GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) offers high-speed data services in GSM network. It uses Packet Mode Technique to transfer data and provides connectivity to Internet. Users will be able to browse Internet using handsets supporting Internet browsing.  They will also be able use their e-mail accounts as is being done through landline Internet access. Also browsing of Internet from Laptops and Desktop computers is possible by connecting the computer with the GPRS enabled mobile handset through  a data cable or Infrared connectivity.

GPRS will also enable the users to send and receive MMS (Multimedia Messages). Presently MMS can be exchanged among CellOne numbers in Eastern Zone only.MMS is combination of
                    

    1• Text          2• Picture          3• Video          4• Speech          5• Animation              6• Music

Click the following to know about : -

Overview GPRS/MMS

GENERAL PHONE SETTINGS FOR GPRS

Procedure for GPRS Activation     

Phone Settings for MMS (for different phone models) (NEW*)

Applications for GPRS

A wide range of corporate and consumer applications are enabled by nonvoice mobile services such as SMS and GPRS. This section will introduce those that are particularly suited to GPRS.

CHAT

Chat can be distinguished from general information services because the source of the information is a person with chat whereas it tends to be from an Internet site for information services. The "information intensity"- the amount of information transferred per message tends to be lower with chat, where people are more likely to state opinions than factual data. In the same way as Internet chat groups have proven a very popular application of the Internet, groups of likeminded people- so called communities of interest- have begun to use nonvoice mobile services as a means to chat and communicate and discuss.

Because of its synergy with the Internet, GPRS would allow mobile users to participate fully in existing Internet chat groups rather than needing to set up their own groups that are dedicated to mobile users. Since the number of participants is an important factor determining the value of participation in the newsgroup, the use of GPRS here would be advantageous. GPRS will not however support point to multipoint services in its first phase, hindering the distribution of a single message to a group of people. As such, given the installed base of SMS capable devices, we would expect SMS to remain the primary bearer for chat applications in the foreseeable future, although experimentation with using GPRS is likely to commence sooner rather than later.

TEXTUAL AND VISUAL INFORMATION

A wide range of content can be delivered to mobile phone users ranging from share prices, sports scores, weather, flight information, news headlines, prayer reminders, lottery results, jokes, horoscopes, traffic, location sensitive services and so on. This information need not necessarily be textual- it may be maps or graphs or other types of visual information.

The length of a short message of 160 characters suffices for delivering information when it is quantitative- such as a share price or a sports score or temperature. When the information is of a qualitative nature however, such as a horoscope or news story, 160 characters is too short other than to tantalize or annoy the information recipient since they receive the headline or forecast but little else of substance. As such, GPRS will likely be used for qualitative information services when end users have GPRS capable devices, but SMS will continue to be used for delivering most quantitative information services. Interestingly, chat applications are a form of qualitative information that may remain delivered using SMS, in order to limit people to brevity and reduce the incidence of spurious and irrelevant posts to the mailing list that are a common occurrence on Internet chat groups.

STILL IMAGES

Still images such as photographs, pictures, postcards, greeting cards and presentations, static web pages can be sent and received over the mobile network as they are across fixed telephone networks. It will be possible with GPRS to post images from a digital camera connected to a GPRS radio device directly to an Internet site, allowing near real-time desktop publishing.

MOVING IMAGES

Over time, the nature and form of mobile communication is getting less textual and more visual. The wireless industry is moving from text messages to icons and picture messages to photographs and blueprints to video messages and movie previews being downloaded and on to full blown movie watching via data streaming on a mobile device.

Sending moving images in a mobile environment has several vertical market applications including monitoring parking lots or building sites for intruders or thieves, and sending images of patients from an ambulance to a hospital. Videoconferencing applications, in which teams of distributed sales people can have a regular sales meeting without having to go to a particular physical location, is another application for moving images.

WEB BROWSING

Using Circuit Switched Data for web browsing has never been an enduring application for mobile users. Because of the slow speed of Circuit Switched Data, it takes a long time for data to arrive from the Internet server to the browser. Alternatively, users switch off the images and just access the text on the web, and end up with difficult to read text layouts on screens that are difficult to read from. As such, mobile Internet browsing is better suited to GPRS.

DOCUMENT SHARING/ COLLABORATIVE WORKING

Mobile data facilitates document sharing and remote collaborative working. This lets different people in different places work on the same document at the same time. Multimedia applications combining voice, text, pictures and images can even be envisaged. These kinds of applications could be useful in any problem solving exercise such as fire fighting, combat to plan the route of attack, medical treatment, advertising copy setting, architecture, journalism and so on. Even comments on which resort to book a holiday at could benefit from document sharing to save everyone having to visit the travel agent to make a decision. Anywhere somebody can benefit from having and being able to comment on a visual depiction of a situation or matter, such collaborative working can be useful. By providing sufficient bandwidth, GPRS facilitates multimedia applications such as document sharing.

AUDIO

Despite many improvements in the quality of voice calls on mobile networks such as Enhanced Full Rate (EFR), they are still not broadcast quality. There are scenarios where journalists or undercover police officers with portable professional broadcast quality microphones and amplifiers capture interviews with people or radio reports dictated by themselves and need to send this information back to their radio or police station. Leaving a mobile phone on, or dictating to a mobile phone, would simply not give sufficient voice quality to allow that transmission to be broadcast or analyzed for the purposes of background noise analysis or voice printing, where the speech autograph is taken and matched against those in police storage. Since even short voice clips occupy large file sizes, GPRS or other high speed mobile data services are needed.

JOB DISPATCH

Nonvoice mobile services can be used to assign and communicate new jobs from office-based staff to mobile field staff. Customers typically telephone a call center whose staff take the call and categorize it. Those calls requiring a visit by field sales or service representative can then be escalated to those mobile workers. Job dispatch applications can optionally be combined with vehicle positioning applications- such that the nearest available suitable personnel can be deployed to serve a customer. GSM nonvoice services can be used not only to send the job out, but also as a means for the service engineer or sales person can keep the office informed of progress towards meeting the customerÂ’s requirement. The remote worker can send in a status message such as "Job 1234 complete, on my way to 1235".

The 160 characters of a short message are sufficient for communicating most delivery addresses such as those needed for a sales, service or some other job dispatch application such as mobile pizza delivery and courier package delivery. However, 160 characters does require manipulation of the customer data such as the use of abbreviations such as "St" instead of "Street". Neither does 160 characters leave much space for giving the field representative any information about the problem that has been reported or the customer profile. The field representative is able to arrive at the customer premises but is not very well briefed beyond that. This is where GPRS will come in to allow more information to be sent and received more easily. With GPRS, a photograph of the customer and their premises could, for example, be sent to the field representative to assist in finding and identifying the customer. As such, we expect job dispatch applications will be an early adopter of GPRS-based communications.

CORPORATE EMAIL

With up to half of employees typically away from their desks at any one time, it is important for them to keep in touch with the office by extending the use of corporate email systems beyond an employee's office PC. Corporate email systems run on Local 

Area computer Networks (LAN) and include Microsoft Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Lotus cc:Mail.

Since GPRS capable devices will be more widespread in corporations than amongst the general mobile phone user community, there are likely to be more corporate email applications using GPRS than Internet email ones whose target market is more general.

INTERNET EMAIL

Internet email services come in the form of a gateway service where the messages are not stored, or mailbox services in which messages are stored. In the case of gateway services, the wireless email platform simply translates the message from SMTP, the Internet email protocol, into SMS and sends to the SMS Center. In the case of mailbox email services, the emails are actually stored and the user gets a notification on their mobile phone and can then retrieve the full email by dialing in to collect it, forward it and so on.

Upon receiving a new email, most Internet email users do not currently get notified of this fact on their mobile phone. When they are out of the office, they have to dial in speculatively and periodically to check their mailbox contents. However, by linking Internet email with an alert mechanism such as SMS or GPRS, users can be notified when a new email is received.

VEHICLE POSITIONING

This application integrates satellite positioning systems that tell people where they are with nonvoice mobile services that let people tell others where they are. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a free-to-use global network of 24 satellites run by the US Department of Defense. Anyone with a GPS receiver can receive their satellite position and thereby find out where they are. Vehicle positioning applications can be used to deliver several services including remote vehicle diagnostics, ad-hoc stolen vehicle tracking and new rental car fleet tariffs.

The Short Message Service is ideal for sending Global Positioning System (GPS) position information such as longitude, latitude, bearing and altitude. GPS coordinates are typically about 60 characters in length. GPRS could alternatively be used.

REMOTE LAN ACCESS

When mobile workers are away from their desks, they clearly need to connect to the Local Area Network in their office. Remote LAN applications encompasses access to any applications that an employee would use when sitting at their desk, such as access to the intranet, their corporate email services such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes and to database applications running on Oracle or Sybase or whatever. The mobile terminal such as handheld or laptop computer has the same software programs as the desktop on it, or cut down client versions of the applications accessible through 

the corporate LAN. This application area is therefore likely to be a conglomeration of remote access to several different information types- email, intranet, databases. This information may all be accessible through web browsing tools, or require proprietary software applications on the mobile device. The ideal bearer for Remote LAN Access depends on the amount of data being transmitted, but the speed and latency of GPRS make it ideal.

FILE TRANSFER

As this generic term suggests, file transfer applications encompass any form of downloading sizeable data across the mobile network. This data could be a presentation document for a traveling salesperson, an appliance manual for a service engineer or a software application such as Adobe Acrobat Reader to read documents. The source of this information could be one of the Internet communication methods such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), telnet, http or Java- or from a proprietary database or legacy platform. Irrespective of source and type of file being transferred, this kind of application tends to be bandwidth intensive. It therefore requires a high speed mobile data service such as GPRS, EDGE or 3GSM to run satisfactorily across a mobile network.

HOME AUTOMATION

Home automation applications combine remote security with remote control. Basically, you can monitor your home from wherever you are- on the road, on holiday, or at the office. If your burglar alarm goes off, not only do you get alerted, but you get to go live and see who are perpetrators are and perhaps even lock them in. Not only can you see things at home, but you can do things too. You can program your video, switch your oven on so that the preheating is complete by the time you arrive home (traffic jams permitting) and so on. Your GPRS capable mobile phone really does become like the remote control devices we use today for our television, video, hi-fi and so on. As the Internet Protocol (IP) will soon be everywhere- not just in mobile phones because of GPRS but all manner of household appliances and in every machine- these devices can be addressed and instructed.

GENERAL PHONE SETTINGS FOR GPRS

1.Setting APN ’s  : First we have to set one APN each for Internet and MMS

                                           Respectively.  For Internet set (www.n.po) 

                                                                    For MMS set (mms.n.po)

                                                                    For Content Downloads set (celloneportal)

2.Setting WAP Profiles : Now we need a WAP PROFILE / Connection Name with

                                           WAP GATEWAY IP as (192.168.51.163)

3.Creating Bookmarks  : Now we need some BOOKMARKS of WAP SITES for

                                           Internet Surfing.

4.Settings for MMS       : Different Handsets have their respective MMS Settings

                                           where we require MESSAGE SERVER/HOMEPAGE and

                                           this is set as follows: http://192.168.51.166/servlets/mms

5. Content Downloads   : For  Content Downloads set default APN as (celloneportal)

                                           And Homepage as wap.cellone.in

Procedure for GPRS Activation

1. You should have GPRS enabled Handsets which are available from different manufactures . Depending on the manufacturer and Model No , GPRS setting procedure is different. Please refer product manual for configuration.

2. First subscribe for GPRS service from your nearest BSNL customer service centre .

3. Go to main menu of your handset and create new account as BSNL_GPRS.

4. Give bearer as GPRS.

5. Give APN name as http://www.e.po/ and IP address as 192.168.51.163.

6. Give homepage as per your choice.

7. Do not give any user name and password.

8. Give authentication as Secure.

9. Press OK.

You are ready with GPRS.

Please check whether your set is WAP1.0 compliant or  http compliant.

If handset is WAP 1.0 compliant

You can only browse sites starting with wap  like wap.yahoo.com from your handset. Please enter this address in enter address menu.

You can browse all websites by using your handset as wireless modem . Please load configuration CD came alongwith your Mobile set. If your handset is IR ready , activate IR port in your handset. Now keep your handset  near the laptop with IR port of handset aligned to IR port of laptop. It will show “ Another computer is nearby “ . Now open one dial up screen. Leave user name and password blank. In dial type *99***n# ( if for your GPRS account CID is n , n ranging from 1 to 9 ) and click on Dial. Please refer to your handset for CID no corresponding to your GPRS account .Once it is connected to network it will show the symbol on right hand end on task bar of your  laptop.  Now open your web browser ( Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator etc ) , enter web site address and enjoy !!

If handset is http compliant

Open the browser  from main menu of your handset. Select GPRS bearer as BSNL_GPRS. Now enter web site address and enjoy !!

Procedure for MMS Activation

1. You should have GPRS and MMS enabled Handsets which are available from different manufactures . Depending on the manufacturer and Model No , MMS  setting procedure is different. Please refer product manual for configuration.

2. First subscribe for GPRS and MMS  service from your nearest BSNL customer service centre .

3. Create GPRS account as mentioned above .

4. Go to main menu of your handset and create new account as BSNL_MMS.

5. Give bearer as GPRS.

6. Give APN name as mms.n.po.

6. Give homepage as http://192.168.51.166/servlets/mms.

7. Do not give any user name and password.

8. Give proxy server address as 192.168.51.163 and port no as 8080.

9. Press OK.

You are ready with MMS.

For sending MMS

1.     Go to New Message in Messaging Menu and Select Multimedia Message .

2.     In To,  give the mobile number of  the receiver and write the test. Then you can select  insert option from menu and add image, sound clip, video clip, slide etc.

3.     Then send .

4.     It will you give the message that message has been delivered ,if  delivery option in made on in configuration menu.

For receiving MMS

1.     Open Inbox submenu in messaging menu and click on the message.

2.     It will be opened . The attachment will be opened automatically.

However everything is handset specific. Please read manual before configuration and using MMS.

MMS SETTINGS------------------

Imp :- To get these settings over the air,  SMS manufacturer model no to 8355

                                                              Example:- nokia 6600