message Service (EMS), allowing sufficiently simple graphics to be sent along with a text message

• Multimedia Message Service (MMS, picture messaging), allowing rich multimedia to be sent from one device to another.  

These may all play a part in a mobility strategy.

Voice

Voice for person-person calls is well understood, but there are some considerations that make voice useful in building person-system applications.

First, voice has excellent coverage.  Voice coverage using cell phone companies or the public phone companies allows you to reach remote locations in the field, although not always wirelessly.  Second, the growing maturity of voice recognition and voice synthesis systems allows users to make requests, participate in business processes, and update information over a phone.

Finally, a new technology called VoiceXML makes it easier than before to build interactive voice response (IVR) applications.  

In an article dedicated entirely to voice, we'll show you some compelling examples, and tell you how you can experiment with this technology free of charge.

Internet Access

The carriers provide internet access over their cellular networks to a variety of devices, such as some cell phones, Blackberries, and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants, such as Palm and Pocket PC type devices).  

It is certainly the case that wireless internet access was over hyped and generally disappointing when the main scenario was cell phones over slow networks.  The situation has changes in a number of ways:

• We now understand that useful functionality can be provided on less rich user interfaces than the desktop browser.  Decorative visuals and screen pop-ups can be dispensed with in favour of more highly focussed information

• Our understanding of the needs of the mobile user has improved.  A mobile user has different needs than a desktop user. The latter is a fixed location, conducive to browsing and being entertained. The mobile user has specific needs, often time- and space- limited, such as getting a stock quote or finding the nearest defibrillator station.

• Devices with larger, better displays are available

• Networks are getting faster.

Short Messaging Services

SMS let you send and receive short messages of up to 160 characters between certain types of wireless devices. These wireless devices have to use the more advanced networks provided by the carriers, at least 2G networks.  It cannot be used on the data only networks such as CDPD, or Mobitex/ARDIS which the original Blackberry used.

In the early days, there were massive SMS interoperability restrictions between the Canadian carriers.  This is not surprising, as SMS utilizes spare capacity on voice part of networks, which in Canada are based on two completely different technologies, called GSM and CDMA.  However, from a user perspective, it sucked.  Once interoperability between the carriers was established, SMS usage skyrocketed.

Text messaging is widely associated with consumer wireless, particularly one-one texting in the youth and young adult segments.  Business use of SMS is also expected to increase, as enterprises understand the value of pushing out short, useful messages such as "Take you medicine", especially if the messages are system generated.  One Australian Bank is using encrypted SMS to allow customers to check account balances, electronic bill payment, and funds transfer from a mobile device.

Multimedia Message Services (MMS) is the big brother of SMS and will allow multimedia such as voice, pictures and video, to be sent from one device to another over the carrier network.  These handsets can handle multimedia input or output, so expect to see capabilities such as cameras, voice recorders and video players built into handheld devices.

Email

Email is a global service with excellent reach and few interoperability problems, and is available over many cell phones and PDAs.  

One consideration about wireless email for mobile workers is how many business email accounts you want to manage.  Many products will let employees use their same email address for their corporate desktop and wireless devices.  Essentially, they forward mail received in their corporate in-box to the users mobile device, in the process applying rules on which mail must get through and which can be blocked.

This approach is beneficial because is rationalizes email addressing, and makes it straightforward to change to another carrier as new products and services are introduced.

Churning 

Churning isn't a new service being offered by the carriers, it's the movement of a customer from one carrier to a competitor. All carriers are concerned about churning, and churn rates have been quoted as high as 30%.  As one response to containing churn, carriers try to lock consumers in to long-term plans. The carriers are also trying to provide value-added services for consumer and corporate uses. These include wireless portals for local weather and services, games, etc.  Some carriers have expressed more interest in the corporate world than others, but no carrier has yet landed on the killer-app that will attract and retain business users.

Churning might get worse in the near future if Canada follows the lead of the US and introduces Wireless Local Numbering Portability (WLNP). This is a requirement for carriers to let customers transfer their wireless cellphone number from one carrier to another, or even to the wireline phone companies.  Currently, the inability to transfer phone numbers is a barrier to switching companies.  Once this barrier is eliminated, customers will select carriers based on quality of service, and price (which will likely decrease).

 

Martin Stares is a respected speaker, author and coach in the field of wireless solutions and strategy for business, helping companies find innovative wireless solutions for their organizations. For more information and resources, visit Greyfriars Consulting Group at www.greyfriars.net. Read other articles in this series This article is one of a series call Wireless Solutions Fast Start, a course helping companies and individuals understand the business uses of wireless technologies. Visit www.greyfriars.net for other articles in this course. Free content for your web site Would you like to add this article and many others to your web site at no cost? The Greyfriars Wireless Solutions articles may be used on your site as long as the following conditions are met. The full content and links of each article must be used. The author and copyright notice must stay intact. The last paragraph describing the author and their business along with the link to their web site must be intact. If you do use one of our articles, drop us a line at enquiries@greyfriars.net so we can visit your site.