4G mobile technology

The 4th generation (4G) mobile technology is becoming the emerging solution to drive the new growth of the industry, and help foster state-of-the-art technology, novel partnership arrangements or transformational business models.

The various innovations that this technology includes are:

• In the 4G mobile era, the access to the mobile services will be evolved to an open Mobile Cloud so that it is fully open to any developers and providers. In this way, any non-wireless industries, such as Google, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, GM, Bank of America can provide services for their mobile users. The access to the mobile network is still controlled by the traditional wireless operators such as AT&T, Verizon,  T-Mobile and China Mobile.
• The mobile device system architecture will be open in order to converge multiple RTTs (radio transmission technologies) in one same device. Same as laptop computer, the future Smartphone will be based on open wireless architecture (OWA) technology which means, when you change the wireless standards, you do not need to change phone. It is totally different from current multi-standards phone which is in closed system architecture, and users can not remove the unused RTT modules and basically can not do anything on the mobile phone system.
• Any portable consumer electronics device can be a mobile phone by inserting the OWA-powered mobile RTT(s) card. This approach is truly converging the mobile wireless technology with the computer technology by providing the OWA virtualization layer between the high-layer computer-based OS (operating systems) & applications solutions and the underlying wireless transmission-based different mobile networks access means.

The world is moving rapidly towards this 4G open mobile movement. In China, the government has in fact,  targeted for 4G mobile industry. In European Union, evolution to 4G has been the mission-critical strategy since 2003. Japan and Korea started 4G regulations in 2002.

Visit the 4G website to know more.

USSD – Unstructured Supplementary Service Data

Ok, this post might just get a little technical… But USSD is a service that can open huge business opportunities… Some banks are already using it to their advantage.

Unstructured Supplementary Service Data is a capability of all GSM phones. It is generally associated with real-time or instant messaging type phone services. There is no store-and-forward capability like that in an SMS. Hence, response times for interactive USSD-based services are generally quicker than those used for SMS. The advantage of USSD currently is that,  in operation, it is not possible to bill for USSD directly as yet. Which means that users of USSD service get it free of cost.

Users do not need to access any particular phone menu to access services with USSD- they can enter the Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) command direct from the initial mobile phone screen.

The primary benefit of USSD is that it allows for very fast communication between the user and an application. Most of the applications enabled by USSD are menu based and include services such as mobile prepay and chat.

You could read up telecom circle for an understanding of USSD’s usage in mobile payment systems. Other reads include mobilein and wiki.

Tone Dialing / Pulse Dialing

This one might be a little technical…but wanted to find out the fundamental difference between the two different types of dialing in a landline phone.

Pulse dialing, dial pulse, or loop disconnect dialing, also called rotary or decadic dialling in the United Kingdom (because up to 10 pulses are sent), is pulsing in which a direct-current pulse train is produced by interrupting a steady signal according to a fixed or formatted code for each digit and at a standard pulse repetition rate.

Dial pulsing originated with a rotary dial integrated into telephone instruments, for the purpose of signaling. Subsequent applications use electromechanical or electronic circuits to generate dial pulses.

The pulses are generated through the making and breaking of the telephone connection (akin to flicking a light switch on and off); the audible clicks are a side effect of this. As a result, all that is really needed to dial a number with pulse dialing is a switch. Each digit in the number is represented by a different number of rapid clicks. In most countries one click is used for the digit 1, two clicks for 2, and so on, with ten clicks for the digit 0.

Individual digits in a phone number need to be separated with a short pause so as not to bleed into each other and in keypad based pulse dialing digits need to be “buffered” when dialed rapidly. In rotary systems this interdigit interval is provided by the slow rotation of the mechanical dial.

 Dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signaling is used for telecommunication signaling over analog telephone lines in the voice-frequency band between telephone handsets and other communications devices and the switching center. Most fixed-line phones now use dual tone multi frequency (DTMF, also called touch tone or tone dialing) rather than pulse dialing, but most telephone equipment retains support for pulse dialing for backward compatibility. Some models of keypad phones have a tone/pulse switch which can be toggled to switch between the two, making these phones usable in areas where DTMF dialing is not accepted.