Ericsson has two types of mobile music offering: a Napster-branded solution, where the content comes from Napster's catalog, and a white-label solution, in which content is sourced by Ericsson and branded by the customer. In both cases, the solution is hosted by Ericsson and the underlying technology and functionality is the same.

Staffan Ljung, manager for entertainment solutions at Ericsson, says the focus is on making it easy and cost-efficient for the customer, and on minimizing the time to market. "For example, our latest deployment of Napster Mobile for TMN in Portugal took just 45 days from initiation to service launch," Ljung says.

Last year, Ericsson was the end-to-end solution provider in 15 mobile music service launches. The company's largest mobile music customer to date is Cingular in the US. It chose the Napster offering and its subscribers are now able to enjoy more than three million tracks from the Napster catalog.

Other Ericsson customers that also chose the Napster offering were TMN and the Irish operator 02. In the latter deal, the access method i-mode was introduced.

Customers that have gone for the white-label offering are, among others, ONE in Austria, Maxis in Malaysia, Elisa in Finland, and Centennial Wireless in the US.

Another of last year's important deals was that with Cincinnati Bell Wireless, in the US. In this deployment, a dual portal was launched - adapted to pre-paid and post-paid customers - as well as an integrated ringback-tone service.

The Ericsson offering supports multiple access methods, including web, WAP, i-mode, and mobile clients built on Java or Symbian. Other important features of the offering are dual delivery (to the PC and mobile in parallel) and progressive download, making it possible to download and listen at the same time.

The solution enables end users to download content such as full-length tracks, ringtones, ringback tones, wallpapers, animations, games and video clips. Another attractive feature is a recommendation engine for service personalization. Furthermore, all major DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies are supported.

"In the near future, community features will also be included," Ljung says.