GSMA sets up a database of stolen phones — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Stopping the phone thievery} GSMA sets up a database of stolen phones

18 Dec 2004 at 19:15 GMT Timo Poropudas

The GSM Association (GSMA), the global trade association for the world’s GSM mobile operators, keeps working on efforts to stop mobile phone theft. It is introducing plans to cut cost on setting up Equipment Identity Registers (EIR) - local databases used to blacklist stolen phones.

“The cost to operators today of implementing local stolen phone databases, on a per subscriber basis, is prohibitively high,” said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association.

“This has been a significant barrier to implementation for many operators, in many markets of the world. Our members are in need of more cost effective solutions, tailored to the needs of their markets.”

In response, the GSMA has created GSM Technology Services, a venture with iLabs that will offer cost effective EIR solutions together with improved functionality.

“Over time we believe we will be able to leverage greater economies of scale to further reduce costs, and therefore improve the viability for more operators to develop their own customized databases,” said Conway.

Making it cheap

GSM Technology Services will offer two alternative cost-effective Equipment Identity Register (EIR) solutions, customized to meet mobile operators’ specific market based requirements.

The first is an innovative centralized managed EIR service that will significantly lower the initial investment required to implement an EIR system.

The second is a newly developed local EIR database solution. Both options are expected to offer substantially reduced set-up costs compared with the offerings currently available on today’s EIR solutions market.

The identities of stolen handsets uploaded to local EIR databases are uploaded to a central database hosted by the GSM Association (the Central Equipment Identity Register or CEIR). The GSMA is also poised to extend and upgrade the functionality and scalability of its central database.

Operators connected to the existing central database will be migrated to the upgraded global database during early 2005. The upgraded database will be able to accept new connections from the second quarter.

The GSMA’s announcement builds on the agreement, reached earlier in 2004 between the Association and leading handset manufacturers on measures to enhance the integrity of handset identities.

The investment in the upgraded global database and greater security of electronic identities underlines the commitment of the industry to the fight against phone theft.

Old plan

The plan for mobile phone identity registry is as old as GSM phone itself. In the past the criminal element has been able to change the imprinted id-numbers which has made databases meaningless.

In addition, many operators have wanted to report as stolen the phones that they gave out to customers tied to long term service contract. Competing operator did not want to treat these phones as stolen.

There is also the problem of Saturday week end theft. People lose their phones over the week end, report them as stolen but find them on Monday or Tuesday. Dealing with these cases is time consuming and costly.