Mobility Bytes

Wireless Sensors, Transmitters: $1,850 mn Market

According to an analysis from Frost&Sullivan, the revenues from World
Wireless Sensors and Transmitters Markets totaled $160 mn in 2005. It is
expected to grow to $1,850 mn in 2012.

With the availability of commodity radio devices, adoption of
wireless sensing technology in industrial applications and automation in the
areas including energy management, process control and inventory tracking has
risen considerably.

The largest opportunity for wireless sensor networks is as
sensing devices in remote or inaccessible areas such as nuclear plants, oil and
gas fields and high temperature furnaces. Overall, the key growth areas for the
technology lie in energy for metering, building home and industrial automation.

However, there are still issues related to interoperability
of multi-vendor equipment. Wireless sensors and sensor networking technologies
are largely proprietary and each market participant has his own set of
implementations with little interfacing capabilities with those of other
manufacturers or original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)," said
Frost&Sullivan Research Analyst, V Sankaranarayanan. Hence, if a customer
was to buy a solution from one service provider, migrating to another would mean
reworking the entire solution, thereby incurring significant costs, he adds.

Nevertheless, the analysts pointed out that with the
emergence of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and very recent ZigBee standard,
wireless sensing technology seems to be heading towards a standards-based
environment. The future growth of the market will depend on ensuring that
applications are developed in such a way that all sensors can be demonstrated
independently and are also interoperable.

Elitecore's WiMax Billing Solution

Elitecore Technologies has launched Crestel Convergent Billing to deliver
end-to-end WiMax billing and customer-centric management. The solution meets the
complete OSS/BSS, policy management, authentication and customer care
requirements with distinct offerings for tier-1 to tier-3 WiMax and next
generation service providers.

According to Hemal Patel, managing director and CEO,
Elitecore Technologies, vendor of Crestel Convergent Billing, even as WiMax has
extended beyond backhaul towards the edge and access layers, it has emerged as a
parallel service to cellular technologies with its ability to cater to mobile
VoIP.

WiMax deployments are gaining ground. According to In-Stat
Research, WiMax equipment market is expected to grow from $42 mn in 2006 to $3
bn in 2010.

As a convergent solution, Crestel delivers network agnostic
OSS/BSS, functioning through a unified control layer, enabling multi-service
operators to seamlessly integrate their WiMax offering into current networks
while offering matching service levels over the new technology.

In conjunction with Elitecore's RADIUS solution, Crestel
enables high-value broadband service delivery to qualified customers through
user and device authentication, provisioning, mediation, real-time rating and
charging with prepaid and postpaid billing. On the other hand it also offers a
one-stop solution to smaller providers and greenfield operators with limited
technical and financial resources, delivering pre-paid and post-paid billing,
accurate service provisioning, policy-based QoS, inbuilt RADIUS functionality,
differential packages and customer web self-care.

SCO Launches HipCheck

SCO Group's Me Inc mobile services division has launched HipCheck mobile
service, a proactive mobile administration solution. The service allows system
administrators to proactively monitor and manage UNIX and Windows systems 24x7
from any location through Windows mobile phones. The solution combines system
monitoring and alerts with secure mobile intervention allowing the technicians
to detect, diagnose and correct many common system problems.

The pricing for the HipCheck service Pricing can be range
from $10 to $18 per monitored system per month. It will vary depending on the
number of users, servers and the time period that the service is used on the
Windows mobile device.

Sony Ericsson's Smartphone

Sony Ericsson has launched the first commercially available smartphone with
the Symbian OS version 9.1 and UIQ 3 software platform. With the estimated
street price of Rs 37,000, the P990i smartphone is Wi-Fi enabled and features a
2 megapixel camera and a hardware keyboard beneath the flip-down keypad.

The P990i provides the benefits of UMTS including video
calling, high-bandwidth multi-media downloads and the ability to browse the
Internet with full HTML pages. In addition it is also prepared for all major
push e-mail clients enabling full e-mail access with attachments.

It has an internal memory of 80 MB, which is expandable via Sony Memory Stick
Pro Duo cards upto 4GB. A 64 MB Memory Stick PRO Duo is included in the box,
preloaded with a VPN client and trial version of a virus scan package.