Management Information System Term Paper on

CLOUD PHONES

Prepared by: Rahul Kumar, 1st Year Roll No.: 10BM60069 Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur

Cloud Phone

Contents
Sl. No. Topic 1. Abstract 2. The Cloud Based Telephone Solution 3. How the Cloud Can Enable Shared Phones for Millions 4. Cloud Phones Work like E-Mail Accounts 5. Sending Cell Phones into the Cloud 6. Enter the Cloud Phone 7. Personal Cloud Phone Service for Rural Users Without a Handset 8. Meet the 20-cent Cloud Phone 9. An Interview with Nigel Waller, CEO of Movirtu CNN 10. Reference Page No. 3 4 5 6 7 8 11 12 12 15

Page 2

Cloud Phone

Abstract
There is no doubt that mobile telephony has brought about a tremendous change and improvement in the lives of those in the developing country; but the challenge is to bring those benefits to everyone. There are several companies that are working on the line of a new concept called Cloud Phone to provide access to mobile telephony to those who cant afford a SIM card. Cloud phone is the emerging technology in mobile telephony where people can own a virtual Cloud Phone account. They can login to their account from different devices and use the services of their service provider. My preliminary research included searching on the net for the number of mobile phone owners in the developing nations who belong to the middle class or any lower class and might not be able to afford a SIM card or mobile telephone sets. My research also includes a couple of interviews from people working in different mobile service provider companies in India, and collecting their view on the concept of Cloud Phone and how according to them would this new technology and service be received by the Indian public. I also did some research on the internet about the emerging technology to find out how feasible the solution is and how many companies are moving in this new area of service; also what variant of this technology are they planning to implement for their business. You've been using email for a while now, so you know how it works. You know that you don't need a computer dedicated to your email service in order to check in or send messages. All you need is a computer, any old computer, with Internet access. You just visit your account provider, like Gmail or Yahoo, log into your account and then read, send or receive messages. This is exactly how a Cloud Phone system works. Imagine that you have phone booths like internet cafes, and you can walk in, log in to your account using one of the phone devices and make a call; logout when the call is completed and walk out of the caf after paying for the service. Its easy and convenient. Cloud Phone is going to bring about a revolution in mobile telephony. It is specially going to attract people from the lower class who cant afford a mobile phone or a SIM card and for those in the upper class who need to maintain several phone numbers but dont want to carry around many mobile phone sets. These people can carry just one mobile phone set and can conveniently log in and log off of any service providers account to use it. In short, it is a technological innovation and a business idea we should look forward to.

Page 3

Cloud Phone

The Cloud Based Telephone Solution

Smartphones like Blackberry, Googles Nexus One, iPhone, etc. control the intelligence on the device that is owned or controlled by the vendor. These Smartphones integrate services and user experience. Google, Apple and other vendors control and sometimes own the revenue streams away from the carriers and operators. Apple integrates content and application download services by restricting the hardware/software environment. An iPhone app can only be used and run on an iPhone. To run a non-Apple value added service, the necessary application can only be transferred onto an iPhone by paying the necessary application charges or by paying Apple to include this application in its App Store. The operator has to bear the complete cost of supporting the massive data traffic generated and of supporting the seemingly small but cumbersome and powerful mobile devices but has to pay to Apple if it needs to deliver its own value added service to Apple. Google follows a similar model of restricting the software/hardware environment but allows the user to switch between operator networks via the 20-year-old GSM model. Just like Apple, Content and application services are tightly integrated with the device application environment; these devices do not operate without having been registered both with the operators network and with Google/Apple thus disinter mediating both the network as well as the customer relationship between the operator and their subscriber base. In all cases, all value-added revenues bypass the operator who is left with price-based only competition on commodity pipes. Cloud phones are virtual personal phones hosted in the network that are simply accessed via a personal ID from any device. The intelligence is not on the handset, but in the network. The device accesses everything required for the users digital life it does not house it. The digital experience is exponentially improved. The speed at which one can browse, download and upload is extraordinary. No more waiting and watching a globe spin now it is simply click and go. There are no plug-ins, application or compatibility issues. Whatever form-factor device, content, or application needed to access, everything is faster, simpler and more secure. Any combination of applications can be delivered as a service to any form-factor device. And applications are not constrained by any proprietary development environment or device features. They are developed and run on massively powerful servers, delivering an unparalleled experience not achievable with traditional computing phones, or smart/netbook devices. With cloud phones, the intelligence is in the network, and devices are non-intermediated. The subscriber is recognized and identified as such by the operator, irrespective of the device he/she is using. The operator becomes the broker between value-added service vendors and its subscriber base, and removes device and application/content legacies.

Page 4

Cloud Phone
Cloud phones do not prevent subscribers from using Google or Apple value-added services; rather they enable them to access them from any device. This is mostly due to the network intelligence delivered by the operator and, more importantly, with much cheaper devices, a better user experience, and with a price/performance value that Smartphone Nexus One, iPhone, et al cannot match. Cloud phone services are always hosted in the network on computing infrastructure that can take advantage of open and widely available application development environments. Since all the intelligence is in the network and the cloud phones can universally access any service -- independent of on any application or device legacy -- service development and deployment is far simpler/faster than traditional Smartphone. This offers operators the ability to compete on a leveled playing field without breaking any net-neutrality rules, and allows access to any service provisioned and delivered by anyone. In conclusion, cloud phones deliver the next-generation user experience, allowing subscribers to have access to their digital life from any device, anywhere. All through an intelligent network that returns the operator to a competitive position, decommoditizing the pipes and leveling the playing field with "bypass" players.

___________________________________________________________________ How the Cloud Can Enable Shared Phones for Millions
In developed countries, it is not uncommon for a majority of the population to have more than one mobile phone: for example, Germany has 1.2 phones per person. Residents in emerging countries, however, where income can be as low as under a dollar per day, a handset purchase is considered a luxury. Dual SIM handsets from Micromax, Nokia and others are targeted for these specific markets, allowing two persons to share the same phone. That is one plausible solution, but it pales in scope next to what Movirtu offers with its MX Share platform, which leverages the cloud to make millions of mobiles potentially sharable among a number of different people. With MX Share, subscribers have to purchase airtime minutes, services and their own phone number, even if they have do not own any mobile phone. The user can login to their phone using either a pay phone or someone elses handset in order to place prepaid calls, send text messages or check voicemail. No special handset or hardware is required. On ground level, the model is similar to sharing a computer through multiple accounts (such as an internet cafe); sign in to get your data and use the device. The key difference between an internet caf and cloud phone here is that the account management enabling handset use is handled in the cloud, and not on the individual device.

Page 5

Cloud Phone

The approach reminds us of Google Voice, which allows callers to reach us regardless of the phone we are currently using. Of course, Movirtus product is geared for a different audience: individuals, families or villages that could benefit from sharing a single handset. Those who can afford a mobile device can also benefit by offering their handset to others due to Movirtus SharePaid feature handset owners earn a small credit for allowing non-phone owners to borrow their device for calls or service. Its a win-win for all parties involved.

___________________________________________________________________ Cloud Phones Work like E-Mail Accounts

Cloud phones can bring text messaging, voice mails and other services to people who cannot afford their own mobile phones. It works quite similar to an e-mail account: the users have a unique phone number and a password for it, and they can access their account from any phone available. Movirtus, a UK-based company, CEO Nigel Waller, believes that these phones can help people who are struggling with poverty to find employment. He spoke about his company's cloud phones at the PopTech conference in Maine, USA. The conference focused mainly on new technical ideas that would benefit our society at large in the coming future. Discovery News reported that Waller believes his cloud phone concept can give people access to mobile communication regardless of their income. Movirtu provides mobile technology and business models to wireless telecommunication providers serving rural poor communities in sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia. The company's mission is to expand the use of mobile communication by rural poor in communities where residents may be living on less than $2 per day. Discovery News said Waller believes his company provides an affordable solution based on cloud computing, the idea of storing information and data on the Internet and accessing it through a Web application. Movirtu's concept involves phone services like text messaging, voice mails and calls and works in a way similar to e-mail. A user gets a card that contains a unique phone number in a local phone network and a login and password with which to access it. The user buys a phone or borrows from a friend. Waller's idea is being tested out in Africa. The phone costs 10 to 20 cents to activate and lets groups of people share a single phone while still using individual phone numbers. Waller claims that giving someone a phone identity can increase their earnings potential by about $6 per day because they have greater access to jobs. The person calling also wouldn't know that the person they are calling does not own their own phone.

Page 6

Cloud Phone
It can also save them money because they are not paying someone else to use their phone or make a call for them. He said Movirtu has thousands of subscribers, not quite the million he discussed at a PopTech conference in 2009.

___________________________________________________________________ Sending Cell Phones into the Cloud

According to Allan Knies, associate director of Intel Research at Berkeley, the main problem with mobile phones today is that everyone wants them to perform like a regular computer, despite their relatively trivial hardware. A research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, Byung-Gon Chun thinks that the solution to this problem could very possibly be to create a supercharged clone of ones Smartphone that lives on "the cloud" and let it do all the computational heavy lifting that your phone is incapable of handling.

Face in the cloud: CloneCloud allows processorintensive applications, like this prototype facerecognition application, to be offloaded to remote servers. Credit: Intel Research Berkley

CloneCloud was invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis It uses a smart phone's highspeed Internet connection to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype has been tested on Google's Android mobile operating system. Here it effortlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double. This is a trick quite similar to how many Web-based applications, such as Google Docs, run on remote servers. The difference is that CloneCloud creates a perfect copy of the phone's software and thus is able to take on literally any processor-intensive task that it calculates it can do faster than the phone itself. This decision is arrived at after weighing the amount of time and battery life required to transfer the required data. The big benefit of CloneCloud is battery-life extension, which is a direct benefit of lower utilization of the mobile phone's CPU. Chun imagines that this could lead to a competitive advantage for vendors over services like free voice mail or unlimited data plans.

Page 7

Cloud Phone
CloneCloud is not here just to make Smartphones more efficient, it would be able to make them more capable. A test application developed by Chun performs face recognition on photos. It takes around 100 seconds of processor time on a standard Android phone, but it was completed in only one second when run by a clone of the phone running on a desktop computer. Since the software runs on a cloudcomputing platform, it can be scaled in terms of both the amount of memory allocated and processing power, both of which increase performance on computationally rigorous tasks. Security is yet another important potential application of CloneCloud. Ya-Yunn Su, a researcher at NEC Laboratories, in New Jersey, who previously developed a prototype system similar to CloneCloud, commented that "as Smartphones become mini general-purpose computers, more of the problems we see in desktops, like viruses, will become Smartphone problems." Virus scans, which involve checking the entire file system of a device, are exactly the sort of process that Chun envisions CloneCloud accomplishing in the background, even while the smart phone is off.

___________________________________________________________________ Enter the Cloud Phone

With the adoption of SaaS applications, augmented reality, visual recognition and other next-gen phone apps, the Smartphone processing model is looking for help from the Cloud. Guest author Vish Nandlall introduces the concept of the Cloud Phone and the technology advances that can make this happen

Page 8

Cloud Phone
Are Smartphone converging with laptops? While Smartphones enable a rich user experience, there exists an order of magnitude gap in memory, CPU power, screen size and battery life relative to the laptop or desktop environment (see table below). This disproportion renders the whole question of Smartphones vs. laptops an apple vs. oranges debate. We have one major question to answer: can the Smartphone ever bridge the gap to the laptop? Smartphones Apple iPhone 4 HTC EVO 4G Laptops ASUS G73Jh-A2 Dell Precision M6500

CPU

Apple A4 @ ~800MHz

Intel Core i7Qualcomm Scorpion @ 720QM 1GHz @ 2.80GHz Adreno 200 N/A 4x2GB DDR31333

Intel Core i7-920XM @ 2.0GHz

GPU

PowerVR SGX 535

N/A

RAM

512MB LPDDR1 (?) 512MB LPDDR1

4x2GB DDR3-1600

Battery

Integrated 5.254Whr

Removable 5.5Whr

75Whr

90Wh

Source: Apple, HTC, ASUS, DELL websites As a matter of physics, the mobile and nomadic/tethered platform will always be separated along the silicon power curve largely driven by physical dimensions. The laptop is always going to be able to cool a higher power processor, host a larger screen size and house a larger battery and memory system than a Smartphone. Does a Smartphone need to be laptop? The users want it to be and surely it soon will. The low-power constraints of mobile devices have been the official argument of Apple behind the recent Apple- Adobe feud and Apples acquisition of PA Semi is further evidence to the importance of the hardware optimization in mobile devices. The processing envelope for mobile applications is becoming stretched by the demands of nextgeneration mobile applications; always-on synchronization of contacts, documents, activities and relationships bound to my time and space; the adoption of Augmented Reality applications by mainstream service providers that pushes AR into a primary window of the phone; advanced gesture systems as MITs Sixth Sense that combine gesture based interfaces with pattern recognition and projection technology; voice recognition and visual recognition of faces or environments that makes mobile phones an even more intuitive and indispensible remote control of our daily lives. All these applications require the combination of a Smartphone front-end and a laptop back-end to realise not to mention having to run multiple applications in parallel. The appearance of these next-generation applications is also going to create greater responsibilities for the mobile application platform: it is now much more important to monitor memory leaks and stray processes sucking up power. We need to detect, isolate and resolve malicious intrusions and private data disclosure, and manage applications which require high-volume data. So we come back to the question, can there be a way to leapfrog the compute and memory divide between tethered and mobile devices? The answer, as it turns out, may lie in the clouds.

Page 9

Cloud Phone
The idea behind the Cloud Phone is to seamlessly offload execution from a Smartphone to a cloud processing cluster. The trick is to avoid having to rewrite all the existing applications to provide this offload capability. This is achieved through creating a virtual instance of the Smartphone in the cloud. The following diagram shows basic concept in a nutshell (source: NTT DoCoMo technical review)

The Cloud Phone technology has been brought back due to advancements in four key areas: 1. Lower cost processing power: Computing resources today are abundant, and data centres have mainstreamed technologies for replicating and migrating execution between and within connected server clusters. 2. Robust technologies for check-pointing and migrating applications: Technologies such as live virtual machine migration and incremental check pointing have emerged from the classrooms and into production networks. 3. Reduced over-the-air latency; the mobile radio interface presents a challenge in terms of transaction latency. Check-pointing and migration requires latencies on the order of 50-80ms these round trip times can be achieved through current HSPA, but will become more realistic in next-generation LTE systems. Average latencies in a flat LTE network are approximately 50ms at the gateway, which suddenly makes the prospect of hosting the

Page 10

Cloud Phone
Smartphone application on a carrier-operated cloud very much a reality. Note that past the gateway, or beyond the carrier network, latencies become much more unmanageable and will easily reach 120ms or more. 4. Mobile Virtualization; this technology offers the ability to decouple the mobile OS and application from the processor and memory architecture, enabling applications and services to be run on cloud servers. This has become an area of intensive research in mobile device design. A cloud execution engine could provide off-loading of Smartphone tasks, such as Augmented Reality, visual recognition, voice recognition and pattern recognition applications, thereby overcoming the Smartphone hardware and power limitations. This model would also allow key maintenance functions requiring CPU intensive scans like virus scans to be executed on a virtual Smartphone mirror image in the cloud. This would also smooth the progress of checking and data leak prevention which have been long used in the PC domain to increase system robustness. The raw ingredients for the Cloud Phone are coming together; more users are driven towards using SaaS based phone applications, and HTML5 is being adopted by handset OEMs. There is no shortage of applications waiting to exploit a cloud phone platform: in July 2010 alone, 54 augmented reality apps were added to the Apple App Store. Google has also made advances in the Cloud Phone space with Cloud to Device Messaging which helps developers to channel data from the cloud to their applications on Android devices.

___________________________________________________________________ Personal Cloud Phone Service for Rural Users Without a Handset
There is no doubt that cell phones can make dramatic improvements in the lives of the people living in the developing world; the challenge is bringing these benefits to everyone. There have been attempts by Range Networks' open source phone service for off-grid areas, and recently we came across UKbased Movirtu, which is helping to bring low-cost phone service for those who don't own or cannot afford their own handsets. Movirtu's MXShare service enables people who cannot afford a phone or SIM card to own a virtual Cloud Phone account with their own telephone number. Once launched by a local operator, people subscribe to the service by visiting their local village payphone agent or airtime voucher vendor to purchase a mobile number. To access their account, they simply borrow a phone from a friend or family member or use a street side or community phone and enter a network code; that, in turn, activates the MXShare platform and enables the Cloud Phone service on the handset. Whereas without the MXShare service such users are anonymous and unable to receive private text messages or mobile payments, the Cloud Phone service makes them an identified subscriber with a unique phone number and prepaid account. No special handsets, SIM cards or additional client software are required; rather, the service works instantly on all basic mobile handsets available today in SubSaharan Africa and South Asia. All information is transmitted between the handset and the MXShare server using secure channels, thereby eliminating the potential privacy issues associated with borrowing a handset. The system also manages the subscriber's offline activity, tracking missed calls and sending notification alerts to friends or nearby village phone operators. Those with phones to

Page 11

Cloud Phone
lend, meanwhile, get rewarded with one-off fixed amounts or a percentage of the cost of the call or transaction as an incentive to share their handset. Also available from Movirtu are MXPay, which brings mobile banking services to those without a handset, SIM card or bank account; and MXInfo, which delivers personalised information services to such users. Four billion people in the world do not have a mobile phone, Movirtu says time to get involved and help bring a very functional service to the base of the pyramid?

___________________________________________________________________ Meet the 20-cent Cloud Phone

A lot of people are using cell phones today, but many of the world's poorest mobile users don't actually have their own phones. Instead of spending $25 (or more) for their own personal handsets, many impecunious users simply purchase one phone, and share it amongst their friends or family. It may be a cost-efficient way of connecting to the world, but it isn't at all convenient, nor does it offer any privacy. Thanks to Cloud Phone, the cash-strapped cell phone users may soon be able to have their own mobile phone numbers for just 20 cents - even if they don't actually have a phone. As Movirtu CEO Nigel Waller explains, the cloud phone isn't really a phone, but a mobile service. Once activated, the service will assign a unique number to each subscriber, who can then create a list of contacts, and check for any missed calls or text messages. The difference, however, is that users can access their accounts from any other phone. All they have to do is borrow someone's phone, type in their special PIN code, and instantly make or receive calls under their own number. And the best part, of course, is that they'll only have to pay 10 to 20 cents to subscribe -- although they'll still have to adhere to local rates if they want to actually place a call. The cloud phone may not be able to provide actual phones for the world's neediest, but it can certainly help them maximize the handsets they've already invested in. And considering how many mobile users live on just $1 a day, any service capable of stretching that dollar is certainly a program worth pursuing.

___________________________________________________________________ An Interview with Nigel Waller, CEO of Movirtu CNN

CNN spoke with Nigel Waller, who is founder and CEO of a company called Movirtu Limited, after a lecture at the PopTech conference in Maine, an event focused on new ideas in technology that benefit society at large. CNN: What is a "cloud phone"? Waller: The cloud phone is an object that we at Movirtu invented.

Page 12

Cloud Phone
There are over a billion people who do use mobile phone services today but do not own a mobile phone handset. So what they do is they borrow phones or they share a phone. They either share phones amongst a family unit or they'll go to a street corner and buy a single phone call from an entrepreneur sitting on that street corner. So what we allow people to do is to have their own identity -- and to log in and log out of other people's mobile phones, just like you or I would log in and log out of our e-mail to be able to send email from someone else's PC. By allowing them to log in and log out they access a service -- which we call the cloud phone. CNN: So it's essentially a cloud phone number? Waller: Well it's a number that gives you access to your own phone. So once you log in with your own number and a pin code you will get greeted with a menu. So it will say, "Hello, John. Your balance is $1. You have two missed calls. You've got one SMS message." And then we effectively set up a communication channel with the user, where we're asking them questions and then they're telling us what they want to do. CNN: How much does this cost? Waller: It costs the user anywhere from 10 to 20 cents to actually buy a phone number and then they're up and running. The call costs are the same as the existing prepaid tariffs that already exist on the prepaid network. We are offering the technology to the mobile operators and we give them all the information and the marketing about how they can launch it to these people, and then we help them launch the service. CNN: A person could use a SIM card to maintain their own number without a phone. Can you explain how the cloud phone is different from that? Waller: The cheapest mobile phones that are out there are $20 to $25 a pop. Now, if you're on an income of $2 a day, then that's six months' savings. OK, so the user then has the alternative to buy a SIM card. That's an identity, yeah? Your identity's on your SIM card [which is inserted into a phone to provide service] ... But they have difficulties finding a phone to put that SIM card in, because phones are very personal things. They don't like taking the phone apart, taking out the battery, putting in someone else's SIM, plugging in the battery, and putting it all together and turning it on. All your messages then get downloaded and stored in someone else's phone. All your calls are logged there. And these people specifically, living below the poverty line, want to lead very private lives. Plus, there are just the impracticalities. It's very easy to lose that SIM card. For half the cost of a SIM card, somebody can have their own phone number, but they don't need to carry anything around. CNN: Why not just make phones cheaper?

Page 13

Cloud Phone
Waller: There's no doubt that phones are getting cheaper. But there are three key components in every mobile phone today, which cost about $5 or $6. There's the display, the keyboard and there's the RF [radio frequency] chip. Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of phones that are manufactured, they still don't seem to be able to reduce the price of those three key elements. You add up those elements and you've got $18 or whereabouts. You add $1 for the battery, $1 for the SIM-card holder and you've got $20, $25. I'm sure there's going to be some new technology coming down the road that will attack one of those elements. There are cheap OLED displays that are coming out ... keyboards are getting cheaper. So we will see phone prices dropping, but I don't think they're going to drop down to the level of $2, for example. The willingness to pay for mobile phone in Mozambique, in Africa, is $2. CNN: Why is access to a phone so important? Waller: We estimate that by giving somebody a phone identity -- it doesn't necessarily mean they have a mobile phone themselves -- we can actually save them $5 a month in costs. And also we can increase their earnings potential by about $6 a month, and that's through allowing them greater access to jobs. There is Kenyan lady who we know is 17, and her whole family has one mobile handset and she's desperately trying to find a job. But the head of the family -- he has the mobile phone and he takes it with him. Whenever someone phones her for a job, he answers the phone and he doesn't know who it is or what it is. And she's actually giving up getting a job just because people can't contact her. CNN: How many people have access to the cloud phone service now? Waller: When I was here [at the PopTech conference] last year as a social innovation fellow, I made a big statement that we were going to hit a million subscribers within a year. We haven't hit a million. We're in thousands but not millions. What we've found is it's taken a lot longer to roll out the technology than we thought. A lot of that has been the mobile operators, because we've had to show them the business models and about how they can actually make money out of these people, because ultimately they want to make a profit. CNN: What's next for mobile phones in the developing world? Waller: Battery technology is a big thing. People have big problems even when they can afford a mobile phone in terms of battery technology. People actually put charging cycles into their weekly lives. "On Monday I will walk for two hours to this village, I'll charge my phone, I'll talk to my friends while it's charging and then I'll walk two hours back." And then they do the same thing the following week. Battery technology will really help.

Page 14

Cloud Phone

References:
1. http://www.movirtu.com/ 2. http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/08/ 3. http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpps/news/ 4. http://news.discovery.com/tech/ 5. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/10/21/cloud.phone/index.html?hpt=Mid 6. http://www.appvita.com/2010/03/24/phonebooth-the-cloud-based-telephone-solution/ 7. http://gigaom.com/2010/10/21/ 8. http://www.technologyreview.in/communications/22571/ 9. http://www.switched.com/2010/10/23/ 10. http://springwise.com/telecom_mobile/movirtu/ 11. http://www.wikipedia.org/ 12. http://www.google.com/ 13. http://www.wisegeek.com/ 14. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ 15. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ 16. http://www.apple.com/ 17. http://www.htc.com/ 18. http://www.asus.com/ 19. http://www.dell.com/ 20. http://edition.cnn.com/

Page 15