Humanitarian Aid or Pay As You Throw?
Vodafone's 150 design shape reminds me that this looks like a squared-edged version of the old rounded-edged Phillips Savvy (back when Virgin Mobile sold it in a box through their music chain stores) that use to be on the market. One distinction here though is that Vodi is selling the Vodafone-150 into developing countries India, Turkey and eight African countries including Lesotho, Kenya and Ghana at $15.00 (£10.00). The disclosed objective is a worthy and laudable aim that out there in the Africa countries communications relevant to voice calls, SMS, financial transfers and healthcare have more importance and relevance than touch screen functionality, games and posturing as to who has a weird app that they want to boast about.
.
The spec given for this product:
.
"Vodafone 150 device specification: Black candy bar device with 5-way navigation key; 1.0” monochrome graphic display 96x64 pixels; voice and SMS; GSM 900/1800; polyphonic ringtones; vibration; alarm clock; calculator; currency converter; 2 embedded games; memory for up to 100 entries in phonebook plus SMS storage; torch; battery: 500mAh (standby up to 400h, talk time up to 5h); mini USB connector."
.
A truly magnificent gesture on behalf of the international community would be to allow mobile phone credits to be used to purchase food and water, medicine, etc other than only allowing it to be solely used to make a mobile calls, whilst idly sitting by watching human life being put at risk. What could there ever be the point in watching people die of starvation and dehydration?
.
Imagine for each mobile phone user a maximum credit to purchase life sustaining essentials could be made available. Imagine that specialist supply waypoints (International Humanitarian Aid Points) were setup whereby the genuine user can get food/water, medicines etc, then the waypoints can check the applicants wanting the food/water, medicines are the genuine users of the phones. What a fantastic way that would be for finitely targetting humanitarian monetary aid to those in need.
.
Of course, it is not unrealistic to observe that there is also a calculated risk being taken here that cheap handsets can lead to their owners using them as disposal objects, as opposed to meaningful devices. Any owner migrating as a roaming-user are unlikely to be barred from making calls because the handsets are dual band RF chipset(s) (GSM MHz900/GSM MHZ1800) so should work in any GSM network.
.
Cheap handset can also make them a target for unlocking. It is not hard to imagine, cheap phones like these will not be long out of the cargo doors before they are being supplied into Europe. So this is one of the calculated risks (the other side of the coin so to speak). Such low-cost handsets (or officially "ULCH phones") are not new. We were already aware of ULCH's some years back but they have now grown in status as viable products because of the World recession. Cheap handsets are in Europe at the moment and regularly used in crime and thown away afterwards.
.
.
How might any operator stop such ULCH phones being used for making chargeable calls where such calls are being made for the purposes of the commission of a crime? Well, the first obvious point is to include a validity integrity key (VIK) to be transmitted along with the IMEI and associate the VIK to the IMEI at manufacturing production stage. Were someone to clone the IMEI of a handset it would not be associated with the VIK and therefore the network could detect this and block the handset from making calls. Equally, if the financial credits on the phone were from Humanitarian Aid, then the network operator could equally help in stopping that credit being spent on phone calls associated with crime because of the VIK conflict with cloned IMEI and/or because the phone isn't in the geographical region to which it was expected to operate (as a humanitarian aid phone). Moreover, the idea of security VIK/IMEI could be implemented in every new handset issued and maybe able to be implemented via SMS Class 1 messages to older handsets already in the marketplace. Realistically, how long would this take to be implemented? It depends, in as simpler statement that can be made, how long it takes to implement signalling in the network to the EIR and a response from the EIR.
.
.
The spec given for this product:
.
"Vodafone 150 device specification: Black candy bar device with 5-way navigation key; 1.0” monochrome graphic display 96x64 pixels; voice and SMS; GSM 900/1800; polyphonic ringtones; vibration; alarm clock; calculator; currency converter; 2 embedded games; memory for up to 100 entries in phonebook plus SMS storage; torch; battery: 500mAh (standby up to 400h, talk time up to 5h); mini USB connector."
.
A truly magnificent gesture on behalf of the international community would be to allow mobile phone credits to be used to purchase food and water, medicine, etc other than only allowing it to be solely used to make a mobile calls, whilst idly sitting by watching human life being put at risk. What could there ever be the point in watching people die of starvation and dehydration?
.
Imagine for each mobile phone user a maximum credit to purchase life sustaining essentials could be made available. Imagine that specialist supply waypoints (International Humanitarian Aid Points) were setup whereby the genuine user can get food/water, medicines etc, then the waypoints can check the applicants wanting the food/water, medicines are the genuine users of the phones. What a fantastic way that would be for finitely targetting humanitarian monetary aid to those in need.
.
Of course, it is not unrealistic to observe that there is also a calculated risk being taken here that cheap handsets can lead to their owners using them as disposal objects, as opposed to meaningful devices. Any owner migrating as a roaming-user are unlikely to be barred from making calls because the handsets are dual band RF chipset(s) (GSM MHz900/GSM MHZ1800) so should work in any GSM network.
.
Cheap handset can also make them a target for unlocking. It is not hard to imagine, cheap phones like these will not be long out of the cargo doors before they are being supplied into Europe. So this is one of the calculated risks (the other side of the coin so to speak). Such low-cost handsets (or officially "ULCH phones") are not new. We were already aware of ULCH's some years back but they have now grown in status as viable products because of the World recession. Cheap handsets are in Europe at the moment and regularly used in crime and thown away afterwards.
.
.
How might any operator stop such ULCH phones being used for making chargeable calls where such calls are being made for the purposes of the commission of a crime? Well, the first obvious point is to include a validity integrity key (VIK) to be transmitted along with the IMEI and associate the VIK to the IMEI at manufacturing production stage. Were someone to clone the IMEI of a handset it would not be associated with the VIK and therefore the network could detect this and block the handset from making calls. Equally, if the financial credits on the phone were from Humanitarian Aid, then the network operator could equally help in stopping that credit being spent on phone calls associated with crime because of the VIK conflict with cloned IMEI and/or because the phone isn't in the geographical region to which it was expected to operate (as a humanitarian aid phone). Moreover, the idea of security VIK/IMEI could be implemented in every new handset issued and maybe able to be implemented via SMS Class 1 messages to older handsets already in the marketplace. Realistically, how long would this take to be implemented? It depends, in as simpler statement that can be made, how long it takes to implement signalling in the network to the EIR and a response from the EIR.
.
I have sent this thread up to President of the United States of America, Mr Barack Obama, to the World Health Organisation, Oxfam, and to UK Government etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment