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Because of its
synergy with the Internet, GPRS would allow mobile users to participate fully in
existing Internet chat groups rather than needing to set up their own groups
that are dedicated to mobile users. Since the number of participants is an
important factor determining the value of participation in the newsgroup, the
use of GPRS here would be advantageous. GPRS will not however support point to
multipoint services in its first phase, hindering the distribution of a single
message to a group of people. As such, given the installed base of SMS capable
devices, we would expect SMS to remain the primary bearer for chat applications
in the foreseeable future, although experimentation with using GPRS is likely to
commence sooner rather than later.
Textural
and Visual Information
A wide range of content can be delivered to mobile phone users ranging from
share prices, sports scores, weather, flight information, news headlines, prayer
reminders, lottery results, jokes, horoscopes, traffic, location sensitive
services and so on. This information need not necessarily be textual- it may be
maps or graphs or other types of visual information.
The length of
a short message of 160 characters suffices for delivering information when it is
quantitative - such as a share price or a sports score or temperature. When the
information is of a qualitative nature however, such as a horoscope or news
story, 160 characters is too short other than to tantalize or annoy the
information recipient since they receive the headline or forecast but little
else of substance. As such, GPRS will likely be used for qualitative information
services when end users have GPRS capable devices, but SMS will continue to be
used for delivering most quantitative information services. Interestingly, chat
applications are a form of qualitative information that may remain delivered
using SMS, in order to limit people to brevity and reduce the incidence of
spurious and irrelevant posts to the mailing list that are a common occurrence
on Internet chat groups.
Still
Images
Still images such as photographs, pictures, postcards, greeting cards and
presentations, static web pages can be sent and received over the mobile network
as they are across fixed telephone networks. It will be possible with GPRS to
post images from a digital camera connected to a GPRS radio device directly to
an Internet site, allowing near real-time desktop publishing.
Moving
Images
Over time, the nature and form of mobile communication is getting less textual
and more visual. The wireless industry is moving from text messages to icons and
picture messages to photographs and blueprints to video messages and movie
previews being downloaded and on to full blown movie watching via data streaming
on a mobile device.
Sending moving
images in a mobile environment has several vertical market applications
including monitoring parking lots or building sites for intruders or thieves,
and sending images of patients from an ambulance to a hospital.
Videoconferencing applications, in which teams of distributed sales people can
have a regular sales meeting without having to go to a particular physical
location, is another application for moving images.
Web
Browsing
Using Circuit Switched Data for web browsing has never been an enduring
application for mobile users. Because of the slow speed of Circuit Switched
Data, it takes a long time for data to arrive from the Internet server to the
browser. Alternatively, users switch off the images and just access the text on
the web, and end up with difficult to read text layouts on screens that are
difficult to read from. As such, mobile Internet browsing is better suited to
GPRS.
Document
Sharing/Collaborative Working
Mobile data facilitates document sharing and remote collaborative working. This
lets different people in different places work on the same document at the same
time. Multimedia applications combining voice, text, pictures and images can
even be envisaged. These kinds of applications could be useful in any problem
solving exercise such as fire fighting, combat to plan the route of attack,
medical treatment, advertising copy setting, architecture, journalism and so on.
Even comments on which resort to book a holiday at could benefit from document
sharing to save everyone having to visit the travel agent to make a decision.
Anywhere somebody can benefit from having and being able to comment on a visual
depiction of a situation or matter, such collaborative working can be useful. By
providing sufficient bandwidth, GPRS facilitates multimedia applications such as
document sharing.
Audio
Despite many improvements in the quality of voice calls on mobile networks such
as Enhanced Full Rate (EFR), they are still not broadcast quality. There are
scenarios where journalists or undercover police officers with portable
professional broadcast quality microphones and amplifiers capture interviews
with people or radio reports dictated by themselves and need to send this
information back to their radio or police station. Leaving a mobile phone on, or
dictating to a mobile phone, would simply not give sufficient voice quality to
allow that transmission to be broadcast or analyzed for the purposes of
background noise analysis or voice printing, where the speech autograph is taken
and matched against those in police storage. Since even short voice clips occupy
large file sizes, GPRS or other high speed mobile data services are needed.
Job
Dispatch
Nonvoice mobile
services can be used to assign and communicate new jobs from office-based staff
to mobile field staff. Customers typically telephone a call center whose staff
take the call and categorize it. Those calls requiring a visit by field sales or
service representative can then be escalated to those mobile workers. Job
dispatch applications can optionally be combined with vehicle positioning
applications - such that the nearest available suitable personnel can be
deployed to serve a customer. GSM nonvoice services can be used not only to send
the job out, but also as a means for the service engineer or sales person can
keep the office informed of progress towards meeting the customer's requirement.
The remote worker can send in a status message such as "Job 1234 complete,
on my way to 1235".
The 160
characters of a short message are sufficient for communicating most delivery
addresses such as those needed for a sales, service or some other job dispatch
application such as mobile pizza delivery and courier package delivery. However,
160 characters does require manipulation of the customer data such as the use of
abbreviations such as "St" instead of "Street". Neither does
160 characters leave much space for giving the field representative any
information about the problem that has been reported or the customer profile.
The field representative is able to arrive at the customer premises but is not
very well briefed beyond that. This is where GPRS will come in to allow more
information to be sent and received more easily. With GPRS, a photograph of the
customer and their premises could, for example, be sent to the field
representative to assist in finding and identifying the customer. As such, we
expect job dispatch applications will be an early adopter of GPRS-based
communications.
Corporate
Email
With up to half of employees typically away from their desks at any one time, it
is important for them to keep in touch with the office by extending the use of
corporate email systems beyond an employee's office PC. Corporate email systems
run on Local Area computer Networks (LAN) and include Microsoft Mail, Outlook,
Outlook Express, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Lotus cc:Mail.
Since GPRS
capable devices will be more widespread in corporations than amongst the general
mobile phone user community, there are likely to be more corporate email
applications using GPRS than Internet email ones whose target market is more
general.
Internet
Email
Internet email services come in the form of a gateway service where the messages
are not stored, or mailbox services in which messages are stored. In the case of
gateway services, the wireless email platform simply translates the message from
SMTP, the Internet email protocol, into SMS and sends to the SMS Center. In the
case of mailbox email services, the emails are actually stored and the user gets
a notification on their mobile phone and can then retrieve the full email by
dialing in to collect it, forward it and so on.
Upon receiving
a new email, most Internet email users do not currently get notified of this
fact on their mobile phone. When they are out of the office, they have to dial
in speculatively and periodically to check their mailbox contents. However, by
linking Internet email with an alert mechanism such as SMS or GPRS, users can be
notified when a new email is received.
Vehicle
Positioning
This application integrates satellite positioning systems that tell people where
they are with nonvoice mobile services that let people tell others where they
are. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a free-to-use global network of 24
satellites run by the US Department of Defense. Anyone with a GPS receiver can
receive their satellite position and thereby find out where they are. Vehicle
positioning applications can be used to deliver several services including
remote vehicle diagnostics, ad-hoc stolen vehicle tracking and new rental car
fleet tariffs.
The Short
Message Service is ideal for sending Global Positioning System (GPS) position
information such as longitude, latitude, bearing and altitude. GPS coordinates
are typically about 60 characters in length. GPRS could alternatively be used.
Remote
LAN Access
When mobile workers are away from their desks, they clearly need to connect to
the Local Area Network in their office. Remote LAN applications encompasses
access to any applications that an employee would use when sitting at their
desk, such as access to the intranet, their corporate email services such as
Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes and to database applications running on Oracle
or Sybase or whatever. The mobile terminal such as handheld or laptop computer
has the same software programs as the desktop on it, or cut down client versions
of the applications accessible through the corporate LAN. This application area
is therefore likely to be a conglomeration of remote access to several different
information types - email, intranet, databases. This information may all be
accessible through web browsing tools, or require proprietary software
applications on the mobile device. The ideal bearer for Remote LAN Access
depends on the amount of data being transmitted, but the speed and latency of
GPRS make it ideal.
File
Transfer
As this generic term suggests, file transfer applications encompass any form of
downloading sizeable data across the mobile network. This data could be a
presentation document for a traveling salesperson, an appliance manual for a
service engineer or a software application such as Adobe Acrobat Reader to read
documents. The source of this information could be one of the Internet
communication methods such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), telnet, http or Java
- or from a proprietary database or legacy platform. Irrespective of source and
type of file being transferred, this kind of application tends to be bandwidth
intensive. It therefore requires a high speed mobile data service such as GPRS,
EDGE or UMTS to run satisfactorily across a mobile network.
Home
Automation
Home automation applications combine remote security with remote control.
Basically, you can monitor your home from wherever you are - on the road, on
holiday, or at the office. If your burglar alarm goes off, not only do you get
alerted, but you get to go live and see who are perpetrators are and perhaps
even lock them in. Not only can you see things at home, but you can do things
too. You can program your video, switch your oven on so that the preheating is
complete by the time you arrive home (traffic jams permitting) and so on. Your
GPRS capable mobile phone really does become like the remote control devices we
use today for our television, video, hi-fi and so on. As the Internet Protocol
(IP) will soon be everywhere - not just in mobile phones because of GPRS but all
manner of household appliances and in every machine - these devices can be
addressed and instructed. A key enabler for home automation applications will be
Bluetooth, which allows disparate devices to interwork.
Source Mobile Lifestreams
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