Mobile operators sit between your content and your users. It is their policies that will determine if and how a user can access your site, how much the user is charged for access, and what information you can extract about the user from the network.

When deploying mobile web content, individual mobile operators can greatly help in making your mobile site successful, secure and popular, but at the same time, sites that are not configured to be aware of individual operators can just as easily be rendered inaccessible from some networks or entire countries. The nexsites Platform contains a great deal of information regarding many mobile network operators and can help you integrate cleanly and quickly with individual operator networks.

Secure User Identification

One of the most common requirements is to securely determine the mobile telephone number or other uniquely identifying data from the network. Retrieving this information from the mobile network directly rather from the user has many advantages such as:

• Allowing you to authenticate and even sign-in a user simply by their accessing your mobile site from their device
• Storing user preferences permanently in your backend rather than relying on cookies and other device-dependent storage
• Providing an reliable audit log that can be used by your fraud department or law enforcement in the case of fraudulent access or transactions

nexmedia provides pre-built integration with several mobile network operators to retrieve such information, and can work with you to integrate user identification mechanisms from additional operators if necessary.

Bypassing Operator Filters

If your site will not involve transactions or authentication, your main concern regarding the mobile operator's network used by your mobile web site's end users is likely to be ensuring that the operator does not block, filter or otherwise adapt your site as it is transmitted to the user's handset. Unlike fixed line Internet access where the ISP purely acts as a pipe provider, many mobile operators take a much more aggressive approach to managing content as it is delivered to handsets, deploying content filters that may:

• Reformat the site's markup in a misguided attempt to adapt what the operator may think is a non mobile-aware site to a format more suitable for a mobile device. While this may be desirable for desktop browser oriented sites, this brute force reformatting frequently has a devastating effect on sites that are already designed and targeted for mobile devices.
  
• Add advertising and/or marketing banners to the site's content under the guise of providing the user simplified navigation through the mobile web. In reality these banners typically serve little purpose other than to advertise the mobile operator's premium walled garden services, and to add extra bytes of data transfer for each page access.
  
• Prohibit access to certain content depending on the plan type that the user has subscribed to, their geographical location or other factors.

nexmedia can help you work around these types of filtering to ensure that your site is rendered on the handset exactly as you intended. Techniques used by the nexsites Platform to avoid such reformatting and filtering include providing content description headers advising filters that the content is mobile-safe, use of mobile tagging domain suffixes, and in many cases, working with operators directly to whitelist nexmedia's mobile web servers, avoiding such filtering for all nexmedia customers.