Exclusive: Nokia courts T-Mobile for Preminet

T-Mobile International is evaluating Nokia's Preminet content distribution service as a possible technology to augment its T-zones download center, an international repository of games, ringtones and other multimedia applications that serves 35 million customers in five countries including the U.S., T-Mobile and Nokia officials told Telephony.

T-Mobile T-zones Innovations Centre head Robin Jewsbury said in a recent interview that the carrier is testing Preminet's download client over a variety of T-Mobile's devices. He said the client software provides features beyond T-Mobile's in-house client, including the ability to preview multimedia clips, cache downloaded content and provide more sophisticated real-time billing for third-party applications. So far, T-Mobile is only considering licensing the client, which Nokia offers to carriers for free, and not the stores of content in Preminet's application catalog, but Jewsbury held out the possibility of including Preminet content in the T-zones content store.

"There's a growing realization among carriers that we're not content providers," said Jewsbury, who was the principal architect of the T-zones service. While carriers certainly aren't prepared to become dumb pipes for other people's content, he said, they are interested in focusing more on their networks and customers. He added that carriers would likely be looking to third parties and content distributors like Preminet in the future.

Winning T-Mobile as a Preminet customer would be a major coup for Nokia. When Nokia launched its applications catalog and distribution service in October, many industry observers expected Preminet to target mainly mid-sized and small carriers and operators and developing markets--carriers that didn't have the resources to aggregate their own content stores. T-Mobile is not only a Tier 1 carrier, it is a major presence in multiple markets, with GSM and UMTS services in its home country Germany, the U.K. and Austria and GSM/GPRS services in the U.S., the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. T-Mobile also announced today its first UMTS trial in Berlin. T-Mobile's most recently released figures show that it had 18.5 million downloads from T-zones across its networks, and 4.9 million T-zones subscribers.

Nokia Preminet director Steen Thygesen said he wasn't prepared to jump to any conclusions about whether T-Mobile would eventually adopt the service, but he said Nokia was obviously very pleased that T-Mobile is evaluating it. A win with T-Mobile would be extremely significant to success of Preminet--similar to Qualcomm's success in landing Verizon Wireless as a BREW customer--and would go far to proving that the platform is more than just a solution for mid-tier carriers, he said.

"Many large operators are looking to streamline their portal operations," Thygesen said. "T-Mobile will have to make its own decision whether to use Preminet, but the fact that they are considering it is a proof point that Preminet is something applicable to more than just small providers."

So far, Nokia has publicly announced three Preminet customers, Indian CDMA carrier TaTa Indicom, Smartcom in Chile and Midwest Wireless in the U.S. While those carriers have incorporated a good deal of Preminet's content catalog into their services, T-Mobile is considering a much more basic implementation. As part of the evaluation T-Mobile has optimized Preminet's client to reflect its content portal for the T-zones store, Jewsbury said, and is engaged in a friendly user trial. So far the only content on the portal is T-Mobile's own T-zones content, but if the carrier were to opt for Preminet content, incorporating it would be very simple. T-Mobile could add content from the Preminet catalog into the portal, making the Preminet applications indistinguishable from T-Mobile's and branding it all under the T-zones name.