Have you ever wondered why you couldn't access your Outlook email/contacts/calendar from your favourite iPhone or iPad, and why your IT admin was pretending you needed a Blackberry instead? Why your new Blackberry then couldn't access your company's intranet? Why you could buy a bus ticket by sending an SMS to a hard-to-remember shortcode, but not by simply browsing the bus company's website from your mobile phone? Have you ever tried accessing your bank account from work or on holidays, while your plastic authentication token was at home? Or remembering and filling in logins and passwords on the tiny keyboard of your smartphone, while your passwords are stored in a file or tool on your laptop?...
Five years after the launch of suitable 3G smartphones, our daily experience with these mobile devices is frustrating. Mobile network operators can connect you to their walled gardens, an appstore or to the wide open internet, but can't provide access to your email, your contacts, your calendar, your company intranet, the bus company or your bank. Huh?
Welcome to the 3G Bitpipe!
Whereas 20 years ago mobile operators were engineering their network to improve coverage, audio quality and reliability, today Mobile operators are mainly engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of revenue per Hertz and per bit. Voice and texts are commoditized and so is data, which mobile network operators are transporting from the cell sites to the internet peering point over all-IP networks, without adding much value to the user experience, beyond mobility - ubiquitous internet access.
Mobile voice and sms revenue is sustained by the E.164 addressing scheme - Metcalfe's law got applied to over 5 billion mobile phone numbers. Is mobile data business sustained by the IPv4 addressing scheme? Not at all. Anno 2011 your smartphone receives a meaningless, dynamic IPv4 address. To communicate with your friends, family or colleagues on the mobile internet, you need to use an over-the-top app such as an email client, instant messenger or social network, each coming with its own addressing scheme. Will IPv6 re-establish Metcalfe's law in mobile networks? Well, perhaps if you would key in your fiends' IPv6 addresses into your address book???
Mobile data operators, and data service providers in general should, in order to benefit from Metcalfe's law, introduce a permanent addressing scheme on top of IP.
For some time, they thought it would be the E.164 number (@ a domain name) of the SIP User Agents in the IMS network, as conveyed in the SIP Request URI, From: and To: headers. In other words that data applications would be "sessionized" and transported as "RTP media streams". Today's reality is that on the internet, progressive video download for example (Flash, Silverlight, ...) is much more popular than video streaming (RTSP/SIP + RTP/RTCP).
Now imagine if we could use the 5 billion SIM cards out there, to identify end users on the public internet, to authenticate them and even to encrypt their comunications. Mobile and fixed operators would insert the authenticated mobile identity (i.e. a scrambled version of the IMSI) as a header in upstream HTTP GET requests. Initially probably only to web sites with which the user would have agreed to share his/her mobile identity, location and/or presence. Later, in messages directly to other mobile devices on this "Internet of SIMs".
Are Mobile Operators able to enrich protocol headers with a strongly authenticated mobile identity? Sure! They were doing it 12 years ago, when WAP was launched. WTP requests from the WAP gateway to the WAP server would typically carry the E.164 MSISDN!
Were the WAP sites delivering any added value based on that "network-based cookie"? Nope. They would not even remember the language you selected during your previous access.
Would internet content providers and powerhouses be able to deliver meaningful added value based on a secure permanent identity? The list is endless - customer profiling, banner tailorization, cookieless devices, secure webmail, video services which you can pause and continue watchig later, immediately accessible bank and brokerage accounts, premium rate services, reverse charged services, micropayments, multi-device synchronization, network-based address books...
Mobile operators have failed to deliver Secure Sign On, Location and Presence Triggers to internet applications, and still don't see the necessety and urgency to do so.
They don't see the distress of the iPhone user not able to access his/her bank account, because the plastic authentication token is at home. Or to watch digital TV on the move, because the authentication token for digital TV is in the set-top-box at home.
Let's put some competitive pressure on them. EAP-SIM (RFC 4186) and EAP-AKA (RFC4187), are allowing smartphones, tablets and laptops to be identified, authenticated and securely admitted to residential, enterprise and public Wifi Access Points, deployed and configured mainly by fixed broadband operators. It is sufficient to add a Community SSID (e.g. "EAPSIM-MOBILE") on the Access Point, and configure it for EAP-SIM authentication : RADIUS communication to a central AAA-to-MAP gateway, leading to the HLR where the user's authentication vectors are generated.
Fixed broadband operators and Over-The-Top content providers could thus start distributing SIMs (Subscriber Identification Modules) today, for Wifi tablets, laptops and netbooks, in order to offer the user experience we missed for a decade on 2.5G-3G!
Or, if mobile operators changed their minds, they could open up their HLRs and let WiFi federations verify the SIM card credentials of over 5 Bn mobile subscribers. And unite forces with the fixed operators to enrich the headers, to connect a fleet of employee SIMs to the correct enterprise VPN, or a set of metering devices to the correct machine-to-machine service.
The time has come for mobile operators to decide if they want to go further down the spiral of value destruction through commoditization and upfront 4G investments, or whether they want to address their customers' real issues, namely logging in to applications and communicating to eachother in a secure way, based on the SIM, over any wireless IP access network (2.5G, 3G and WiFi).
