The Espoo-based telecoms equipment vendor had already told ComputerWire that it would be doing a deal with Kineto, which hails from Milpitas, California, but yesterday’s announcement went into more detail on the agreement.
UMA is a technology that enables cellular traffic to be tunneled across a fixed-line network over a WiFi connection, namely a device doubling as a WiFi AP and DSL router. It requires special client software on the mobile handset, together with a UNC inn the core of the network to handle the tunneled traffic.
For the time being, UMA is specific to the GSM world. There is no CDMA version, which was a commercial decision by the community that developed it, based on the fact that there are over a billion subscribers in the GSM world and somewhere in excess of 100,000 in CDMA.
Pekka Viirola, director of convergence network systems at Nokia Networks, said the company would resell the Kineto UNC without re-badging it, arguing that Kineto has a strong enough name in the market already to justify that option.
It will be sold alongside Nokia’s MSS mobile switches, media and security gateways, the last of which will set up the tunnels, with Nokia guaranteeing interoperability and performance. Kineto itself offers UMA clients for mobile phones, but Nokia’s handset division will be developing its own, for launch in the first half of next year, Viirola went on.
He said Nokia sees UMA as one path to fixed-mobile convergence, in particular where fixed-line operators decided to keep their TDM switches and install softswitches and gateways. The other approach is direct access to an IP core, in which case an operator will install end-to-end IP, including an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) at the core.
