MURRAY HILL, N.J.-In the wireless data weltanschauung of Lucent Technologies Inc., operators will remain the linchpin for an increasingly complex assembly of players. Lucent’s role, from its world view, is to anticipate and facilitate solutions for each part, large and small, of this expanding totality.
“In my view, there will be cyber carriers, which are the data carriers that optimize servers for applications and networks. There will be network operators, which provide the infrastructure. There will be service bureaus that aggregate content. There will also be mobile virtual network operators, and we are just at the beginning of that segmentation,” said Stacey J. Gelman, vice president of Mobile Internet for Lucent’s Wireless Networks Group.
“I have spent a lot of time thinking about how service providers will win, and there are three critical components: location, presence and personalization. … Carriers have a very trusted relationship with you, the customer. If they expand and extend that relationship with you, you’d be comfortable going from the familiar with the familiar.”
The Lucent Wireless Data Gateway, introduced late last year, is designed to permit network operators to introduce personalized services, including those based on a subscriber’s location. It also will permit customers to change or customize their wireless services.
“The gateway is designed to make the infrastructure more flexible to many kinds of companies in this space and gives applications providers something to build on,” Gelman said.
“We are positioning the gateway as a way to achieve the goal of retaining value in the network, to leverage an asset in which carriers already have invested.”
The Wireless Data Gateway serves as a mediator. It extracts from the carrier’s network information about the subscriber, whether his phone is on, where he is and what features he has, said Edward A. Forzani, market manager of wireless systems.
It shares this “in a controlled and secure way” with the Internet, “allowing service providers to choose which applications they want to partner with and enhancing the user experience with the applications.” It also permits end users to decide whether they want their information shared with applications providers.
“Initially, the gateway is focused on location and presence, which means whether the phone is on, and this is very good for instant messaging,” Forzani said. “The gateway will eliminate the need for the customer to know the ZIP code. In the future, it will permit porting of Internet transactions to wireless devices.”
Even as other kinds of companies nip at their heels, telecommunications services providers enjoy another unique advantage.
“Because of their databases, operators are the only ones who know where their customers are and what they are looking at,” said Eric J. Wilson, vice president of the North America Region for the Wireless Networks Group.
“It is most important to be able to bill and identify down to the megabit level and to change from a minutes-of-use model to sharing in e-commerce revenues.”
Nevertheless, Hugh J. Sheridan, director of mobile Internet architecture and technology, cautioned that wireline content providers have ascended the throne at the expense of landline telecom carriers.
“As we move into the wireless (Internet) space, carriers’ ownership of the customers won’t disappear, or else they will become commodity players. But the content guys will take a piece of it, no doubt.”
Reliability is key
In a mobile data environment, quality of service will become increasingly important to wireless carriers and their customers, Gelman said. With that goal in mind, Lucent announced late last year a strategic relationship with Sun Microsystems Inc.
In Lucent’s new Flexent Mobility Server, Sun’s carrier-grade Internet Protocol servers will join forces with Bell Labs’ software, which enhances wireless data network reliability to 99.999 percent. This is part of a package of mobile Internet architecture network elements that Lucent plans for phased commercial introduction starting early next year.
Five-nines reliability is important for mission critical functions, while 99 percent may be adequate for store-and-forward functions involved in content caching and switching, Sheridan said. Content switching involves viewing information transmitted and deploying intelligent agents to filter and reformat it to meet the needs of different networks and electronic communications devices, Gelman said.
In June, Lucent said it had formed its new Internet Content Delivery and Distribution business unit. As part of that announcement, Lucent unveiled a strategic alliance with Mirror Image Internet Inc., a Woburn, Mass., company with financial backing from Hewlett-Packard Co. Mirror Image has a patented architecture for Internet content distribution.
“A very big piece of what we work on with customers, the focal point of our discussions, is how to help the evolution path from circuit-switched to IP. Do you throw all the old stuff away, take write-offs and drop in a new network or maximize investment protection and phase in the new?” Wilson said. “Solutions go both ways, but our systems are backward compatible and our architecture designed with software upgrade capabilities.”
IP networks are more efficient at transmitting data, but voice over IP still has quality and reliability problems in need of resolution.
“Voice over ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) is doing a good interim job of juggling. The big question operators are struggling with is at what point to make the crossover,” Wilson said.
A parallel dynamic is under way with regard to data speeds, but the beauty of data is “it is one of those things you can do at any rate, although it gets better as it gets faster,” Gelman said.
While a “five-line text experience” will not be acceptable to mobile communications users over time, speech-to-text is one promising development to reach the goal of “zero click transactions,” Sheridan said. Lucent has achieved voice- recognition capabilities that are 99-percent accurate, and the remaining 1 percent comprises identical twins.
Having been in the phone business for a long time, one of Lucent’s core competencies is audio and speech processing and its interface with telephony networks, said Robert J. Yurkovic, director of advanced business management wireless networks.
Yurkovic called Voice XML “the hottest format” and also advised the wireless-phone industry to keep a close eye on the direction in which AM and FM radio is heading-to mobile wireless radio.
“We don’t build our own devices. We look at the breadth of what is out there, and there is a lot of great stuff out there. Then, we position different manufacturers to benefit,” Sheridan said.
“Ours is a total solutions focus, bringing in device manufacturers, applications providers, the Wireless Data Gateway, the infrastructure. It’s more than driving bits of data over the air.”
