Tata Teleservices Ltd announced it first, followed by Reliance Infocomm, so you can be reasonably certain that others will be joining the party. I am talking about international roaming on CDMA (code-division multiple access) and GSM (global systems for mobility), simultaneously. What’s that mean, and how does it work?
The world of mobile telephony is based on several platforms, but the most commonly-used are GSM and CDMA. The story so far was that if you used a CDMA service, with a CDMA handset, obviously, the handset was not enabled to handle the SIM card of a GSM service provider, and vice-versa. So, the user needed to buy two SIM cards, and two handsets to avoid becoming incommunicado.
Earlier this month, TTSL said it would be launching an international roaming facility on its Tata Indicom service, called "One World One Number". The service is to be launched in mid-April. "We worked on the back-end of the service to enable our T-Sim card to be compatible with both CDMA and GSM networks. T-SIM required some additional memory to work with both platforms," Greg Young, head of value-added services of Tata Indicom, told me in an interview on Wednesday.
"Getting the additional memory was the challenge, but the more important part of the exercise was to ensure that customers got a single bill even when they travel extensively abroad, cruising on 290 networks in 186 countries around the world," Mr Young said. "T-SIM cards can be used in both a CDMA and a GSM phone, or the multi-mode phones which are going to be launched next month. With multi-mode phones, users simply need to switch networks, depending on which platform he/she wants to use," he said.
Both voice and SMS will be offered to begin with, he said, with data services being available sometime in the future. Reliance Infocomm’s inter-standard international roaming will be available on 11 major CDMA networks and 340 GSM networks.
Cutting-edge
Meanwhile, in news from the handset front, cutting-edge mobile phones-or phones integrated with various multimedia and rich-data functionalities-are rapidly increasing their share of phones shipped in the Asia-Pacific market.
For example, with 252.3 million mobile phones shipped in the region in 2005, 53.4 per cent had camera functions, says In-Stat, a high-tech market research firm says. The plunging price of such models in emerging markets has greatly promoted their adoption. "Digital cameras, including both digital still camera and video camera, will remain the most popular function of cutting-edge phones," says In-Stat.
"By 2009, 67 per cent of mobiles sold in Asia-Pacific will have camera functionality."