I will start this presentation by identifying the problem faced by the Deaf community. Then I will describe our technology and how it fulfills their needs. Today there are around 150 GSM operators with more than 175 million mobile phone subscribers in Europe. GSM, Global System for Mobile communication, is a standard for digital wireless telecommunication networks, initiated by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. Text telephony is performed by text telephones connected to a landline telephone network.
Text telephones use different protocols for conversation.
There are six mutually incompatible analogue text telephone protocols in Europe alone. The service provides for text calls between mobile handsets, and between mobile handsets and stationary text telephones. The Mobile TextPhone service is performed by switches in the GSM network. Mobile TextPhone calls are conducted as data calls in GSM networks. The Mobile TextPhone switches handles call setup and simultaneously interprets between the different text telephony protocols transparent to the subscribers.