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Visa Europe and Monitise sign partnership agreement to develop mobile payment services

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Visa Europe has signed a partnership agreement with Monitise to develop and supply mobile payments services for Visa Europe’s member banks and financial institutions across Europe.

Following Visa Europe’s six year build and €0.5 billion investment in a new European inter-bank processing service, this agreement will leverage this platform and accelerate the development and commercialisation of large scale mobile payments and services.

The exclusive partnership gives Visa Europe a licence to Monitise’s world-leading mobile technology.  Monitise will act as an advanced development engine for Visa Europe, enabling it to provide its member banks with a rapid go to market mobile payments service in Europe. Initially this will include the development of Visa Europe’s mobile platform for mobile contactless payments, mobile alerts and person to person payments followed by account management, loyalty applications and mobile e-commerce.

Peter Ayliffe, Visa Europe Chief Executive said, “We’ve created an inter-bank processing service without equal in Europe. This agreement now places us in an undisputed position to deliver mobile services with incredible scale and processing efficiency in the mobile arena, enabling Visa Europe’s member banks to offer mobile payment services direct to their customers – consumers and retailers.”

Alastair Lukies, Chief Executive of Monitise plc, said:  “This deal is a major step forward in Monitise’s relationship with Visa Europe. Mobile banking and payments users with smartphones check their accounts on average 16-18 times a month, three times more than via internet banking. We are honoured by this exclusive partnership with Visa Europe, which will help consumers benefit from growing mobile money innovation.”

New joint venture to deliver internet payment by mobile

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Atos Origin, Bouygues Telecom, Orange and SFR have formed a new joint venture company to launch a new payment solution. The new solution is said to be backed by major online retailers in France, including Aquarelle, Brandalley, Darty and Rue du Commerce.

Buyster is said to be a simple, fast and secure remote payment solution for fixed and mobile Internet purchases, which will be available in France from mid-2011. Against a backdrop of sustained growth in eCommerce and an increase in purchases being made from new types of screen, including smartphones and touchscreen devices, the three French mobile operators (Bouygues Telecom, Orange and SFR) and Atos Origin, through Atos Worldline, a European specialist in electronic transactions and secure payments, are bringing together their experience in telecoms and payment to launch the new solution.

The JV has been created against the background of the Single European Payment Area and, in particular, the Payment Services Directive (PSD), which provides the legal foundation for the creation of an EU-wide single market for payment. The regulatory environment is supportive of new players entering the payment market and the partners behind Buyster believe that their combination of mobile communications and eCommerce expertise will present a very strong offer to consumers and online merchant alike.

The aim of the company, whose payment institution licence is still being requested from the Banque de France, is to develop, operate and market the Buyster payment facility in France.

The Buyster service will be offered through the JV’s mobile telephony partners, which together account for over 50 million consumers. Buyster will be targeting the new payment solution at online merchants, capitalizing on the strong market presence and extensive eCommerce knowledge of partners such as Atos Worldline.

Eric Gontier, CEO of Buyster: “Thanks to this alliance, we are setting out our ambition to become a key player in eCommerce payment and the leading company in France for mCommerce; a market with strong potential.  Over the next five years, we are counting on a share of the mCommerce market representing 10% of the turnover for eCommerce with an estimated amount of just over EUR 6 billion.”

Solutions for Mobile Broadband Profitability

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Turning the Capacity Crunch into a Revenue Bounce – recording now available to view

Date: Wednesday, 2 February, 2011
Host: Keith Dyer, Edtor, Mobile Europe
Speaker: Sunil Laroiya, Product Manager, CommProve

Currently, almost two thirds of the world’s networks are experiencing some level of data network congestion. With data usage predicted to more than double every year until 2014 and smartphones growing by over 50% year on year, the varying patterns of use create a challenging dimensioning process.

It is clear that the way operators generate profits from mobile broadband has to change.

Operators need to be able to visualise not just the end to end service impact of the data network, but the financial impacts of varying network usage and congestion. When integrated into other processes such as policy control and network expansion plans data revenues can be maximized in line with the required network investments.

Join this CommProve webinar, where we will present an analysis of the industry needs and ways of adapting network technology to enhance the mobile broadband experience and the operators business.

View Webinar

Lessons in messaging

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The consolidation of the mobile instant messaging market continues with the acquisition by Synchronica of Neustar’s Next Generation Messaging (NGM) business. With Synchronica also having bought Colibria last year, it really does now have most of the operator customers out there that have launched OMA IMPS-based (basically, standards-based presence servers) mobile IM products – and the technology that supports those services.

Back when the GSMA was proposing its Personal Instant Messaing initiative, the idea was that operators would be able to use standards-based technology to provide interoperability between customers using operator-supported IM services. In other words, instead of a user signing in to a MSN or Skype or Google chat account, he would instead use an @Vodafone account, or similar. The advantage of this to the user would be that they would be able to chat not just with users of the same community, but to other operator-provided IM users as well. In short, it would do to IM what interoperable SMS did to SMS.

Yet this never really happened, as users preferred to stay with the IM providers they were with, or use chat services from services like Fring, or from Facebook or similar. There was also little value for operators in providing IP-based IM services, when the SMS cash cow was still gurgling away on the milking parlour, even if on much reduced yields.

PIM’s successor, the Rich Communications Suite (RCS) initiative, took on the presence-based driver of PIM and the IM part, of course, and added to them things like the connected address book, and file sharing, to build a vision of interoperable SIP/IMS based services. That too has seen little take up to date – with very few RCS clients, for example, on any devices.

This is not to say that no operators have gone down the “operator-led” mobile IM path. The Synchronica deal with Neustar saw a clutch of operator customers move over to Synchronica as part of the acquisition, and Colibria too had a handful of major operator customers.

But Synchronica’s success to date as been in emerging markets, where a) there has been less fixed take up of rival messaging services and b) operators are used to living and working in much lower ARPU environments.

It’s worth noting that NeuStar, with its clearing house and interconnection model, took on the IM market through its acquisition of FolloWap for $139 million in late 2006. At that time it saw a model whereby presence servers and messaging gateways were installed within operators, with interconnection and interoperability handled through its interconnect platform. Despite some tactical successes, as a strategy it seems to have failed, with the unit now being offloaded for just $251,000 (plus liabilities).

Happier news from the femto forum, which has completed its second plug fest, this time with 13 companies testing the effectiveness of the Broadband Forum’s femtocell management standard in supporting interoperability between femtocell access points and network equipment from different vendors. The companies involved were Ablaze Wireless, Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent Telecom, Alpha Networks, Argela, Askey Computer Corporation, Huawei, Institute for Information Industry, NEC Corporation, Node-H, Nokia Siemens Networks, PicoChip and Ubiquisys.

The relevance of this meeting is that is shows the desire to build out an ecosystem that will enable operators to have confidence that femtocell technology is open and interoperable. The femtocell standard being tested allows mobile operators to simplify deployment and enable automated remote provisioning and configuration, radio environment monitoring, diagnostics-checking and software updates. These will be crucial if femtocells are to form the low cost network option, in opex as well as capex, that they will need to be to achieve true volume.

If you’d like to find out more about recent femtocell developments we now have two recent webinars available to view. See the links on this newsletter to access them.

Keith Dyer

Editor

Mobile Europe

 

 

Links:

http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/news-anaylsis/8448-neustar-exits-mobile-im-business-with-sale-to-synchronica

 

http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8446-femto-forum-focuses-on-management-with-second-plugfest

 

http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8445-ofcom-unveils-spectrum-plans

 

 

Six Essential Steps: LTE Small Cell Development & Validation

(https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/122008297)

 

 

Live debate: Beyond the niche – why small cells will be network critical in 2011

(https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/484591545)

 

Colt extends partnership with iPass

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iPass, a provider of enterprise mobility services, today announced that Colt is expanding its commitment to leverage the iPass Open Mobile Platform. The cloud-based services delivery system is said to be a key platform driving the growth of Colt’s mobile enterprise solution.

Colt’s mobile enterprise solution targets the specific mobile needs of enterprise customers with a range of voice, data and computing services. This service offers customers Wi-Fi network access and enables European businesses to use critical business information and applications effectively, without interruption or disruption.

“Enterprises need to embrace workforce mobility to sustain their competitive advantage. Colt’s Information Delivery Platform brings together mobility services and enterprise computing allowing European Businesses to access business critical information and applications on the move” said Luke Broome, Chief Technology Officer at Colt. “We are delighted to extend our longstanding partnership with iPass. Their Open Mobile Platform is designed with an open architecture that enables Colt to offer its customers best-in-class mobile enterprise service”.

“Colt is a leading European provider of enterprise computing serving the requirements of over 3,000 of Europe’s major enterprises including 24 of the world’s top 25 financial institutions and has been an important partner of iPass for a number of years,” said Steven Wastie, senior vice president of marketing and product management at iPass. “With expansion of the partnership to include the iPass Open Mobile Platform, Colt can offer customers market leading cloud-based mobility services that provide secure access on the move to clients across Europe through Colt branded services powered by iPass.”

Colt’s mobile enterprise solutions allow customers to access business applications from a multitude of PC and smartphone devices including Windows, Mac, Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Symbian and iPad. The iPass network footprint also encompasses 260,000 Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide including 90 of the world’s top 100 busiest airports.

ST-Ericsson launches ‘faster and sharper’ mobile positioning

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ST-Ericsson, a specialist in wireless platforms and semiconductors, is launching the world’s smallest receiver to be able to see both GPS and GLONASS positioning satellites, enabling mobile devices to deliver much faster and much more reliable location-based services. Compared to GPS-only solutions, the combination of GLONASS and GPS technology is claimed to dramatically improve positioning accuracy in dense “urban canyon environments”, where tall buildings can obscure satellite signals, as well as significantly reducing the time it takes to initially determine a device’s location.

Requiring just two external components, ST-Ericsson’s new CG1950 is the first GPS/GLONASS receiver to be built in 45 nanometer silicon, enabling manufacturers to produce sleek, low-cost devices capable of supporting highly-accurate navigation, mobile social networking, augmented reality and other location-based services. The low-power CG1950 is designed to be integrated into mobile phones, camcorders, cameras and other mobile devices.

“The frustration of waiting for your device to locate you will be a thing of the past once receivers can connect to both GPS and GLONASS satellites,” said Thierry Tingaud, Senior Vice President Entry solutions & Connectivity Division of ST-Ericsson. “This breakthrough will also mean more precise positioning, fueling demand for augmented reality applications and other sophisticated location-based services that depend on very accurate readings.”

Neustar exits mobile IM business with sale to Synchronica

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Neustar exists mobile IM business: sells division it bought for $139 million for $250,000

Neustar has sold its mobie IM business, which it calls its Next Generation Messaging business, to Synchronica for $251,000 in cash.

The sale includes 11 carrier and OEM customer contracts, accounts, intellectual property, patents and software, and all other associated assets from Neustar NGM. It comes eight months after Synchronica bought the OMA IMPS assets of Colibria, a company that had previously competed for operator contracts with NeuStar.

Synchronica has also taken on liabilities as part of the deal. Neustar built its NGM business mainly on the acquisition of Followap for $139 million in 2006. Back then, Neustar had plans to build out a range of services based on presence capability and moble IM. It hoped to be able to drive interoperability of IM services through its own interconnect platform. But a marked reluctance of operators to roll out their own mobile IM services, ineroperable or not, has stalled that vision.

 

Synchronica has been having more success with selling its mobile IM product to operators in emerging markets, and as well as the Colibria acquisition snapped up Canadian firm iseemedia in September 2010.

A Synchronica statement outlined the following:

Acquired Customer Base
Neustar NGM’s operator customer base includes eleven contracts with tier one and tier two mobile operators including Vodafone and Optimus (Portugal), SFR (France), Globe (Philipines), TIM (Italy), Turkcell (Turkey), Hutchinson 3 (Hong Kong), Vimpelcom and MegaFon (Russia). The acquired customer base also includes two tier one device manufacturers which are using the Neustar MIM (mobile instant messaging) to provide instant messaging services to end-users.
Synchronica will assume all responsibilities under the existing contracts and intends to provide full support for installations of Neustar NGM products and services to existing operator and device manufacturer customers.
Acquired Products and Services
With the acquisition of the IM assets and liabilities of Neustar NGM’s business including its patented technology, Synchronica gains access to the following products and technologies offered to mobile operators and device manufacturers:

Mobile Instant Messaging: MIM services enable operators to launch both mobile optimized access to established internet IM communities including Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, and Facebook and to build their own IM services
Interconnect: Intercarrier Communications Process (ICP) enables operators to offer their customers instant messaging interconnectivity, enabling users to freely communicate across multiple IM communities, mobile and fixed
Mobile Social Networking: Mobile Messaging Gateway provides operator-branded services that give end-users mobile-optimized access to social networking communities, such as Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and Vkontakte
Operator Communities: Instant Messaging Service Center (IMSC) and the Presence Server Platform enable subscribers to create customized personal profiles, check whether friends are online and what they are doing, chat in realtime, and share pictures and other media
Rich Communication Suite (RCS): RCS is an initiative led by the Global System Mobile Association (GSMA) with the support of a wide range of operators and vendors. It aims to provide an enhanced communication experience to subscribers through a suite of interoperable and interconnected services and applications. RCS enablers include the Instant Messaging Service Center (IMSC), which provides the enhanced messaging capability, and the Presence Server Platform enabling the Enhanced Address Book
Enhanced Address Book: A key part of the next evolution of communication, the Enhanced Address Book is included not only in RCS services, but also in some of the latest smartphone handsets

Synchronica intends to continue to support Neustar NGM’s open standards-based IM technology and plans to integrate key elements of the software into Synchronica’s Mobile Gateway product line. To existing customers, Synchronica will propose a roadmap and transition to Synchronica Mobile Gateway, extending the range of services from IM to push email, synchronization, and social networking.

Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica, comments: “We are delighted to acquire these assets, further accelerating our business, and cementing our position as the leading provider of next-generation messaging services for mobile operators and device manufacturers. We are looking forward to working with our new customers; Synchronica is committed to continue support for these products and providing a vision and roadmap including synergies with other Synchronica messaging products.”

Ubiquisys and CTTC develop world’s first open source product-oriented LTE network simulator

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Ubiquisys, a developer of intelligent cells, and the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), the leading research organisation in communication technologies, are working together to develop the world’s first open source product-oriented LTE network simulator.

The simulator will provide a common platform for LTE femto vendors and LTE macro vendors to evaluate their different solutions.  The advantage for operators is that they can be sure that large and small cells from different vendors will work harmoniously before they are deployed.

Ubiquisys is a provider of WCDMA intelligent femtocells which continuously sense and respond to changes in their radio environment, and form self-organising networks (SONs) in enterprise and outdoor deployments.  Ubiquisys says it had a head start when it comes to LTE femtocells because it is the only vendor with a commercially deployed WCDMA SON product, which provides enterprises with seamless coverage from a grid of self-organising femtocells.  Because SON is a cornerstone of LTE, the company has built on this experience it says.

CTTC is an advanced research centre, created under the auspices of the Regional Government of Catalonia in 2001.  Research activities, both fundamental and applied, mainly focus on technologies related to the physical, data-link and network layers of communication systems.

“Just like femtocells, the true value of LTE small cells is in their Intelligence, which minimises OPEX and maximises scalability,” said Will Franks, CTO and co-founder, Ubiquisys. “We are delighted to be working alongside CTTC creating a simulator that will both prove out Ubiquisys’ unique SON techniques and enable multi-vendor interoperability in an open collaborative environment.”

“We have been conducting research and contributed to relevant projects for the preparation of LTE systems since 2004. It is now a great honour to support Ubiquisys in the ambitious objective of leading the LTE femtocell revolution,” said Prof. Miguel Ángel Lagunas, Director of CTTC.

In WCDMA networks, femtocells and macro cells work independently, but in LTE all cells work together as a single SON.  This means that the adaptive behaviour of femtocells and macro cells is interdependent. Simulators are important because they can evaluate product behaviour in a mature, densely deployed and heavily used network, at a time when real deployments are in their infancy. Ubiquisys made extensive use of a WCDMA network simulator during the development of its first generation of intelligent femtocells.

The open source LTE simulator is based on the popular ns-3 network simulator for internet systems. The development of the LTE simulator will be open to the community in order to foster early adoption and contributions by industrial and academic partners.

Femto Forum focuses on management with second plugfest

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The Femto Forum, the independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell deployment worldwide, today announced it has successfully completed its second plugfest which focused on femtocell management. The series of plugfests aim to cultivate an effective ecosystem of standardised femtocells. This helps provide operators and consumers with a wider choice of femtocell products while also facilitating economies of scale which help bring down the cost of equipment. The plugfest had widespread vendor support with 13 companies participating, including vendors of network equipment and femtocell access points as well as component providers.

The plugfest was organized in cooperation with ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and overseen by testing and compliance consultancy TRaC Global. The primary objective of the plugfest, organized as an ETSI Plugtests interoperability testing event, was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Broadband Forum’s femtocell management standard in supporting interoperability between femtocell access points and network equipment from different vendors.

Karim Sharf, Chair of the Femto Forum’s IOT SIG and CTO – Telecoms at TRaC, commented: “The plugfest series is helping to drive forward femtocells as an open and interoperable technology – a critical element in its successful uptake.The interest and participation at this second plugfest was much greater than we anticipated and led to the event being extended by two days. This high level of attendance secured at both plugfests is very encouraging as we start to plan the next event in the series.”

The Broadband Forum’s femtocell management standard (TR-196) was published in April 2009 and is an extension of the TR-069 standard that is widely used in fixed broadband networks and set-top boxes. The femtocell standard allows mobile operators to simplify deployment and enable automated remote provisioning and configuration, radio environment monitoring, diagnostics-checking and software updates.

The companies involved were Ablaze Wireless, Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent Telecom, Alpha Networks, Argela, Askey Computer Corporation, Huawei, Institute for Information Industry, NEC Corporation, Node-H, Nokia Siemens Networks, PicoChip and Ubiquisys.

Interoperability tests were conducted between femtocell access points, management systems, security gateways and femtocell network gateways to verify the Broadband Forum’s TR-196 femtocell management standard. The plugfest also tested the IPsec/IKEv2 security protocols which allow femtocells to communicate over the public Internet to operators’ core networks in a highly secure manner.

Ofcom unveils spectrum plans

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New plans to help increase mobile network capacity and deliver faster and more reliable mobile services for consumers, were unveiled today by Ofcom. The proposals are designed to allow mobile phone operators for the first time to trade the radio spectrum that mobiles use to communicate with mobile masts.

Spectrum is of particular importance to the mobile phone and mobile broadband industry, which relies on it to carry information between customers’ handsets and mobile masts. There are 80 million mobiles in the UK and more than 12.8 million of these are smart phones, used by people to access the internet. This is placing big demands on mobile spectrum.

Under the proposals, which cover spectrum at 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2100 MHz, operators with a greater need for spectrum will be able to make offers for spectrum from those who need it less. It is hoped that this added flexibility will help operators to respond more quickly to demand.

Ofcom Chief Executive, Ed Richards said: “This is an important milestone in the modernisation of spectrum management in the UK. It comes in response to the fast pace of change and innovation taking place in the mobile communications sector, which is placing increased demands on spectrum. One important way of meeting this demand is making the acquisition of spectrum as flexible as possible.”

Over the past two decades, mobile phone companies in the UK have acquired blocks of licensed spectrum. In general, the more spectrum an operator holds, the more telephone conversations and internet traffic it can carry over its network. Not all operators hold the same amount of spectrum, and the level of demand for mobile services also differs from area to area.

By allowing operators to trade their spectrum, Ofcom believes that there will be greater opportunity to use it more efficiently. Ultimately, it is believed that this will bring benefits to citizens and consumers in terms of improved mobile services.

As part of a wider initiative to promote improvements in mobile services, the Government directed Ofcom to make mobile spectrum licences tradable in December 2010. Today’s proposals outline how this will be achieved.

Ofcom will be responsible for the administration of spectrum trades – publishing the details of proposed trades online, confirming that they are acceptable, and then issuing revised licences to implement the trades.

To ensure healthy competition, a safeguard is proposed whereby Ofcom assesses if competition is likely to be distorted before deciding whether or not to consent to a trade of mobile spectrum. 

 

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