18 months ago, I predicted that "that operators will need to start to divulge more about their traffic-shaping policy. Otherwise they'll find that other people will reverse-engineer it and do it for them."
So I felt pretty self-congratulatory when I saw that Google had announced its Measurement Labs tools this week, which does that yet.
I've said before that I can't get too exercised by the whole Net Neutrality debate. There are some perfectly valid reasons to prioritise certain traffic (eg emergency services, to take an extreme example). There are also some perfectly invalid reasons to differentiate traffic types, and I am still confident the market will work out when that occurs, and punish the offenders where it hurts - their customers base and revenues.
Put simply - if carriers want to be viewed as honest and trustworthy, they need to be absolutely clear on their network policies and how/when they are enforced. Any covert throttling or articifical quality degradation should be considered contrary to consumer protection laws, and dealt with appropriately.
Friday, February 06, 2009
Thursday, February 05, 2009
My MWC schedule is now full
My thanks to all the various AR people who've been in touch with me over the past few weeks.
My diary in Barcelona is now completely solid with meetings and briefings, so please refrain from additional offers in order to save ourselves wasted time.
(Obvious exceptions made for people who either want to spend money with me, or for invitations to really good parties or dinners)
I'll also be at eComm in San Francisco from 3-5 March, so if you have any representatives there you'd like me to talk to, let me know.
My diary in Barcelona is now completely solid with meetings and briefings, so please refrain from additional offers in order to save ourselves wasted time.
(Obvious exceptions made for people who either want to spend money with me, or for invitations to really good parties or dinners)
I'll also be at eComm in San Francisco from 3-5 March, so if you have any representatives there you'd like me to talk to, let me know.
Repeaters vs. femtocells Part 2
I wrote a few months ago that I was hearing renewed noises about repeaters - essentially devices that boost outdoor mobile signals for better indoor coverage. They're generally disliked by many radio-planning traditionalists, especially where they are bought and installed illicitly by individuals.
So it's interesting to see that Nextivity has signed a deal with 3 Ireland for deploying its products for improved indoor coverage.
However, scrutinising what's been written, I don't actually think that this is a case of repeaters vs. femtos - it seems much more likely that this deployment scenario is about providing 3G coverage to places in rural Ireland that don't have DSL or cable, and which therefore couldn't support fixed broadband anyway.
Not only that, but for houses in remote districts - especially if they have thick stone walls - there is clearly likely to be a problem with decent indoor coverage from the normal macro network, plus the signal attenuation would effectively reduce the overall capacity of the base station.
It will be interesting to see if the solution is also used by 3 Ireland in urban areas, where the density of users and complicated urban propagation characteristics might make the overall RF planning more complex. (I also realised I missed an announcement a month or so ago about a similar solution being used in T-Mobile Netherlands retail stores)
So it's interesting to see that Nextivity has signed a deal with 3 Ireland for deploying its products for improved indoor coverage.
However, scrutinising what's been written, I don't actually think that this is a case of repeaters vs. femtos - it seems much more likely that this deployment scenario is about providing 3G coverage to places in rural Ireland that don't have DSL or cable, and which therefore couldn't support fixed broadband anyway.
Not only that, but for houses in remote districts - especially if they have thick stone walls - there is clearly likely to be a problem with decent indoor coverage from the normal macro network, plus the signal attenuation would effectively reduce the overall capacity of the base station.
It will be interesting to see if the solution is also used by 3 Ireland in urban areas, where the density of users and complicated urban propagation characteristics might make the overall RF planning more complex. (I also realised I missed an announcement a month or so ago about a similar solution being used in T-Mobile Netherlands retail stores)
Monday, February 02, 2009
Yes, handset WiFi is important - but dodgy surveys don't help make the case
Like many smartphone owners, I use WiFi quite regularly - although it's almost entirely for use at home. I find that iPhone users tend to be the most WiFi-savvy group, especially if they have come from the ranks of Mac laptop owners.
That said, I generally don't use WiFi hotspots on my phone - if I'm at a hotel or airport, I'd rather use my laptop if I've got 30-60 minutes. And if it's only 5 minutes, I'm certainly not going to sign up & pay money via a small-screen browser.
The solution is to have various automated auto-login options for devices, either via some for of embedded client (yes, even UMA has a role here), or an aftermarket app like DeviceScape's or Boingo's. On the other hand, this happens so infrequently, I'm certainly not prepared to have a separate paid-hotspot subscription for my phone - I don't even have one for my laptop, which would certainly be a higher priority.
Over time, this will continue to evolve, especially given roaming rates and the desire of operators to start offloading traffic from their macro networks.
On featurephones, it's pretty pointless having WiFi for all sorts of reasons - data consumption is almost zero, so the offload argument doesn't fly in particular.
In general though, I'm definitely in favour of smartphones having WiFi - it's quite possibly the case why the BlackBerry Storm isn't doing as well as many hoped, especially outside the US.
But what I do have a problem with is dodgy surveys to try and drum up interest. Honestly DeviceScape - what's the point in surveying your own user base (ie loyal WiFi smartphone users) and asking them if they like WiFi, and want it in more phones? Quite frankly, I'm curious about the 14% of people who *don't* want more WiFi in handsets, given the bias inherent in the survey base.
This just underscore a point I've made before. Any survey which is clearly being done specifically for PR purposes is generally not worth the paper it's written on. My standard expectation is that "90% of respondents don't know what they're talking about, and the other 10% lie". And that's where it's actually a representative sample, rather than "we asked people we could find cheaply and easily". In political polls, there is a branch of science called "psephology" that analyses election results. That's also an imprecise area - but at least it's treated with some level of rigorous oversight.
Surveys which are being done for real, internal, management information and product development purposes, but which have some data of external interest as well, can be a different story. Even then, you should always look carefully at the selection of the sample, and the "neutrality" of the question wording, as well as the number of responses.
Maybe there should be something like a "Technology User Survey Council" which sets down best-practice recommendations for sampling and questionnaires?
That said, I generally don't use WiFi hotspots on my phone - if I'm at a hotel or airport, I'd rather use my laptop if I've got 30-60 minutes. And if it's only 5 minutes, I'm certainly not going to sign up & pay money via a small-screen browser.
The solution is to have various automated auto-login options for devices, either via some for of embedded client (yes, even UMA has a role here), or an aftermarket app like DeviceScape's or Boingo's. On the other hand, this happens so infrequently, I'm certainly not prepared to have a separate paid-hotspot subscription for my phone - I don't even have one for my laptop, which would certainly be a higher priority.
Over time, this will continue to evolve, especially given roaming rates and the desire of operators to start offloading traffic from their macro networks.
On featurephones, it's pretty pointless having WiFi for all sorts of reasons - data consumption is almost zero, so the offload argument doesn't fly in particular.
In general though, I'm definitely in favour of smartphones having WiFi - it's quite possibly the case why the BlackBerry Storm isn't doing as well as many hoped, especially outside the US.
But what I do have a problem with is dodgy surveys to try and drum up interest. Honestly DeviceScape - what's the point in surveying your own user base (ie loyal WiFi smartphone users) and asking them if they like WiFi, and want it in more phones? Quite frankly, I'm curious about the 14% of people who *don't* want more WiFi in handsets, given the bias inherent in the survey base.
This just underscore a point I've made before. Any survey which is clearly being done specifically for PR purposes is generally not worth the paper it's written on. My standard expectation is that "90% of respondents don't know what they're talking about, and the other 10% lie". And that's where it's actually a representative sample, rather than "we asked people we could find cheaply and easily". In political polls, there is a branch of science called "psephology" that analyses election results. That's also an imprecise area - but at least it's treated with some level of rigorous oversight.
Surveys which are being done for real, internal, management information and product development purposes, but which have some data of external interest as well, can be a different story. Even then, you should always look carefully at the selection of the sample, and the "neutrality" of the question wording, as well as the number of responses.
Maybe there should be something like a "Technology User Survey Council" which sets down best-practice recommendations for sampling and questionnaires?
UK mobile broadband market slowing down
Sometimes not all the most interesting news is available online. I get the paper edition of the UK mobile trade magazine, Mobile Today - and a front page article from a week ago doesn't seem to have made it to the website.
The article is quite short, but the headline states baldly "Mobile Broadband Sales Flat". It states that growth in dongle sales have dropped off since the beginning of the year - presumably a mix of post-Xmas sales lull, coupled with economy-related concerns.
Fitting in with my view that there's only a limited pool of people wanting ongoing monthly contracts, the publication quotes an anonymous Vodafone person saying "Dongle sales are really just coming from prepay now." There is no mention at all of embedded-3G notebooks.
Clearly, the UK is one of the more mature markets for dongles, plus it's also one of the hardest-hit by the economic crisis (despite the protestations of our hapless prime minister). It's also been one of the most prominent in shifting to prepay - I was in Spain last week and tried to get a prepaid dongle, but none of the operators sold them. So it's perhaps not surprising that my domestic market is at the sharp end of any weakness in mobile broadband contract uptake.
However, I suspect that this will be mirrored elsewhere - although mobile broadband will continue to grow in user numbers in 2009, it won't be accelerating as hard as it has done up until now. I'm also expecting it to put further pressure on prices - although perhaps the silver lining in the cloud is that it could mean that radio network congestion risk starts to be pushed out into the future.
The article is quite short, but the headline states baldly "Mobile Broadband Sales Flat". It states that growth in dongle sales have dropped off since the beginning of the year - presumably a mix of post-Xmas sales lull, coupled with economy-related concerns.
Fitting in with my view that there's only a limited pool of people wanting ongoing monthly contracts, the publication quotes an anonymous Vodafone person saying "Dongle sales are really just coming from prepay now." There is no mention at all of embedded-3G notebooks.
Clearly, the UK is one of the more mature markets for dongles, plus it's also one of the hardest-hit by the economic crisis (despite the protestations of our hapless prime minister). It's also been one of the most prominent in shifting to prepay - I was in Spain last week and tried to get a prepaid dongle, but none of the operators sold them. So it's perhaps not surprising that my domestic market is at the sharp end of any weakness in mobile broadband contract uptake.
However, I suspect that this will be mirrored elsewhere - although mobile broadband will continue to grow in user numbers in 2009, it won't be accelerating as hard as it has done up until now. I'm also expecting it to put further pressure on prices - although perhaps the silver lining in the cloud is that it could mean that radio network congestion risk starts to be pushed out into the future.
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