Unified Access

Mar 15, 2001 12:00 PM, Lawrence Frank

Meeting the multiple-media-messaging needs of wireless subscribers — as defined by the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) (www.3gpp.org) — has challenged carriers. On one hand, subscribers want to have immediate access to their information. On the other hand, storing all of this information on any single device ensures that they won’t have global access to their messages.

This distinction is important. Messaging today means downloading all messages onto a computer or laptop for storage. Once downloaded, these messages become inaccessible from any place other than the computer itself. The mobility aspect of people’s lives has rendered this unacceptable, thus fueling the demand for a different breed of unified messaging.

By using messaging-specific appliances that support standards-based Internet messaging, carriers can deliver high performance and reliable unified messaging while keeping management costs low. Fast and secure Web and WAP-based access to multiple media messages — without the need for costly protocol conversions — now is a reality.

Overcoming the Barriers

Unified messaging got off to a slow start because it brought about new challenges that weren’t adequately addressed with initial architectures. However, today’s new Internet messaging platforms address the key issues of network integration, global access, storage and latency.

• Network Integration. Because unified messaging sits at the point of convergence, a messaging system must support more than one specific access technology. Most of today’s unified-messaging solutions, however, are designed to provide messaging to the desktop — phone or PC — exclusively. And, they assume the presence of a reliable, high-bandwidth connection to stream audio in an effective manner.

What the industry needs is a platform designed to accommodate multiple types of access devices; one that is capable of taking information and rendering it in a manner appropriate to the device in the network that is available at the time a message is being retrieved. In short, the platform must support low bandwidth and/or unreliable connections — especially when wireless connectivity is to be accommodated. New messaging server appliances are designed to do just one thing — messaging. As a result, they don’t carry any of the overhead and inefficiencies found with general-purpose databases, routers and operating systems.

• Global Access. Once a company’s voice-messaging system is opened up to the Internet, the carrier also is opened up to potential security problems (e.g., viruses, hackers, disruptions of corporate information). Yet, before unified messaging can live up to its name, subscribers must be given access to their messages from any location.

With early systems, information remained at the edge, where it was frequently inaccessible. In the new unified-messaging paradigm, the data moves into the network core, making it accessible from multiple locations. Because the messaging server appliance is specifically designed to perform only one function, there’s no way for a hacker to obtain a UNIX prompt and gain access to the unified-messaging system — or any other corporate system for that matter. And, potentially harmful viruses are filtered out prior to being stored. Providing access and ensuring security no longer need to be conflicting goals in the deployment of unified messaging.

• Storage. Initial unified-messaging solutions left the storage-handling chores to local devices through the post office protocol (POP), which meant accessibility to messages after they were downloaded was difficult. Having messages downloaded to a PC doesn’t do a subscriber any good if he’s away from the computer. If subscribers are to access their messages from multiple places using multiple devices, unified messaging also must provide additional storage as well as robust backup and recovery plans.

New solutions that embrace the Internet message access protocol (IMAP) standard allow for the central storage of messages within the network or messaging system and make them readily accessible to subscribers, regardless of where they are or what device they are using. Plus, with the price of storage having dropped substantially, almost unlimited message storage becomes feasible.

IMAP, as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is designed to provide the features of enterprise e-mail (e.g., foldering, searching, server based mail, access from multiple locations) using open published standards (www.ietf.org). The IETF created IMAP to address the limitations of POP, an Internet mail standard that fell short in answering the questions associated with delivering e-mail to disconnected clients.

IMAP helps carriers meet another crucial requirement of unified messaging: synchronized storage. Whenever subscribers access a message, the actions they took the last time they were in the mailbox are accounted for. For example, once a message is read via the phone, it’s marked “read” and doesn’t appear as a new message the next time a subscriber accesses messages from the PC. IMAP can be thought of as the “thread” of the message that performs this media conversion (if necessary) to support the device being used to access a message.

Because of the innovations done in the messaging store (e.g., screening and content filtering), subscribers also can be selective about what information is delivered to the handset. Just as importantly, they can go into the message store with a wireless device and not have to spend the time searching for the information they want. It is these types of innovations — using the power of IMAP-based searches — that allow subscribers to retrieve very specific information without having to navigate an entire inbox of information. Without these controls, a sea of information would overwhelm the portable device.

• Latency. Latency “kills.” The reason subscribers are picking up their mobile phones is because they want something right at that moment, which is especially challenging when text-to-speech conversions are required. Incorporating IMAP within the messaging base and using messaging-only servers solves the latency issues that plagued initial unified-messaging platforms.

Standing Out in a Crowd

The impact of wireless-accessible unified messaging around the world is compelling. In Japan, for example, more people now access the Internet through a wireless device than with a traditional wired device. This is being supported by i-mode.

In Europe, the licenses for UMTS are being awarded, and carriers are spending incredible amounts of money to obtain the right to offer these next-generation services. Why are these carriers spending so much money on UMTS? And, why would subscribers in Europe switch from their GSM phones to UMTS phones? Again, it’s all about access. UMTS provides subscribers with real-time, wireless access to multiple-media information.

By bringing together the power of the wireless world with WAP and the Web, North American wireless carriers now have a tremendous opportunity to give subscribers the access they want — and are willing to pay for. And, it only gets better as they begin evolving their networks to accommodate the packet radio services of 2.5G and broadband capabilities of 3G.

Where wireless once was the missing link from the demand side, that’s no longer the case. By owning the frequency and the infrastructure necessary to meet the both the subscribers’ need for mobility and immediate accessibility, wireless carriers soon could find themselves in the enviable position of being perceived as the ultimate ISP/ASP.

Frank is Mirapoint (www.mirapoint.com) vice president of business development.