CENTRE for CROSS BORDER STUDIES

http://www.B4UCall.com

The first ever study of the "near impenetrable jungle" of mobile phone calling costs in Ireland, North and South, plus details of the first on-line system for making mobile phone prices transparent to the public, are contained in a new report to be published today by the Centre for Cross Border Studies with sponsorship from eircom.

The report - The Evolution of Telecom Technologies: Current Trends and Near-Future Implications - has been compiled by a research team led by two of Ireland's leading specialists in information retrieval, data analysis and image and signal processing: Professor Fionn Murtagh of Queen's University Belfast and Dr John Keating of National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

The prices of mobile phone 'roaming calls' between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland - like the cost of international 'roaming calls' generally in Europe - are extremely high. The European Commission, the European Parliament, the International Telecommunications Users Group (INTUG) and the UK regulator OFTEL are among the bodies which have expressed concern about and/or launched inquiries into the poor value of such calls.

One recent INTUG study has shown that the difference in price between roaming and non-roaming international mobile calls within the EU can be as high as 500 per cent. At a time when fixed telecommunications costs and prices are falling, the prices for international mobile roaming are "spiralling out of control", according to another INTUG report. These high calling charges are of particular concern to business people and others working and otherwise communicating across the Irish border.

Professor Murtagh and Dr Keating's team (including Susan Bergin of NUI Maynooth, who designed and developed the software for the cost calculations) has produced the first ever comprehensive evaluation of the various calling packages on offer by mobile service providers in both Irish jurisdictions (pages 23-42). They analyse the chaos of competing and utterly confusing prices published by the mobile phone operators, and come up with conclusions about which operators are providing the most cost-effective services for different types of call. They conclude that all operators "should be obliged to provide detailed costings in summarised format in order that existing and potential customers may accurately determine the most suitable package.We would favour the publication of simple tabular data providing the actual cost for calls of fixed duration of every call type. This is particularly relevant for roaming costs."

In the meantime, the Murtagh-Keating team has produced its own mould-breaking on-line tabular system for the five main Irish service providers, and has made the data publicly available using an Internet information provider (www.B4Ucall.com), which will go 'live' when the report is published (pages 13-22). "This is a first ever attempt to allow the consumer to make sense of the scarcely penetrable jungle of tariff and pricing information provided by the service providers", they say. It is certainly the first such attempt in Ireland; it may also be the first such initiative in Europe, the authors believe.

"Using this system it is possible to determine cross-border and roaming call costs, and identify suitable roaming partners. Information is provided using easy-to-read charts that are dynamically generated from custom-designed models of the service providers' tariff data. By using the charts, the user will be able to compare prices in an environment conducive to comparison and examination, rather than the pressured environment typically associated with high street stores." The system can also encapsulate other data including monthly rental charges, connection charges, inclusive minutes, SMS (Short Message Service) costs and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) costs - this data may be provided on-line at a later stage.

In the general area of cross-border telecom technologies, Professor Murtagh and Dr Keating warn that "tectonic movements are taking place on both sides of the Irish border, often with little relationship to developments in the other jurisdiction" (page 10).

"The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are following the market drives and ambitions of different industrial groups. The potential for introduction of new services at different times, or for the evolution of pricing and service strategies at different time-scales, follows immediately."

They warn, for example, that if cheap videophones are introduced into Northern Ireland in the near future and this innovation takes off, "there could be 'time zones' of technological development and evolution introduced between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland." Internet delivery through TV set-top boxes presents another area of potential mismatch.

There are three other research areas covered in the report. Geraldine McParland, principal cardiac clinical scientific officer at Belfast City Hospital, explains how patient care can be improved and money saved by developing telecardiology services throughout the island of Ireland (pages 43-51). This form of telemedicine, using modems and e-mail, can speed up diagnosis and treatment in remote areas; offer heart scans to patients in smaller hospitals; link local hospitals with central hospitals in order to remotely monitor and analyse patients' heart signals; and remotely monitor pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators.

Christian Harper of the Department of Education at NUI Maynooth outlines the experience of videoconferencing links in the Dissolving Boundaries through Technology in Education cross-border schools project (pages 53-62).

Finally, Mohsen Farid of Dundalk Institute of Technology and Professor Murtagh outline the results of their experiments with low-cost videoconferencing between the US and Ireland, North and South; and with low cost videoconferencing and video publishing using cheap, over-the-counter webcams. Professor Murtagh looks at what is needed to put a seminar or other event on video, stressing the importance of streaming video (pages 63-76)

Research team leaders and commissioning research centre

Professor Fionn Murtagh, Professor of Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast, has written 10 books on information retrieval, data analysis, and image and signal processing. He worked for many years with the European Space Agency in Munich. He is a visiting professor at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg and the University of Washington, Seattle, and editor-in-chief of The Computer Journal.

Dr John Keating, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at NUI Maynooth, has research interests in physiological modelling including artificial neural networks and signal processing. He is particularly interested in human-computer interaction, and has developed the ToonKit (c) Cartoon Development System, which is a highly interactive application that runs entirely in a Web Browser environment.

The Centre for Cross Border Studies, based in Armagh, was set up in September 1999 to research and develop co-operation across the Irish border in education, health, business, public administration, communications and a range of other practical areas. It is a joint initiative by Queen's University Belfast, Dublin City University and the Workers Educational Association (Northern Ireland), and is financed by the EU Special Support Programme for Peace and Reconciliation. Between March and May 2001 the Centre will publish research reports on cross-border telecommunications, cross-border health services, all-Ireland co-operation to tackle disadvantage in education, North/South EU funding programmes, cross-border local government links and a number of other areas of practical North/South co-operation.