Right, back from holiday & onward with matters FMC, VoWLAN, IMS and so on. Already deluged by assorted PR people wanting to tell me about "A new mobile VoIP company offering something unique". So, 37 types of Mobile VoIP uniqueness. Wow.
While I was away, I noticed that people continue to be "surprised" about T-Mobile's imminent launch of a UMA service, with details about its super-secret range of phones. This follows on the heels of some of the beta testers breaking the terms of their NDA earlier last month.
Well, in that case, given that everyone's been amazed that the service will offer the Nokia 6136 as well as the Samsung T-whatever, perhaps I can ensure myself fame & fortune by predicting an appearance by the Motorola A910 as well.
Of course, this is all due to my amazing insider knowledge & crystal ball-reading skills, and nothing whatsoever to do with the photo of the Moto device, along with the Nokia & Samsung ones, from Slide 11 of this presentation given by a T-Mobile exec 8 months ago.
Speaking of UMA, I've been invited back to the lion's den of the UMA conference circuit this week, for an event in London. It will be interesting to see if the tone has changed since the previous conference in Barcelona a few months back.
Also, Kineto Wireless announced support for 3G UMA devices last week, with commentary that it satisfies a clear market demand (which I commented on more than a year ago). At present, operators are stuck with a tricky decision for market segmentation - do we upgrade our best customers to 3G phones? or UMA ones with an FMC service bundle?
What's not obvious from the new protocol stack solution is (a) when phones will actually ship, and (b) whether the phones can actually support 3G-over-UMA/GAN, or whether the device reverts to GPRS-over-UMA when it's indoors. If the latter is the case, although you could ratchet up the GPRS bandwidth to decent speed via WiFi, it would still rely on a 2G core network, with the limitations on applications, latency and so on.
Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
Atleast Nokia 6136 is not WCDMA. So for data, its EDGE in GSM and GPRS over UMA in WLAN.
ReplyDeleteBut about your question in general, the radio network component in total latency is quite high. With that removed, even GPRS/EDGE over UMA should work well, don't you think so?