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GSM
Briefing
Being able to stay in touch whilst away from the office is vital these days. The growth of the cellular phone is testimony to this fact, with busy executives keen to maintain contact with colleagues and customers whilst in the car, on the train or even in the back garden. But there is more to staying in touch than just being able to take voice calls, and there is a gradual shift away from using cellular phones as voice-only communications devices. For many mobile users, however, the idea of wireless remote access to the corporate network is a new one, and one that is often shied away from as being too complicated, too slow and too error prone for everyday use. The most important factor to consider in any mobile architecture is that of resilience because without this the user experience will be difficult and short lived. Dropped calls and lost connections quickly become impossible to manage, and the user, once ‘logged in’, becomes reluctant to log out again until he has completed all his work. This can sometimes result in the finance director, who has to pay for it all, terminating the project because of high usage costs as a result of repeated transactions or extended on-line times. UK-based Brand Communications – currently chairing the ETSI 3G packet services standards committee - has now delivered it’s mobile data solution to 17 GSM networks across Europe including BT Cellnet and Orange in the UK, and Esat Digifone in Ireland. In addition to carrier-class implementations, Brand also has deployments in many blue chip and emergency service organisations with the customer premises version of the product. “The GSM networks that have deployed our solution have seen their data subscriptions soar and the level of ‘churn’ reduce as customers discover the value added data service a must for their business and in keeping with the move toward outsourcing of communications and the use of managed service provision”, says Martin Kendrick, Brand Communications Managing Director. A major part of the successful launch of the Brand Apollo solution in Ireland (branded as "Digifone EasyData") has been the field trials carried out by Siemens Ltd. “A pilot group in Siemens put EasyData through it's paces in the field prior to launch and Siemens are now deploying the solution nation-wide to their field engineers”, says Colin Coffey, Product Development Project Manager at Esat Digifone. “These field engineers dial into the Brand server throughout the day and access their online systems. We were confident that we had made a wise investment in the Brand solution when we had a key systems integrator like Siemens using EasyData on a daily basis”. Tony Devane, Technology Consulting Manager Information and Communication Networks, Siemens Ltd, agrees. “The main benefits to Siemens in deploying EasyData have been the significant cost savings achieved, the ease of use, and the resilience of the solution compared to using standard GSM data”. GSM may have been the technology that put digital mobile telephony on the world map, but it is new wireless data technologies such as High Speed Circuit Switched Data (HSCSD) and General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) will enable GSM network operators to offer mobile users effective email, remote LAN access, Internet access and more. HSCSD allows for multiple time slots to be combined into a single channel, providing multiples of the basic bit rates. In the UK, Orange also provides a new channel-coding scheme that increases the transmission rate of each time slot from the current 9600 bps to 14400 bps. As its name suggests, HSCSD is still a circuit-switched technology, similar to that which is already available, just running at higher bit rates. GPRS, on the other hand, is a packet switched technology that is designed to extend the Internet connection across the GSM network to the PC. It will also increase data transmission speeds from the current 9.6 Kbps to over 100 Kbps, though the investment in the network infrastructure required from the operators is much greater. GPRS will provide the type of data capabilities planned for "third generation" cellular networks (such as UMTS), but years ahead of them. Ironically, although HSCSD is seen more as a “stepping stone” technology and inferior to GPRS, at least it guarantees bandwidth to the user. Unlike GPRS, where time slots are shared, if a HSCSD time slot is available, the user gets it for the duration of the session – analogous to the switched Ethernet scenario which is so popular today. This would seem to offer more potential for business applications. The problem is that the move to new second generation (GPRS) and third generation (UMTS) technologies is fraught with problems. Both manufacturers and networks are saying that major changes will be required to the applications used today, and this is hardly likely to happen overnight. “It appears strange that the telecomms world is trying to dictate to the customer what he can deploy rather than asking what he would like to implement” says Kendrick. “GPRS over the last 12 months has had more to do with share prices than real technology advancements, and is unable to deliver many of the IP applications commonly in use today. It would probably surprise many to know that few networks have seen anymore than 3K of data transferred over their trial GPRS networks before they crashed, and the availability of terminal equipment is almost none-existent”. To get around many of the problems associated with GPRS including reliability, security, compression, roaming and the possible lack of a data path, Brand has developed a GPRS interface for it’s Apollo Access server allowing the user to seamlessly transition between packet over switch circuit and the GPRS IP bearer. Many of the considerations and decisions to be made for 2G implementations will also apply for 3G. In release 99 of UMTS the access methods for data will be the same switched circuit and GPRS bearers as 2G, meaning that in the first release of UMTS the speeds will be similar to those offered today, with the higher speeds touted for multi-media applications not following until later releases. The clear message to organisations and users of mobile data is not to put off deployment decisions due to expectations of much higher speeds around the corner. Instead, grasp the technologies that can provide the resilience and performance over today’s networks with the full knowledge that these third party products (from companies such as Brand) can fully transcend all the envisaged bearer technologies currently passing through the standards bodies. Action Points
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