A group of mobile operators announced yesterday their intention to define widely accepted requirements for an open mobile terminal platform (“OMTP”). The founding members of this initiative are mmO2, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, SMART Communications, Telefónica Móviles, TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile), T-Mobile and Vodafone. These members will establish a new company based in London, OMTP Limited (“the OMTP group”), to achieve their goals. It’s about time.

The OMTP group aims to define those platform requirements necessary for mobile devices to deliver openly available standardised application interfaces that will provide customers with a more consistent and improved user experience across different devices, whilst also enabling individual operators and manufacturers to customise and differentiate their offering.

The OMTP group intends to achieve its goals by identifying common mobile operators’ requirements, with the aim of establishing an open framework for mobile device manufacturers and associated software and hardware suppliers to develop open mobile terminal platform compliant products. The OMTP group aims to use existing standards, where they exist, and to further encourage the development of standards by presenting OMTP requirements.

As a technology neutral organisation, all technology vendors will be free to contribute to and support OMTP requirements and to provide OMTP compliant products. The OMTP group is an open association, with membership or participation available to organisations wanting to adopt OMTP requirements, to assist the process of achieving the OMTP group’s goals or simply to follow the latest efforts and results of the OMTP group.

The following companies have expressed their intent to join the OMTP group: Amena, Hutchinson/3, KPN, One Austria, SFR and Telenor.

Mobile operators, mobile device manufacturers, software and hardware suppliers interested in participating in the OMTP group can find more information on the OMTP group’s website, www.omtp.org.

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