LEMONADE for Le Monde

How Open Standards are Adding Fizz to Global Mobile Email Market

By Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO of Synchronica

Mobile Email for the Masses

For years, mobile operators have been debating how to increase the average return per user (ARPU) from mobile data services: MMS, mobile TV, user-created content, and mobile social networking have all entered the discussion. What we are finally seeing, though, are signs that the market for consumer mobile email is set to grow exponentially from eight million accounts this year to a massive 184 million accounts by 2011 [1].

Emerging Markets Leapfrog

Despite European mobile markets generally being more mature, I believe that this growth is likely to be seen first in the emerging and rapidly growing markets of Eastern Europe, Africa, Middle-East, Asia, and Latin America.

Why do I believe this? Because PC ownership in these regions is low and traditional landline telecommunications infrastructure is limited whereas mobile phones are seeing phenomenally high growth rates. In fact, I predict that the mobile phone will become the primary form of accessing email in these regions.

This represents a tremendous opportunity for mobile operators, but as with any healthy market, they have their competitors in the form of internet service providers (ISP) and application service providers (ASP).

Popular Devices

However, to make this dream into reality, it is important to use middleware that can support the majority of the standard mobile phones that are already out there in the market. While we are all drawn to sexy new devices, such as the Nokia N95, the fact is that smartphones represent only a tiny portion of the addressable market.

The vast majority of phones in use today are mass market feature phones, such as the Nokia Series 40 or the Sony Ericsson Walkman range. Therefore, it is essential for service providers to select solutions that work on both smartphones and mass market feature phones.

Popping the Bubble?

The problem is that most mobile email solutions today are based on proprietary protocols, requiring users to download additional client software. This approach is set to fail in the consumer market where the overwhelming majority are using feature phones that cannot use proprietary clients.

Approaches using a Java ME client theoretically work on feature phones, but provide an inferior user experience compared to built-in clients and are therefore less likely to be adopted, leading to lower mobile data revenues for operators.

Time and again it has been proven that consumers won't adopt services that are hard to set up or difficult to use. They want to be able to use mobile email services on standard mobile phones right out of the box - no software installation, no fiddly configuration, no expensive proprietary devices.

The only viable option seems to be using open standards to interface with the built-in email applications. These are shipping pre-installed with the vast majority of devices today, enabling both smartphone and mass market feature phones to receive push email.

Once they have got that part sorted, operators need to ensure a seamless setup by adding automatic client provisioning of the built-in email application.

Who Uses What?

At present, there are two main industry-standard delivery mechanisms for mobile push email. One is preferred by operators and the other is preferred by ISPs and ASPs:

For internet service providers and application service providers, the LEMONADE [2] IMAP IDLE standard is rapidly emerging as the preferred mechanism for delivering push email to standard mobile phones because it works independently of the operators' networks.

However, it requires a constant connection to the device to enable the server to push new email to the mobile. This can have a substantial impact on battery life and also has the potential to put a heavy load on an operator's infrastructure when consumer adoption of mobile email becomes widespread.

From the mobile operator perspective, LEMONADE promotes the Open Mobile Alliance Electronic Mail Notification standard (OMA EMN). OMA EMN is more attractive than IMAP IDLE because it does not require a constant connection to the server.

Instead, OMA EMN uses SMS messaging to alert the mobile device that new email has arrived. As a result, it has less impact on the battery life of the device and demands less resource from the mobile network infrastructure, too.

Obviously, this is a good choice for operators since they don't incur any expense from SMS messaging, but would be less attractive to ASPs and ISPs because they would have to pay for every message alerting their customers to fresh email.

In summary, the LEMONADE standards (IMAP IDLE or OMA EMN) offer service providers, generally, a major opportunity to offer mobile push email services to the mass market and generate fresh mobile data revenues.

Operators should add a little LEMONADE fizz to shake up the consumer market by adding a vital communication service that works on ordinary phones that are already in their customers' hands … and watch mobile email explode.

The LEMONADE standard was established by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to improve the user experience and usability of email on mobile devices that had limited capacity and bandwidth.

The LEMONADE group promotes open standards, such as IMAP IDLE and OMA EMN, which are platform-independent and therefore designed to support email on the widest range of mobile devices.

[1] Source: Visiongain Mobile Email Market Report
[2] The License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented and Diverse Endpoints (LEMONADE)

About Synchronica

Synchronica plc develops and markets synchronization and device management solutions for mobile operators, device manufacturers, and enterprises. Its product portfolio ranges from data synchronization (DS) to device management (DM), and firmware updates over the air (FOTA). Products include the mobile device management product set Mobile Manager Suite and the push email and synchronization solution Mobile Gateway. Headquartered in the U.K., with a development center in Germany and presences in the USA, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Synchronica plc is a public company traded on the AIM list of the London Stock Exchange (SYNC). More information is available at www.synchronica.com

For more information, please contact:

David Clark
Tel.: +44 1892 5527 20
Fax: +44 1892 5527 21
david.clark@synchronica.com