After a year of remaining idle, Nokia's content delivery platform Preminet is quietly beginning to gain traction — in the U.S., of all places. Nokia has not only landed its first U.S. customer, Cincinnati Bell, but Cingular Wireless is testing the Preminet user interface on one of its handsets.

Since Preminet's launch last October, Nokia has announced only two customers for Preminet — Chilean carrier Smartcom and TaTa Teleservices in India. Compared with the enormous success of Qualcomm's BREW with CDMA carriers globally, Nokia's GSM-targeted solution has seen little uptake. Although Cincinnati Bell gives Nokia another much-needed customer for its end-to-end platform, it does little to bring it to the penetration levels of BREW. The Cingular trial, however, brings Nokia a step closer to getting its platform embedded with one of the largest GSM carriers in the world. T-Mobile also has confirmed it is evaluating the Preminet client and content library in Europe, and Nokia claims yet another Tier 1 provider is doing the same.

“We are in various phases of our sales process,” said Petteri Putkiranta, Preminet solution director. “There are trial deployments of the solution, not just mere discussions.”

Preminet's end-to-end platform — which supplies not only content, but the back-end billing and provisioning, development support and a Java or Series 60 handset client — is geared primarily at smaller providers like Cincinnati Bell, which don't have the resources of the Tier 1 providers to handle multiple content relationships. But Putkiranta said that elements of the Preminet platform have begun to attract the attention of large carriers like Cingular and T-Mobile. The Preminet user interface, Putkiranta said, is of particular interest to them because there is no universally accepted Java client on the market.

Although Cingular stressed it is only evaluating the Preminet client, it has loaded it into one handset, the Nokia 6682. The client accesses content from the Preminet content library, but Cingular officials said if the carrier did expand the trial or adopt the client across the network, Cingular would use its own content catalog and back-end system, not Preminet's.

“Cingular continues to have interest in technologies that provide a richer user interface, easier browsing and a cleaner shopping experience,” said a Cingular spokesman via e-mail. “Preminet, for instance, allows for the preview of ringtones before purchase.”

But although there are some impressive elements to the Preminet client, Cingular is testing out other user interfaces among its handsets, including a platform developed by Sony-Ericsson. The primary user interface for most Cingular Media and mMode customers, however, is still simple wireless application protocol (WAP) browsing.

Cincinnati Bell, meanwhile, has decided to outsource its entire content platform to Cingular. While Cincinnati Bell maintains discretion over what positions content occupies in the deck, Nokia is now managing all of the content relationships, testing and billing for the carrier. Right now, content discovery is through WAP browsing and short messaging service, Cincinnati Bell plans to begin embedding the Preminet Java client in all of its new handsets in November and offers the user interface for over-the-air download to its roughly 300,000 customers with GSM/GPRS handsets.

“Beforehand, we had a couple of content agreements with a few ringtone providers and a few game providers, but the challenge of bringing in new content providers and integrating them with our billing system was prohibitive,” said Tim Bracken, senior product manager for wireless data at Cincinnati Bell. “So we started looking at a few companies who could do it for us.”

MAKING PROGRESS WITH PREMINET

Preminet Customers

Smartcom, Chile — Preminet's first customer last fall

Tata Teleservices, India — Offering content through TaTa Indicom

Cincinnati Bell — Using Preminet for pre-paid and post-paid content services

Trials

T-Mobile — Evaluated the Preminet user interface last year

Cingular — Trialing the user interface on one handset