Rescue for Bangalore City Using Cellphone Technology

Have you ever been to Bangalore? If yes, you must be well aware of traffic situation there. To alleviate people's traffic problems, Bangalore Traffic Police, Mapunity (developer of geographic information systems and services) and Airtel have come up with an urban traffic information system known as Bangalore Transport Information System (BTIS) using cell phone technology.

With BTIS (lunched last June), real-time traffic information is generated from the cell phone tower logs of Airtel's city-wide network, and made available to commuters to see live congestion hotspots, find directions and plan their travel routes. The entire information system is available through SMS to Airtel customers using a shortcode and to others by dialing a ten-digit number. This live traffic information system is the first of its kind in India. It addresses the growing need of traffic administrators for centralized traffic monitoring and control infrastructure.

Source: Cellphone Digest

Boost Up Your Phone Signals With zBoost

Do you face problems like dreaded signal bars go away thus losing your signal in your home/office/shopping complex? zBoost is here to improve indoor cell phone coverage and fix the annoying problem of weak/losing signals.

zBoost captures the wireless signal outside, brings it inside and enhances, or boosts it; thus extending a Cell Zone in your home or office or your car. It repeats and amplifies the signal and is frequency dependent.

Source: Cellphone digest

Happy Birthday GSM!!

Twenty years ago today 7th Sept, an historic agreement was signed in Copenhagen by 15 telecommunications operators from 13 countries that led to the development of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), and a mobile communications industry that today serves more than 2.5 billion people across 218 countries.

GSM - originally known as Groupe Special Mobile was designed to provide a single mobile phone standard within Europe to replace the multiple of incompatible analogue systems in use at the time. It was ironically, never designed as a global system from the outset, but was later adopted by other countries, initially Australia's Telstra for their phone systems and eventually the Groupe Special Mobile became the Global System for Mobile Communications.

In 1989, GSM responsibility was transferred to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and phase I of the GSM specifications were published in 1990.

The first GSM network was launched in 1991 by Radiolinja in Finland with joint technical infrastructure maintenance from Ericsson. It was in June 1992 that the first roaming agreement was signed between Telecom Finland and Vodafone in the UK.

The first US based GSM network was launched later in November 1995, on the GSM1900 band by American Personal Communications - trading as Sprint Spectrum, and was initially 49% (later 100%) owned by Sprint which later launched a national CDMA network, abandoning its early GSM heritage in 1999.

Today, the GSM family of technologies makes up 85% of the global mobile services market, which accounts for about 1.6% of global GDP. Each year, mobile users purchase more than one billion new handsets, make more than 7 trillion minutes of calls and send about 2.5 trillion text messages.

Source: Cellular News

iPhone Price Reduced by 33%

To make iPhone affordable, Apple has lowered the price of the most popular iPhone model with 8GB of storage from $599 to just $399. The 4GB iPhone is available for $200 in the US through Apple’s retail and online stores and AT&T retail stores. The iPhone 4GB model will be sold while supplies last.

Source: 3G

Senior Citizens Show Concern Over Handset Designs

According to a new survey by iGR, Americans over age 65 years are using the cameraphones, are interested in medical applications and LBS. They have a major concern about the complexity and usability of current handset designs.

The study shows that handsets and services for seniors should not be so simple as to be featureless, but rather should include advanced features that are easy to use.

Source: Cellular News

Smart Limits - A Relief for Parents in USA

Parents in the US will soon have a service allowing them to limit mobile phone usage of their kids. AT&T's 'Smart Limits' will enable parents to set a limit on incoming and outgoing calls, text messages, talk time, ring tones and other downloads through a Web site.

Parents can make settings on the net, which will allow their kids to make or receive calls from parents as well as make emergency calls to 911 even when they are out of specified limits and minutes.

Source: Techtree

Interesting Statistics About Mobile Usage in Delhi

- With the population at 13,800,000 (census 2001) persons, there are 1.038 phones per person

- Between June and July this year, 532,033 new mobile phone and WLL connections were issued

- An average GSM user talks for 211 minutes per month while he makes the calls, while he talks 261 minutes per month while receiving calls. On an average, the user talks for 471 minutes or almost 8 hours on the phone every month

- An average CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) mobile phone user spends 217 minutes per month on making calls, while he spends 244 minutes per month on receiving calls

- In the metro cities, a GSM user sends 51 SMSes per month while a CDMA user sends 24

- The average outgoing rate (rental and call charges) for GSM users is Rs 1.37 per minute while for CDMA users it is Rs 1.04 per minute. That's an average monthly charge of Rs 289 for GSM, and Rs 219 for CDMA users

- Both GSM and CDMA post-paid users spent almost three times as much time on the phone as their pre-paid counterparts

- There are 6 mobile phone and WLL operators--Vodafone Essar, Idea, Bharti Airtel, Reliance, Tata Teleservices and MTNL--out of which, Airtel has 3,344,686 users. That's 25.17% of the total users in Delhi

- Within their networks, Reliance had the maximum number of successfully connected calls at 99.77% and the best voice quality. Market leader Airtel had the maximum delay in access to its service at 13.60 seconds

- While most mobile phone operators refund customers within 30 days after dispute resolution, Vodafone Essar (formerly Hutch Essar) had the best record with refunds being disbursed within 15 days of dispute resolution


Source: indian Express

Indian Mobile Subscribers Raised to 157.4 Million in 3 Years

Mobile user subscribers have grown from 35.6 million to 165.10 million in 3 years, according to industry data.

As on July-end, it stood at over 193 million. But when it comes to growth in market share, only Bharti, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Tata Teleservices (TTSL) have shown any significant increase from March 2004 to 2007.

Source: iSource

Ovi- from Nokia

Nokia is expanding its focus from 'on mobile' services to offering a range of 'Internet' services under the brand 'Ovi'. Ovi, meaning 'door' in Finnish, enables consumers to easily access their existing social network, communities and act as a gateway to Nokia services.

Ovi starts out with music, games and maps. Nokia plans to offer localized service all over Europe during this year.

As part of Ovi, Nokia announced the Nokia Music Store and N-Gage, two services that make it easy for people to discover, try and buy music and games along with exclusive content only available through Nokia.

Source: Mobile Monday