Ericsson boosts mobile data market

By RICHARD BRADDELL

WELLINGTON - Telecommunications equipment vendor Ericsson Communications will supply internet content and applications aimed at stimulating the New Zealand market for mobile data.

The head of Ericsson web site E-Zebra.Net, Christopher Swan, said that while it was not Ericsson's core business, "a lot of things don't happen until the applications and information are in place."

Last week, Wilson & Horton unveiled plans for a new associate company, iTouch New Zealand, to deliver news, sports results, share prices and services such as banking and ticket purchases to digital cellphones.

And the Vodafone group announced plans to bring the internet to cellphones through a new service that will also provide news and other content to subscribers.

While Ericsson's venture into content and applications is not expected to be a great money-spinner, if it does turn out to be successful, it could be sold off.

Ericsson will initially concentrate on providing information such as weather, news and financial results.

It has an international agreement with Reuters for news and is working with Television New Zealand to be able to provide news to mobile phones as well.

The initiative is part of E-Zebra net, which was launched before Christmas.

Its aim is to become an incubator platform for carriers, content providers and application developers to develop and trial internet applications.

Mr Swan said the possibilities were unlimited once the new generation of wireless application protocol (WAP) became available later this year.

"It's going to create two-way communications so we can provide interactive services; things like ticketing, online banking, stock purchasing, retail sales ... Anything becomes possible."

With the internet reaching into mobile phones, information would be available globally rather than being confined to New Zealand.

Ericsson is one of the leading exponents of WAP, which is a technology that enables a trimmed-down, text-only version of the internet that suits the small screens and limited data-capacity of mobile phones.

Instead of using the internet's donkey, HTML, the WAP system relies on a stripped-down language known as WML.

Mr Swan said that while Ericsson would be setting up the equivalent of wireless internet sites based on WML, it was expected that, in the future, there would be devicedrivers that would identify if the site was talking to a fully fledged web site or a stripped-down WML phone.

Mr Swan expects the carriers to be doing field trials of WAP by the middle of this year.