FT, LongBoard Partner
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — France Telecom, one of the principal world telecommunications operators, and LongBoard, Inc., a leading provider of software that enables personalized multimedia services, announced today that they have signed a partnership to jointly develop and deliver an innovative, IMS-compliant multimedia roaming solution.
The multimedia roaming solution, which is already being developed and is expected to be commercially available in early 2007, enables service providers to deliver seamless multimedia services with high-speed handover and service assurance across multiple access networks including GSM, GPRS, CDMA, UMTS, Wi-Fi, and WiMax.
This jointly developed multimedia roaming solution will be marketed by LongBoard to its customers.
The multimedia roaming solution being developed by LongBoard and France Telecom delivers network-based policy and enforcement capabilities that ensure quality user experiences for multimedia services. It enables carriers to ensure that mobile users are always connected to the optimal fixed or mobile network available — the network that is best able to provide users with the services they want.
In addition, the solution further enhances the mobile user experience by adapting streaming multimedia services in real-time as users move across networks. For example, it automatically adapts a streaming video to a higher quality stream as mobile users move from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network.
Finally, the solution enables service providers to offer subscribers different levels of multimedia service quality, such as Premium subscription and charge customers accordingly. For example, a Premium level subscriber would get priority over another subscriber when these customers are both within range of a Wi-Fi access point.
France Telecom SA (NYSE: FTE)
LongBoard Inc.
