Caroline asked me to give a short view about open OS platform and the problems to deliver consistent services on mobile handsets by the mobile operators.

Always increasing demand of complex mobile services puts the handset platform strategies on top of the operator agenda. The differentiation of handset offerings has become over the time huger and huger, with wide available choices by the customer. The "dark" side of this differentiation is the big fragmentation in terms of service delivery mechanisms that the operator has to face, react to and manage.

By itself, the technology evolution is offering the mobile carriers different ways to deliver a service (so called service bearer): traditional messaging, IVR, MMS, UICC STK, web browsers, multimedia players, Flash technologies, Java, native applications; in addition to other intrinsic fragmentation items - different bandwidth availability (GPRS, UMTS, HSDPA) the service has to work on, different handset hardware platforms in terms of displays, processing power, form factors, multimedia performances, branches for different customer targets, interoperability with network appliances, management, configuration and installation mechanism. The inhomogeneous support of different service bearers by the open OS platform on handsets as well as the different security schema make the service framing and engineering a complex multidimensional decisional space on which the carrier has to move on.

Looking through the GSM history, voice and messaging services were of great success also because they can be delivered on 100% of handsets portfolio with a consistent user experience and quality: every user knows how to make or answer a call or send/receive an SMS and what experience she/he has to get. On other side, the operator can manage voice and SMS services in a consistent way in its own network without differentiation among handsets.

With advanced service bearers like web browsers, application frameworks, we end up with many inconsistencies:

·          Different user experience

·          Different support of standards

·          Different availability of APIs

·          Different quality of service

·          Different delivery and management mechanisms that the operator has to manage.

These issues become more and more hard to mitigate going from the complete-standardized bearer (i.e. SMS) to the complete-custom bearer (i.e. native application environment) passing through mid-standardized environment like Java, Flash and Advanced Browsers with a variable coverage of the handset portfolio.

Nowadays we are seeing that the current most visible hype is the mobile browsing that, in some extent, try to assure a similar user experience on a good number of handsets and seamless management on operational side. The use of mobile browsers in conjunction with widgets and plug-ins and with integration with the rest of handset application suite and services is expected on a side to maintain the service differentiation proper of full-custom clients and, on the other, to mitigate the fragmentation and extent the handset portfolio coverage,

In conclusion, the open OS community and open platform providers have to create common meeting points like common standard support, common available API, common specifications and user experience to facilitate the wide deployment of mobile services: the handset platform shall be "open" but, more important, its "doors' keys" shall be easily accessible and manageable by operators and users

Dr. Fabio Ricciato is responsible for Mobile Handset Evolution activities within Telecom Italia Mobile(TIM) Access and Terminals in Technology division. He represents Telecom Italia in several international handset-related initiatives. He has contributed in OMTP since foundation. He managed projects for development of mobile handset platforms, open OSes; his past activities covered also convergent phones, embedded appliances and intellectual properties for SoC in mobile handsets. He published several papers and had speeches on mobile communication software, platform based design, SoC test and co-simulation. He is a graduated of the University of Illinois-Chicago and of the Politecnico di Torino and specialized in Telecomunication from Scuola Superiore R. Romoli.