Monday, December 5, 2005

Kineto Cites Strong Demand for Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA)

Kineto Wireless, a start-up based in Milpitas, California, reported strong industry demand for its Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) technology. UMA is an access technology that allows a seamless handoff of mobile voice and data from a wide area cellular network to a wireless local area network (WLAN).

In April 2005, UMA achieved global standardization when the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) ratified the UMA specification as part of its Release 6, ensuring standardized approaches for handsets and infrastructure equipment to speed adoption of mobile/Wi-Fi convergence. First announced by the UMA participating companies in September 2004, the specification became a 3GPP global standard in less than eight months.

BT, Telecom Italia and TeliaSonera -- have announced their intent to deploy the technology as part of their strategic fixed-mobile convergence initiatives. In addition, Kineto is actively involved in UMA evaluations with more than 25 major operators around the globe.

"The momentum for UMA in the market is tremendous. With UMA now a formal global standard, major mobile operators committing to UMA deployments, and leading handset and infrastructure vendors delivering UMA solutions based on Kineto's proven technology, all the pieces are now in place for widespread commercial UMA deployments in 2006," said Rick Gilbert, chief executive officer for Kineto Wireless.
http://www.kineto.com











How
UMA Enables Broadband IMS
Originally
developed by 15 leading companies in the mobile industry, Unlicensed
Mobile Access (UMA) is now the 3GPP standard for enabling subscriber
access to mobile services over Wi-Fi and broadband IP networks. The UMA
standard effectively creates a parallel radio access network - the UMA
Network (UMAN) that interfaces to the mobile core network using existing
GSM-defined standard interfaces. This solution uses IP tunneling
techniques to transparently extend mobile voice, data, and IMS services
over IP access networks. Here is an overview of UMA.