I’m in the UK this week on a business trip, before heading to my favourite island republic for a few days on Sunday.

Specifically, I’ve been representing the company at a two-day GSMA OneAPI project meeting in London; it has been great to be in the room for a change, as normally we participate in these meetings via a teleconference bridge. The OneAPI is an initiative to create a standard access API for mobile network enablers – messaging (SMS/MMS), location and charging.  Our own OneAPI reference implementation has just been deployed for testing, and we are leading an effort to run a commercial pilot in the Asia-Pacific region by November.

So far we’ve had an enthusiastic response from operators in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and several other countries in South Asia. (If you are interested, either contact us or follow the Locatrix blog for more details and announcements of participating operators and developers).

Anyway, while in the UK I’ve also been doing the rounds of the local operators to learn more about their initiatives in the areas we focus on: enablers, location-based services, social networking and mobile marketing. I’ve been pleased with the reception to our solutions and hosted services focus, and am becoming optimistic about our expansion in this part of the world over the next 12 months.

While I’ve been here I’ve also taken the opportunity to sample, as a pre-paid consumer, several local mobile offerings – mobile broadband, on-portal mobile VAS, as well as regular voice/text services. It would be remiss (not to mention commercially dangerous) of me to go into specifics, but I’ve been struck by the percentage of dodgy SIM cards I’ve been supplied – I’m on my third from the recommended mobile broadband network, and my second from one of the other operators for general use. As in SIM cards just not registering in devices, and having to be replaced. Quite frustrating, not to metion time-consuming. In all the pre-paid SIM’s we’ve registered in Australia, I’ve never had this happen.

I’ve also got to note how I now take decent quality mobile broadband in Australia for granted – I’ve been really surprised at the low 3G performance here in London (using a standard Huawei USB modem).  I’m now posting this from a bar in Camden, as England finishes day one at six down for 300-odd runs. Better value than hotel WiFi for sure, but I miss my NextG from home.

That said, I love visiting London – I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up with some old friends (both Brits and Australians) who live here, but frustratingly haven’t been able to get tickets to the Ashes! I’ll likely be spending more time here as we ramp our export efforts, so it is fortunate that I’m starting to be able to navigate my way ’round the capital and surrounding area more effectively.

So I’m in London, still, and despite some 3G hiccups, am having a productive trip.

*Sincere apologies to The Waifs for my blatant plagiarism of the title from one of their excellent songs!