Open Market Handset Proof of Concept Trials Reach Successful Conclusion in India

(Business News & Technology News, 13 May 2008)

By Stephen Las Marias, Editor


The Open Market Handset (OMH) proof of concept trials in India, led by the CDMA Development Group (CDG) in cooperation with Reliance Communications and TATA Indicom has ended successfully. Open Market Handsets enable both operator-specific configuration information and subscriber-specific provisioning information to be moved from the handset's non-volatile (NV) memory into a Removable User Identity Module (R-UIM) or smartcard. By doing so, the handset becomes a generic device that can be sold anywhere on the "open market" and used in multiple operator networks.

The OMH program is part of the CDG's overall Global Handset Requirements for CDMA (GHRC) initiative, which specifies the common set of requirements and standards for approving CDMA devices in an open-device and open-application environment. According to James Person, COO of the CDG, the more flexibility they can give CDMA operators and their subscribers, the higher the success rate the technology will have in its continued expansion around the world.

He adds that the OMH initiative seeks to open up handsets to more application and service choices, which in the case of these trials means access to R-UIM data capabilities that are independent of the network and handset. Moving forward, Person says this could help reduce the cost of handsets due to volume aggregation efforts, as well as improvement of mobile experience for consumers given by access to new applications.

The OMH trials conducted in India verified and validated the OMH implementation for CDMA2000 handsets and for multiple data-enabled R-UIMs across two separate carrier networks, each requiring a specific network implementation. The goal of the trials was to prove that all subscriber, service and network provisioning data can be independently stored on R-UIM smartcards rather than existing on both SIM cards and the handsets.

The resulting solution allows OMH-enabled CDMA handsets to serve as open devices for any open packet data application provisioned on the R-UIM smartcard. The devices can be used across multiple operators since all user, network and service configuration data is stored on the removable smartcards.

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