Broadband Wireless Consortium of India

A workshop on Indian Language SMS was held on September 23, 2009 at the India Habitat Centre, Delhi. It was jointly organised by the Broadband Wireless Consortium of India (BWCI) and the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI). The objective of the workshop was two-fold:

1. Disseminate information of a new 7-bit encoding scheme for Indian language SMS that is now part of the 3GPP specifications.

2. Discuss the way forward to make sure that standards-based, affordable and inter-operable Indian language SMS is made available.

The workshop was attended by representatives from 50 organisations including Industry Associations, operators, vendors, VAS technology and services providers, ICT companies, application developers, research organisations and government departments. The full list of participating organisations is available here .

The delegates were welcomed by Mr. T. R. Dua (Deputy Director, COAI). In his opening remarks, Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi (Hon. Director, CEWiT and Chairman, BWCI) announced that the 3GPP has approved the CEWiT proposal for 7-bit Indian language tables which will now be published in the relevant specification. He also announced the formation of a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the BWCI to look into all the aspects of Indian language SMS and invited all the participants to join this effort.

In his keynote address, Mr. Sharad Sharma, Chairman NASSCOM Committee on Products, stressed upon the importance of Indian language SMS and mentioned the key challenges in this regard. He noted that India is in a point of inflexion in the development of off-deck mobile VAS and the CEWiT initiative can serve a vital catalyst in this process.

The workshop was formally inaugurated by Dr. J. S Sarma (Chairman TRAI). In his inaugural address, Dr. Sarma congratulated the CEWiT team and pointed out that the acceptance of new encoding scheme by 3GPP is a historic development and an example of close and successful collaboration between research organisations and industry. He requested the participants to make sure that the standard is implemented and rolled out in a time-bound manner.

This was followed by a series of technical presentations highlighting various aspects related to Indian language SMS. Dr. Nadeem Akhtar (CEWiT) presented the technical details of the 7-bit encoding scheme and briefly talked about related issues such as backward compatibility and regulatory aspects. This was followed by a talk by Mr. Vivekananda Pani (Reverie Technologies) who discussed the issues pertaining to Indian language user interfaces on mobile devices, particularly regarding entry methods, fonts and displays. A virtual demonstration of Indic SMS based on the new 7-bit encoding was also shown. Dr. Swaran Lata (Technology Development for Indian Languages, Dept of IT) presented her views on encoding-related issues. During the lunch break, participants were able to see the actual Indic SMS demo prepared by Reverie Technologies in association with CEWiT.

In the post-lunch session, Mr. Biju R. Balagopal (Comviva) discussed the role of VAS vendors in facilitating Indian language SMS and highlighted the challenges that need to be addressed. Mr. Vikas Phogat (Syscom Corporation) addressed the issue of handling legacy devices (meaning those which do not have 7-bit encoding support) and presented several alternatives that can enable such devices to receive and correctly display messages sent using the new encoding. Mr. Satyaveer Singh (Media Lab Asia) made a brief presentation to introduce the activities of the organisation in fostering development of VAS solutions. Finally, there was a lively ‘Question & Answer’ session moderated by Mr. Babu Narayanan (CEWiT) where the audience posed questions to the speakers.

Prof. Bhaskar concluded the workshop and said that the participants will be informed shortly regarding the next steps planned.