Telit and Red Bend Team Up To Deliver Firmware Over-The-Air (FOTA) Update Technology for m2m Devices

FOTA provides a cost-effective, fast, secure and reliable way for wirelessly reflashing the firmware on mobile devices, ensuring that embedded software is up-to-date with the latest enhancements and features. In the past 12 months, FOTA has become a must-have feature on mobile phones, and is now adopted by all major handset manufacturers and wireless operators around the world. FOTA is currently available in a quarter of all mobile devices globally, growing to 50% by 2008, according to ARCchart, a U.K.-based research firm. Now, Telit and Red Bend are bringing the benefits of over-the air update technology to m2m devices for the first time. Telit has licensed Red Bend’s vCurrent® Mobile client software for use in its m2m product portfolio.

The ability to manage software over-the-air is a necessary requirement for all customers who design m2m products because of long lifecycles of m2m enabled products. The lifecycle of m2m enabled applications in the market ranges from 5-10 years. Downloading firmware version updates with new features represents an important new capability for m2m applications. It does away with the need to have the device upgraded in the field by technicians, cutting costs and timing of maintenance of the fielded applications. OTA mobile software management also improves the reliability figures of m2m modules.

“We believe that the introduction of OTA firmware upgrade capability will offer a significantly increased value to our customers by drastically reducing maintenance costs of m2m solutions,’’ says Dominikus Hierl, President Telit Wireless Solutions. “The need for on-site visits and recalls of remote applications will be soon reduced to an absolute minimum, because only hardware related failures, which happen less often, will need to be fixed manually. As an innovative leader in the cellular m2m space, Telit is happy to partner with Red Bend which brings experience in OTA from the consumer space into our segment.’’

Red Bend is the market leader in mobile software management and Firmware Over-the-Air update solutions for mobile devices. Its vCurrent Mobile client software is now embedded in more than 50 handset models used by 70 million consumers in 91 countries. Red Bend has earned the trust of the world’s leading handset manufacturers to ensure consumer satisfaction with their phones.

Its customers represent in excess of 70% of the global mobile phone market. Red Bend’s customers include LG Electronics, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, BenQ Mobile, and NEC, and others. “We are excited to team up with Telit, a world leader in m2m technologies, to target this important and fast-growing segment of the cellular market,’’said Yoram Salinger, CEO of Red Bend Software. “The ability to deliver software improvements over the wireless network will bring even greater capabilities to m2m devices, while improving their efficiency of operations and reducing support costs.’’

Now in its fourth product generation, Red Bend’s vCurrent Mobile software does not demand any changes to the m2m firmware image structure, and can perform updates any number of times, forwards and backwards. It can update a device in minutes from any version to any version, and creates a bit-for-bit, identical version of target firmware. vCurrent Mobile has patented methods for generating small update packages for fast OTA download times and consistently enables the fastest updates. Additionally, its fail-safe feature eliminates the risk of rendering a device disabled due to a power loss by automatically resuming updates from the point of interruption, ensuring 100% completion. Finally, it applies a patented pre-update verification technique, which verifies the compatibility and integrity of the device firmware and the update package. Additional verification methods are used to guarantee the success of the update prior to the process getting underway.

The m2m market recognizes the importance of over-the-air firmware update technology as a critical part of advanced module deployment. With mobile modules becoming increasingly complex, operators and manufacturers benefit from solutions that provide them the means to remotely upgrade firmware and software over the air.

The implementation of vCurrent Mobile from Red Bend in Telit modules provides the following advantages:

  • Identifies the essential changes from an existing version of firmware to a new, updated version.
  • Reduces the new firmware update to a compact package, up to 97% smaller than can be achieved through other techniques and allows an efficient over-the-air delivery.
  • Updates to the new firmware within the limited memory available on a wireless device.