Smart joins international group of major mobile phone operators

Mobile telecommunications leader Smart Communications, Inc. has joined an international organization that aims to define widely accepted requirements for an open mobile terminal platform (OMTP).

OMTP’s founding members include mmO2, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Smart, Telefonica Moviles, TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile) T-Mobile and Vodafone. Smart is the Philippines’ leading wireless services provider with 15 million subscribers on its GSM network.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), Smart has introduced award-winning, world-first wireless services, including mobile commerce services such as Smart Money and Smart Load. It is a founding member of the Asian Mobility Initiative which promotes cooperation in the development of wireless services among its seven member-operators.

The OMTP group aims to define those platform requirements necessary for mobile devices to deliver openly available standardized application interfaces that will provide customers with a more consistent and improved user experience across different devices, while also enabling individual operators and manufacturers to customize and differentiate their offering.

The group intends to achieve its goals by identifying common mobile operators’ requirements, with the aim of establishing an open framework for mobile device manufacturers and associated software and hardware suppliers to develop open mobile terminal platform compliant products.

It will use existing standards, where they exist, and will encourage the development of standards by presenting OMTP requirements. As a technology-neutral organization, all technology vendors will be free to contribute to and support OMTP requirements and to provide OMTP compliant products.

The following companies have expressed their intent to join the OMTP group: Amena, Hutchinson/3, KPN, One Austria, SFR and Telenor.mmO2 has 100-percent ownership of mobile network operators in three countries – the UK, Germany and Ireland – as well as leading mobile Internet portal business.