News and Events - April 2002

Tue 30th Apr, 2002

27th April 2002, E-Day

IT-Analysis.com writes in The Register on the implementation of the EU electronic money directive in the UK: "As of E-Day, anybody that wishes to issue electronic money can do so as long as they satisfy a number of core criteria specified by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), without having to first obtain a banking license." The article continues: "It is widely expected that a number of companies, from mobile phone giants, credit card organisations and even the Post Office, are actively considering launching their own e-money offerings."

Wed 24th Apr, 2002

Siemens invests in Symbian

Electronics Weekly reports that "Siemens IC Mobile has paid £14.3m to take a five per cent shareholding in... the supplier of Symbian OS..." An article in today's FT comments that this values Symbian at £285m.

Mon 15th Apr, 2002

BT plans Wi-Fi service in offices and public locations

Paul Abrahams and Thorold Barker, write in the FT: "Wireless Lans, also known as Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) ... are proving hugely popular in the US." And they add: "Now it is Europe's turn. In Scandanavia, Telia of Sweden and Sonera of Finland have already set up wireless Lans. But this week BT Group became Europe's first large fixed-line company to announce plans to launch a Wi-Fi service." Why is this significant? Abrahams and Barker continue: "Data can be retrieved at up to 11 megabits a second over Wi-Fi networks - 30 times faster than the speeds likely to be offered by 3G services." But there is a downside: "Wi-Fi's biggest disadvantage is that is is less flexible - consumers must be in a specific place to access services rather than being able to wander around at will."

Mon 8th Apr, 2002

Latency neuters two-way mobile videophones

EETimes point out "Latency is one little-discussed performance problem for next-generation cellphones ... GPRS networks ... face inherent latencies of up to two seconds on Internet Protocol operations." The Shosteck Group elucidate: "Low latency is essential for ... live two-way video (but not entertainment video clips ...)". Gilbert Held described latency issues in voice telephony as "The Conversation Killer": "once the one-way delay exceeds a quarter of a second ... it becomes relatively difficult for the parties in a conversation to tell when one person is finished speaking. This increases the probability that the parties will talk at the same time." The Shosteck Group continue "even if a mobile network is configured to provide low latency, the operator cannot guarantee low latency for end-users who use their mobile devices to access other networks [the Internet] or who use their terminals in a noisy, and thereby latency inducing, RF environment [in the real world, with interference from other equipment]."

Thu 4th Apr, 2002

Sun optimizes Java for ARM

EETimes reports "Sun Microsystems Inc. rolled out a Java Virtual Machine [Monty] at the JavaOne developers conference aimed at boosting the Java language's performance nearly tenfold on next-generation [ARM-based] cellphones". Nicholas Lorain, senior product manager for wireless Java technologies at Sun, said "The ARM architecture probably has 75 percent of the designs with PDAs and cellphones today, and market researchers think it will go to 80 to 85 percent in the next couple of years". Even more speed increases are expected: "the next-generation version of Monty, due to ship in mid- to late 2003 ... will work in a hybrid hardware/software collaboration with ARM's next-gen Jazelle accelerator core". The Register agrees with the importance of Java in the mobile space: "in many cases, network operators are pretty close to betting the farm on Java ... Phones could therefore turn out to be the area where Sun unequivocally manages to turn Java into the standard". Forbidden supports the Java standard and has Java implementations of its players.

Wed 3rd Apr, 2002

Isle of Man 3G trial update

Alan Cane writing in FT creative business reports positively on the Manx Telecom trial of 3G mobile services.