One.tel To Guard Against Mobile Spam
The Age
Tuesday August 22, 2000
UPSTART cellular phone service provider One.Tel launched its 1800MHz national network last Thursday with a promise that its planned advanced services would not lead to spam on our mobiles.
``Spam on e-mail would not even be close to the spam opportunity on the phone, and we see that as something we'll protect the customer from," said One.Tel joint chief executive David Wright.
With the inception of the services to Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane last week, One.Tel joins Optus, Telstra and Vodafone as Australia's fourth Global System for Mobiles (GSM) network. Its Sydney network went live in May.
It is a stepping stone to next-generation applications that mimic the Internet, Wright said.
The company plans to immediately offer a broad suite including news, sport results and weather.
Location-based mobile commerce services based around Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), including directions, music buying, ticketing, and hotel reservations would come later.
One.Tel will also move quickly to offer the high-speed 115Kbps General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) on the way to third-generation mobile telephony at up to 2Mbps, Wright said.
One.Tel uses 32KB Java cards for its Subscriber Identification Modules (SIM), which provide greater flexibility, he said.
``It's like a C-drive on your phone," Wright said.
``Then there's digital audio streaming where you can listen to news and sport. You can do that on a $1 or a $1000 phone, so it's available for everyone."
Most mobile providers have taken a ``walled garden" approach to WAP, locking content publishers into their service and limiting opportunities, he said. Customers can't easily look at a WAP site if it is not already preselected by the provider.
The founder of e-commerce strategist WSA Online, Brad Allan, said the breakdown of the walled garden was inevitable.
He said carriers had implemented closed systems to protect their first mover advantage, which had now mostly dissolved.
He cited Vodafone as an example of a carrier that was relinquishing its stranglehold.
``To break down the walled garden is definitely the way to go," Allan said.
He criticised mobile phone design as an impediment to greater adoption. He said entering a Web address with an alphanumeric keypad is too difficult.
Instead, many providers will go back to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are easier to punch into a phone but, like phone numbers, harder to remember.
``We've got three people conjuring up fantastic 1-2-3-4 (IP) numbers," he said.
In contrast to other carriers, One.Tel allows any publisher's content to be accessible on its customers' mobiles, Wright said.
But he said fears this would lead to spam - bulk, unsolicited messages - were unfounded. One.Tel would make life easier than its competitors for mobile publishers to get on to its network, but not too easy, he said.
``We want the customer to opt-in," Wright said. ``It restricts what you can offer (publishers), but we want the customer to be in charge.
``We won't open the floodgates."
British online IT news service the Register reported last week that Orange customers in that country had been spammed by a website promising to provide cheaper calls.
An undisclosed number of customers were alerted to messages in their voicemail inboxes, but they only found a female voice saying, ``Thinking of upgrading your mobile phone?" from a company called www.somuch cheaper.com.
LINKSwww.onetel.com.au
www.wsaonline.com
© 2000 The Age
