Nokia, Born In the UMA
Nokia is starting to push the wireless technology unlicensed mobile access, or UMA, in the U.S., and will offer a cell phone for T-Mobile’s planned UMA launch in September. Earlier this month Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told the WSJ that Nokia had developed a UMA phone specifically for T-Mobile.
Nokia makes both dual WiFi-cellular UMA handsets and UMA hardware that sits in the network. For T-Mobile’s launch we heard that the carrier is using Alcatel for its UMA network hardware, so we’re thinking Nokia is just sticking to a handset for the launch. If T-Mobile’s UMA launch is successful, perhaps it could help Nokia regain its lead in the U.S., which the WSJ points out slipped behind Motorola in 2004.
Katie,
Get your facts right. Nokia is using Kineto for the UNC (similar to Motorola) and dual-mode UMA handsets will be the last category of handsets that will put Nokia ahead of MOT. It will be such a miniscule portion of the handset market that it is not even funny.
Ram, everyone uses Kineto for the UNC — Kineto invented the technology and hold the patents and their main business model is selling UNCs. The one they make for Nokia will be branded as Nokia, supported by Nokia, and will be sold by Nokia, so as far as the customer is concerned it is a Nokia product. Anyway, Katie said T-Mobile is using the Alacatel UNC (which is the same story as Nokia — really a Kineto UNC).
This is what I’ve been told from various companies: that UNCs are available from Kineto, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel and Ericsson. Both Nokia Networks and Motorola Networks OEM Kineto’s UNC technology. Alcatel and Ericsson both develop their own UNCs. I heard T-Mobile is going with Alcatel, but T-Mobile won’t comment on any UMA plans.
Katie is actually right. The T-Mobile UMA solution is Alcatel in-house based on NGN platform.
The Kineto UNC solution is a centralized (All UMA calls are going thru the UNC) solution which is not in line with what 3GPP is doing (Distributed Architecture).
If you look at it carefully, UMA is a specific signalling (Call control) and VoIP traffic. The best approach is to implement UMA Call control inside the Softswitch (Call control) and the UMA speech codec on the GigE/IP bearer card on the Media Gateways (User Plane).
What Kineto does is to bundle all of this into a single box (Call control + Media Gateway). Again that is against the very principle of 3GPP R4 distributed architecture.
Don’t get me wrong. Just trying to make a point as to explain why Alcatel does have their own UMA solution as they leverage their aquisition of Spatial Wireless NGN and their top market share in Mobile NGN deployments.
Thanks for the info Laurence. I was going from what I’d heard from Nokia, Motorola, and Kineto. I was skeptical of earlier claims that Alacatel was actually going a different way, but that was due to lack of details.
“What Kineto does is to bundle all of this into a single box (Call control + Media Gateway). Again that is against the very principle of 3GPP R4 distributed architecture.”
This information is incorrect. The Kineto solution employs a separate Media Gateway. A check of their website shows press releases for work with dicreet GWs.