Old handset standard put to good use

UMA, OR Unlicensed Mobile Access, was one of those handset standards originally feted to become as universal as Bluetooth. It didn't. But now femtocell makers want to harness UMA to roll out industry standard products.

One femtocell provider, Kineto, is advocating the adoption of UMA as "an industry recognised interface which will hasten standardised devices and accelerate services to market."

It's hardly surprising given that Kineto was one of the founding members of the UMA specifications. Kineto does seem to have the support of another femtoceel maker, Ubiquisys, though.

The original objective with UMA was to provide a means for consumers to gain access to all the services they'd expect on a mobile phone. But have them delivered not through the cellular network but through other wireless services.

Those other services were, of course, Wi-fi and Bluetooth. Perhaps the most famous example of somebody trying to put UMA to good use was BT with its Fusion offering.

Fusion provides one phone which acts like a cordless handset at home but was a regular mobile phone outside the home. It's hardly been a runaway success.

Now femtocell manufacturers and their clients, the mobile network operators, have struck a problem. If femtocells take off then they'll be thousands instead of hundreds of base stations attached to their networks.

There's dangers because these Femtocells work by putting a mini base station in your living room and connecting in via broadband.

So mobile network operators are faced with the prospect of thousands of base stations connecting in via the public internet rather than cosy own private backbone networks.

Which is where UMA comes in because it already has the necessary security for connections built in. So it might stop viruses being delivered over the mobile phone network, for example.

Kineto will probably get its way because there's no point re-inventing the wheel when you can re-use a semi-forgotten standard. µ

L'INQ
UMA Today