ATLANTA-Wireless infrastructure vendors made their wireless Internet plans a major priority at SuperComm here last week, introducing network solutions portfolios that, while different in makeup, have the same goal-to help wireless carriers avoid commoditization when converging with the Internet.
Lucent Technologies Inc. and L.M. Ericsson made major wireless Internet announcements at the show. Lucent unleashed a global network solution suite for the mobile Internet, made up of a new router designed by Bell Labs, Internet Protocol server technology from Sun Microsystems and a base station platform optimized for all major third-generation standards.
The Flexent Wireless Router from Bell Labs was built specifically for mobile Internet traffic to and from wireless devices. Lucent emphasized it is not basing the router for its wireless Internet network infrastructure on technology developed for fixed Internet networks.
“This is a wholly new type of router and we married it with a classic, market-leading technology from Sun,” said Sam Gronner, media relations director at Lucent, referring to the Flexent Mobility Server based on Sun’s IP server.
The router directs voice and data packets to either public telephone networks or the Internet but also can perform mobile-specific functions like frame selection and soft handoff to 3G networks, he said.
The Flexent OneBTS base station was designed for cdma2000, wideband CDMA/UMTS and TDMA/EDGE 3G networks.
Elements of the complete platform are scheduled to undergo phased introduction beginning early next year, concurrent with commercial deployment of the initial OneBTS base station platform.
Lucent also discussed its cooperative innovations program, to encourage third-party application providers to create solutions for Lucent equipment. This eliminates the need for carriers to conduct interoperability testing because Lucent already will ensure the applications will work on its infrastructure. About 70 application providers are already involved in the program.
The overall goal, the company said, is to give wireless carriers the best tools possible to help carve their own niche in the wireless Internet market and not get marginalized by Internet content and service providers.
“If relegated to pipes, the value of the network is lost. You get less out of the network,” said Stacy Gelman, vice president of mobile Internet at Lucent. This network equipment, she said, gives carriers the back-end technology needed to participate in the game, such as taking a percentage of transactions occurring over their networks, which, as Gronner put it, will help them “keep their skin in the game.”
For its part, Ericsson added support for Wireless Application Protocol and short message service to its Directory Gateway product release 2.1, expected to be available in the third quarter.
The gateway essentially is a content management system that provides a single access point for e-mail, phone listings and commercial content. It handles queries from end-user devices, finds the appropriate source for the information and converts it into the proper format. In addition to WAP and SMS, is also supports queries from personal computers, e-mail, browser or directory access protocols.
Ericsson also launched its WAP site, allowing mobile Internet users to access its Web site interactive services from wireless devices.
