The Acton, Massachusetts-based company offers fixed-mobile convergence technology in a client/server architecture, with clients on mobile devices taking to a server in an operator network, said Richard Hubble, Tatara’s director for EMEA. At the moment, however, this means the making voice or data calls on either a cellular or a WiFi network from a single handset and a single phone number, not the ability for calls to begin on one network and roam without interruption onto the other.
Mobile IP is an Internet Engineering Task Force standard communications protocol that is designed to allow mobile device users to move from one network to another while maintaining their permanent IP address, and will enable session persistency, said Hubble. He forecast that Tatara will be in a position to run trials of the new technology in the first quarter of next year, with actual production possibly as soon as the second.
Tatara has commercial deployments in Europe at various Vodafone properties in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, and Germany where its technology manages the connectivity with WiFi hotspot aggregators, as well as a trial at BT Group Plc. In North America, it is in use at Telus and VeriSign, where its technology underscores the latter’s Wireless Data Roaming Service.