Getting a wireless fix on the fly

Last year's Cabir Worm christened the age of the mobile virus. If peer-to-peer mobile multimedia file sharing and other applications are to succeed on a grand scale, the ecosystem of carriers, handset manufacturers and applications providers will need a reliable method for actively exterminating such viruses.

One possible solution would be to use over-the-air (OTA) device management technologies, which have long been positioned as quick and inexpensive ways of administering device firmware updates and remotely de-bugging glitches in devices that already have left the manufacturer's warehouse. In an instance of a rapidly spreading mobile virus, OTA distribution could be used to send out an anti-virus patch, according to David Sym-Smith, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Innopath, one of many providers of OTA device management technology.

“In the anti-virus business, you are only as good as the latest update,” he said. “Diagnosis can become more proactive with OTA update technology. As a virus surfaces, you can send out an anti-virus patch, potentially to a large number of people.”

Innopath and other OTA device management companies, including Extended Systems, Bitfone and Red Bend Software, are either already working with anti-virus experts, such as McAfee, or else looking at doing so.

“You could potentially contain a virus by looking at customer profiles by seeing who might be most at risk and targeting them for an update. It's still kind of a science project right now,” said Sunil Mariola, director of product strategy at Bitfone. He explained that carriers offering anti-virus updates would still need to figure out how to navigate legal and privacy issues related to sending out such updates, however well-meaning they might be.

But anti-virus distribution is just the latest application for OTA device management. For the last few years, the aforementioned technology vendors have been pitching their device update delivery architectures as a way for mobile carriers to effectively reduce the billions of dollars in losses the industry sees every year as a result of devices that are unintentionally shipped with firmware bugs.

“At first, it was mainly for those firmware updates, but now it's really matured into configuration management at diagnosis of problems,” said Carla Fitzgerald, vice president of marketing at Bitfone.

Nathan Pendleton, vice president of mobile device solutions at Extended Systems, said OTA technology could be used to deliver a data-destroying “kill pill” to a corporate-owned device that has been lost or stolen.

In the early going, NTT DoCoMo has been, by far, the most aggressive carrier deploying OTA device management technology, but other carriers in Asia have followed, with U.S. and European carriers starting to take a closer look. Earlier this year, Sprint became the first U.S. carrier to announce an OTA device management program. Also, while Motorola was one of the first device makers to commit to OTA device management technology, more handset manufacturers and OEMs are planning to include it in future products.

“The OTA device management market is really happening now,” said Yoram Salinger, president and CEO of Red Bend Software.

The growing number of applications for OTA device management has helped, but new interoperability specifications from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and other industry groups have further broadened the appeal of the technology. The OMA Sync ML Common Specification 1.2 established guidelines for interoperability between the device management servers of one vendor and the device-embedded OTA device management clients of another. In addition to the aforementioned vendors, server suppliers and systems integrators such as IBM, Gemplus and Openwave have approached the market mainly with server-end solutions that would work with multiple device clients.

Thus far, carriers have shown great interest in deploying multi-vendor solutions, said Pendleton of Extended Systems.

“That specification is the first level of how you establish structured links between a server and other firmware update clients,” he said. “Previously, this is something that the vendors and the carrier involved had to figure out, but OMA compliance makes it all easy.”

Though vendors have varying theories about how the market will progress, Salinger of Red Bend said the OMA specification will be comparable to what DOCSIS was for the cable modem industry.

“You have a specification that allows multiple vendors, and that is how this market will evolve,” he said.

Sym-Smith of Innopath said the OTA delivery method itself is an enabler of what will become “a much broader device management philosophy for carriers.”

“We are at an inflection point with OTA device management,” he said. “It was something that was easily cost-justifiable by the ability to de-bug handset glitches remotely.”

However, the capability of over-the-air device management also can be a powerful paradigm shifter in a number of ways. If carriers deploy the technology aggressively, it will come to re-define not only how handsets get repaired and firmware gets updated but also how entire customer service organizations are organized.

“The device returns channel has really worked a different way to this point, and OTA makes it different,” said Bitfone's Fitzgerald. “To this point, carriers have been able to charge back any device problems to the handset manufacturers, so it was something that had a definite economic effect. OTA could change the whole paradigm of how customer service is administered.”

Relevant OTA DM Standards

• OMA-DM v1.1.2/v1.2: baseline protocol for reading/writing device objects (e.g. firmware version, e-mail settings, P2T settings, etc.)
• OMA-DL v1.0: efficient download of large objects
• OMA-CP v1.1: settings provisioning over SMS
• FUMO v1.0: Firmware Update Management Object, defines FOTA tree objects and behavior; near candidate status
• IOTA: legacy provisioning protocol for CDMA
• IOTA-DM: maps IOTA objects into OMA-DM protocol; currently being evaluated by 3GPP2
• OTA Flash Forum: special interest group addressing OTA DM best practices and “holes” in standards; 33 international members