9.1 Introduction

Mobility portals look set to become the window through which the user will access a whole range of innovative services. Wherever and whenever, the mobility portal will warn you, inform you or just entertain you.

There is a distinction between the mobility portal and the mobile portal. The concept of mobility extends to include terminal independence through user profiles, additional value-add services such as 'find me, follow me' call routing, and integration with existing systems in the fixed network. The mobile portal, however, is being expressed as a cut-down version of existing Web-based applications, such as news, weather and e-mail.

The explosion in use of the short message service (SMS) for sending text messages demonstrates a natural evolution path to wireless application protocol (WAP) services on smartphone and personal digital assistant (PDA) devices. Support from many vendors has created an environment where the applications delivered through the mobile portal will increasingly substitute access through the fixed network.

However, although the Internet and mobile telephones have independently been successful (see Figs 9.1 and 9.2), it does not always mean that combining these technologies will also be successful. Evidence of this is clear in the combination of TV and telephone technologies, both successful in their own right, but the uptake of personal videophones has not happened. Mobile videophone is considered a killer application. However, as will become clear from this chapter, to achieve a high take-up is unlikely in the foreseeable future due to...