Firmware Over the Air (FOTA) Updating of Mobile Phones

As Mobile Phones Add Features, Firmware Becomes More Complex; Firmware Over the Air Updating (FOTA) is Required.

Over the last several years, mobile telephones have been transformed from relatively simple voice-based handsets to more sophisticated multimedia communication devices. Mobile phones now commonly include text messaging, cameras, web browsers, conferencing capabilities and other sophisticated features.

In order to provide these more sophisticated features, these devices require increasingly complex mobile phone firmware. It is this firmware that controls the operations of the mobile phones.

The growing complexity of mobile phone firmware, however, presents a significant challenge to mobile handset manufacturers and mobile telephone operators: the ability to ensure that the mobile phone firmware is of high quality and 100% reliable. Given the volume of mobile handsets shipped – more than 900 million units are expected to ship in 2006 – and the diverse conditions in which they are used, as mobile phone firmware complexity increases, the likelihood of defects causing an operating malfunction increases.

Firmware Over the Air Updating (FOTA) Technology Enables Cost Effective Mobile Phone Firmware Updates.

To address the growing challenge of providing higher quality and more reliable firmware, and eliminating expensive recalls, while at the same time meeting aggressive time-to-market demands, a more effective technology known as "firmware over-the-air" (FOTA) updating is gaining broad acceptance in the mobile telephone industry. FOTA updating of mobile phones enables mobile device manufacturers and mobile operators to remotely update the firmware wirelessly. That is, it can update the mobile phone's firmware when the phone is already in customers' hands. By using FOTA technology to update mobile phone firmware and to patch flaws in the firmware originally installed on the handset, users no longer need to bring the handset to a service facility to update the firmware on their mobile phone.

FOTA Updating Enables Mobile Phone Personalization.

In addition to delivering patches to fix faulty firmware, FOTA updating technology can be used to deliver new features and services to customers. Because this updated firmware can be delivered to users without requiring them to bring their mobile device to a service facility to reflash the memory with new firmware or to purchase a new handset, operators can conveniently deliver firmware that supports new services to individual users' handsets, in effect "personalizing" the handset to meet the particular needs of an individual user. This has the advantage of enhancing customer loyalty and it provides opportunities for operators to generate additional revenue per subscriber