Riding the WIN-e Wave

WIN proved less-than-glamorous results at Wireless 2000.

WIN products traditionally have generated much of the excitement in infrastructure products at previous wireless shows, although it's hard for infrastructure products to get the respect that handset vendors get by putting a new color on the outside of their phones. This year, WIN products had an even harder time garnering attention because of the overwhelming buzz of the Internet, WAP, e-commerce and data. If there were only competing products named POW and BLAM, dialogue on the trade show floor would have sounded more like a Superman comic strip script. To make matters more difficult for WIN, the first generation of products is in a developmental stage so, although WIN-related products are definitely more mature this year, there are no radically new products or giant leaps forward.

The problems facing WIN are recognized. According to Umesh Amin, UWCC chairman, "WIN will have to evolve to adapt. Call models will have to be enhanced to drive mobility into Internet services. Subscriber information still has to reside somewhere, whether it's controlled by the carrier, an ISP or a third party. To some degree, the handset will become the SCP (service control point). But, there also are cautionary voices implying that the promise of WIN, while less hyped than Internet-related products, may be more substantial."

Perry Laforge, CDG executive director, warned, "Increased interest in the applications of wireless to access the Internet is certainly present. New players are emerging, indicating that there's a lot of money chasing the industry. However, it's not always clear that there is a viable business present."

Chris Daigle, Nortel Mobility Services senior manager, said, "I see IP growing, but also see the advantages of WIN architectures. I see a blending of the two technologies. There are advantages to both WIN and IP. Consumers can have any PDA device, but their expectation is that their service still works in the same fashion everywhere. WIN can enhance those services."

Prepaid Services
Prepaid wireless is allowing wireless-service providers to continue to reach out to new markets. One of the problems with prepaid is that the potential for fraud is high — if consumers can figure out how to stop their accounts from being debited, they can get unlimited, free services. Another problem is that the routing is quite inefficient — prepaid calls usually are established with a connection from the mobile to the prepaid platform, and a secondconnection from the platform to the actual destination. This can result in two long-distance calls being required.

Network-based prepaid systems provide a good solution to the fraud problem because the account is managed safely inside the network. Handset-based prepaid systems are vulnerable to tampering. If a problem occurs, it becomes extremely difficult to control the resulting leakage.

Boston Communications Group (BCGI) claims to be a market leader because it has a service-bureau offering. When prepaid customers are roaming, their calls are routed to the closest platform, while service providers who have purchased platforms have to either disallow roaming or swallow the costs of the long-distance call back to the home market. However, this advantage soon could disappear. Virtually all companies developing or offering prepaid services are eagerly awaiting TIA's WIN Phase II standard IS-826, which will allow more efficient prepaid routing. This standard will remove the prepaid platform from the call path by providing bidirectional signaling messages that allow prepaid "remote" control. The MSC will inform the platform whenever a prepaid call is initiated, answered or disconnected, allowing the prepaid platform to decrement the debit account accurately, and deny calls when the account is exhausted. The standard even provides a message to allow the prepaid platform to send warnings to the prepaid customer when the account is running low and to force a disconnect when the account is exhausted.

Location-Based Services
Location-based services owe their existence to the FCC mandate, but it increasingly appears as if the 911 service will not be generating much revenue for service providers, forcing them to turn to commercial location services to maximize the revenue stream from a large capital investment. Some companies are offering network-based solutions, mostly based on a combination of time difference of arrival (TDOA) and angle of arrival (AOA). This is the approach of SigmaOne and Grayson (Allen Telecom), and soon will be by TDOA vendor TruePosition, following its purchase of AOA vendor KSI. At the other extreme, an approach being touted by SiRF and SnapTrack (now part of Qualcomm) is to use a stripped-down GPS receiver in the handset, claiming vastly improved sensitivity and speed over currently available GPS equipment. A handset-assisted approach has the benefit of greater accuracy in many situations, but requires new hardware in phones, and it is unlikely that many phone models will be upgradable. Cambridge Positioning Systems has a middle-of-the-road approach. A software update allows handsets to collect the time-of-arrival information from multiple cell sites and transmit it to the base station as a short-message-service packet. This likely won't achieve the accuracy of GPS, but it will allow most reasonably new phones to be upgraded and will require significantly less network infrastructure than pure network solutions.

The market for commercial location-based services still is developmental, but some companies have recognized that getting accurate locations is only one problem; the information has to be made usable for a variety of applications. GTE TSI demonstrated a service that combines voice recognition, location technology and WIN-like capabilities to provide localized traffic reports. SignalSoft's local.info claims to use WAP, voice and short message to make localized entertainment information and roadside assistance accessible to wireless consumers.

Making location-based services accessible to the WIN infrastructure is the goal of WIN Phase III, which is a standards project still in the organizational stages. Consequently, current products are based on proprietary architectures. Standards organizations are currently finishing up WIN Phase II documents and E-911 Phase II, so it will be at least another year until standards-based solutions will be available.

What Does the e-Future Hold?
WIN features still hold great promise, but the Internet is going to have an enormous impact. Whether WIN and Internetfeatures will converge (WIN-e?) or whether the wireless Internet will displace WIN is impossible to tell at this point, but there is already some crossover. Integrated messaging is a WIN feature — connecting a call to a variety of devices — but is an Internet feature because of the ability to manage telephony data (i.e. faxes). WIN is giving way to a desire to manage Internet data. From a phone, you now can have your e-mail read to you or listen to voice mail. From your phone, using voice or DTMF commands, you can attach a voice message to an e-mail using services such as Tel@GO from Comverse, Intersoft.com from InterVoice-Brite or SimplySay from Parigon. Or, if you prefer, you can use a wireless phone to show your messages in the form of text displayed on your screen. The integration will increase with time as timeslot switching gives way to packet switching in MSCs.

Location services already are being affected by the Internet. The range of services that can be provided is greatly increased when the location is combined with WIN's ability to creatively route calls and the Internet's ability to convert the position of a mobile into automated directions, or into the identification of the closest business of the desired type.

Prepaid is likely to be immune from the onslaught for somewhat longer. Wireless security services are not yet mature enough, but if a prepaid account on a phone could be completely secured, there may be a revival in handset-based solutions. It would be possible that the wireless-service provider might end up being oblivious to the type of billing for the call. The prepaid HLR could validate and authenticate the call, monitor its progress and decrement the credits in the account without any intelligence being provided by the wireless system.

Wireless-service providers have little choice but to uncork WIN-e and launch imaginative new services if they wish to stay afloat in the stormy seas ahead.

Crowe (crowed@cnp-wireless.com) is a wireless-standards consultant and editor of Cellular Networking Perspectives, a wireless-standards and -technology bulletin.