Predictions for 2010: Mobile Winners and Losers

It's mid-December, so it must be time for the annual prediction season. I've tried to keep them short and sharp and to the point - there's plenty of detailed argument behind each of these if people are interested.

I'm off away on holiday tomorrow, so may not get a chance to respond to comments.

Heros

• HSPA+ Just like LTE, but it's got voice and it's straighforward to implement
• Apple iPhone - looking unstoppable, playing the pricing and distribution curve flawlessly, and doubt Mr Jobs will have some extra Wow Factor in mid-2010 to maintain its cool. Apps will continue to help, although from Apple's point of view they're just a means to an end rather than an important revenue source. As usual, hardware is where the profit is.
  
• Android - OK, I'm eating my words on this one, it looks like Google has got it right on the second attempt, rather than some platforms' 3rd or 4th time around. Momentum looks like it's building, unless OS fragmentation calls a halt. Might still struggle in parts of the world where low Gmail penetration deprives it of a headline use case.
  
• Augmented reality - Layar and its peers seem to have tapped into something unique to mobile devices. The notion of a wireless "head-up display" is sci-fi turned real. I can see a whole ecosystem evolving here - and a set of headaches for network planners who have only just got their heads around a shift to indoor usage of mobile data - it might shift back.
  
• Facebook - sets the standard for personal communications, but also the user-provider interaction model. It encourages rebellion among its own users. Meanwhile, it's turning from a service to an app-platform to a web OS. Makes mobile operators' claims of "loyalty" look like a joke in comparison.
  
• Consumer femtocells - ignore the impatient critics expecting overnight adoption, the momentum is building slowly but steadily. The need for extra capacity, offload and the ability to use them as services platforms is inexorable. I'm expecting decent-size deployments in 2010 - although ignore anyone suggesting it's an alternative to WiFi.
  
• Huawei - the scariest vendor in the telecom industry. Derided by some as a cheap copy-shop a few years ago, it's now aggressively pursuing every sector of the telecoms industry with skill and depth. Watch out for its handset division taking out back-markers like SonyEricsson, while the infrastucture side is still worrying everyone. The company's lack of dogmatic pursuit of specific standards is very positive.
  
• "Comes with data" - 2010 starts to see the end of the "subscription mentality". Following on from the Amazon Kindle, we're going to see a range of devices with connectivity "built in" to the retail purchase price, with no need for onerous contracts. Behind the scene, new wholesale models will rule the roost.
• Connection-sharing - I've written quite a bit about this recently, and it might take until 2011 to really pick up, but I think one of the most disruptive possibilities is that of users pooling their mobile broadband connections. "Share my mobile connection - only with my Facebook friends"
• Operator-on-operator applications - I'm not convinced that many will be successful, but I'm expecting various MNOs to follow Vodafone's and Orange's lead and try to launch software apps and widgets to run over each other's networks, exploiting smartphones and open appstores.

Zeros

• Mobile IMS and RCS - the dead parrot is now looking undead, shambling about like a feathered zombie that won't stay buried. But there's plenty of garlic and wooden stakes around....
• LTE - No clear advantages over HSPA, all manner of teething problems in optimisation and building scale. Looks like 2001-era UMTS. Come back in 2014 for it to move beyond niche.
  
• Virtual conferences - virtually useless. Everybody hates them, irrespective of the supposed savings in travel. If I can't be there in person, just email me a PPT or PDF and give me a dial-in number.
  
• NFC - the videoconferencing of the 21st century. Repeatedly hyped, repeatedly delayed and will be repeatedly ignored by customers. Pointless.
• Twitter - either niche or irrelevant. Either way, it doesn't deserve more than 5% of its current hype.
• Enterprise femtocells - no clear business model, and a world of pain in implementation. Question to ask your mobile operator: "How many customer-facing firewall experts do you have?"
• Embedded 3G netbooks - The business model and user behaviour still don't stack up in most cases, a year after I highlighted the deficiencies in a major Disruptive Analysis report on Mobile Broadband. There's already evidence of fraud with subsidised laptops being "box broken" and resold. Dongles and MiFi's are cheaper and easier.
  
• Smartphone profit margins - Touchscreen? Check. Fast processor? Check. Web Browser? Check. AppStore? Check. Widgets? Check. Differentiation? Nope. Margins? Ever-thinner.
  
• Operator AppStores - Might turn out to be "table stakes" to play in the smartphone market, but I really can't see them being the main avenue for application sales for handsets, especially as the iPhone is excluded and every other device will have its own vendor-run store as well. Won't "move the needle" for MNO revenues or churn.
  
• Aggregated social networks - As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the idea of combining various web services into a single handy screen & identity sounds great to operators and other wannabee "owners" of customers. But no user actually wants to be aggregated - we're all very good at multi-tasking now, thank you very much.
• The terms "dumb pipe" and "over the top" - Hugely evocative and judgemental soundbites, which have caused countless executives to make hugely wrong kneejerk decisions. Try using the phrases "Happy Pipe", and "Independent Application Provider" instead for a few weeks. The world looks different now, doesn't it?

No surprises

• WiMAX - Steady but unremarkable growth for fixed-wireless broadband in developing economies. A few high-profile mobile-centric deployments, but not many devices. Slow going for the promised new business models.
• Open network APIs - Lots of noise around initiatives like GSMA OneAPI and numerous operator-specific programmes. Location lookups, network-based SMS, voice and CEBP, automated authentication and billing. Moderate market uptick in 2010, although with a continual battle as alternative work-arounds developed by Google et al continue to mature.
• WiFi - Doesn't get replaced by femtocells, doesn't displace cellular mobile broadband, gets embedded in more devices. Hotspot business models largely still a train-wreck, apart from free venue-sponsored ones.
• Nokia - finally gets going on touchscreens and decent UI. Bounces back a bit. Chugs along steadily and profitably for feature phones and the developing world. Confounds the more hysterical pessimists and doesn't disappear. Ovi might return from the dead, but I'm not banking on it.
• BlackBerry - Continues quietly growing in Apple's PR and branding shadow. Makes considerable headway among consumers, especially teenagers who use it for messaging and Facebook. The PIN messaging system starts to encroach on MSN's territory.
• Consolidation - margins are looking ever uglier. New business models aren't succeeding yet. Capital remains tight. Scale is king
• Mobile TV: Was dead, is dead, will stay dead. No surprise.
• Data roaming prices. Everyone knows it's a huge embarassment. But it's such a profitable embarassment that nobody will budge until regulators or competition authorities come after them with a big stick.
  

Another operator-on-operator service: Orange ON

After the launch of Vodafone 360, there is now another entrant into the fray for mobile operators offering so-called "over the top" applications themselves, from the usually ultra-conservative Orange.

There's an article about it here . I'm at the Telco 2.0 event in Orlando today, but will try to chase down more details when I can.

One tantalising snippet though:

"Although the final details are yet to be confirmed, the network is looking at offering VoIP-type services in markets where Orange does not have a presence. It is understood that this could eventually be rolled out to customers on other networks where Orange does have a footing"

I think that this sort of operator-on-operator competition will be a major disruptor in 2010-2011. I've been talking about the idea for a few years, but it's needed a critical mass of smartphones and appstore-type delivery mechanisms to make it practical.

For some history on this concept, see a previous post here.

LTE Voice: the more I've looked at Circuit fallback, the worse it's looked

I've been talking about the problems with voice on LTE for more than two years now. I first published a report on VoIPo3G in November 2007 in which I discussed in great detail the problems with IMS voice, and the fact that there was no simple, standardised version of "basic VoIP" suitable for operator deployment. I'd previously written about the issues with IMS-capable handsets in 2006, and VoWLAN the year before. More generally, I've been covering wireless VoIP since about 2001.

A common strand in my analysis has been that the technical standards are often completely divorced from considerations of end-user behaviour and experience, the needs of application developers, the practicalities of handset design and the realities of business models.

Like politicians, there's instead usually a focus on control and ideology, rather than pragmatism.

That's not to say that every new technology development has to start with some sort of fluffy "inclusive" focus group approach, or that pseudo-cartels should invent things that competition authorities will frown upon.

It often just means that more consideration needs to be paid to questions like:

• "Hang on a minute - how's this actually going to look in the hands of the user?" or
• "Isn't this going to make it worse than the older solution people have already? Who's going to buy that?" or
• "Isn't that going to break all the other applications running on the phone? What happens if it's multi-tasking?"

A very good example of this is one of the proposed standards for providing voice over LTE networks, Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB). This is the 3GPP approach to supporting voice which drops the LTE connection back to 2G or 3G to make or recieve a phone call. It is generally positioned as an "interim" solution before moving to full IMS voice.

I've written before about CSFB, and it's also been discussed in many of the comments threads on my previous posts on LTE voice, such as here, here, here and here - many of which also cover ongoing problems with IMS voice. (The recent OneVoice announcement is a possible medium-term solution to some of those problems).

Some of the issues that keep cropping up include the latency involved in the LTE-to-3G/2G process, the impacts on any data applications running on LTE at the time of a call, and the need to have overlapping coverage of older networks everywhere you put LTE.

I've now done a more thorough analysis of CS Fallback's flaws. I've come to the conclusion that it's not just awkward, it's actually terrible - worse than useless, in its current incarnation at least. Going back to my questions before, it seems clear that nobody ever said something like:

"Hang on a minute, LTE phones will be expensive, so our best customers will buy them first.... but it will give them a worse telephony experience with CSFB than their existing handset. That's never going to fly!."

(Incidentally, coming back to a discussion from another thread, one commenter asserted that fallback could be achieved in about one second. I cited 2-4secs, based on a 3GPP submission I'd seen, and we agreed to disagree in the absence of hard evidence. I spoke to a *very* senior person in handset RF development for a major device vendor earlier in the week, who has more cellular patents than I've had hot dinners. His estimate was for 6-12 seconds extra latency. For an LTE-to-LTE call or SMS, it would be quicker to use Morse code).

I've now written a white paper covering CSFB's major flaws, which actually seem pretty extensive even beyond what I've written above. It almost looks like it was designed to make IMS voice look good by comparison.

The paper is available for download from here. But first, some disclosure. It has been commissioned by Kineto Wireless, the chief proponents of the main alternative VoLGA, which has evolved from UMA/GAN. In common with all Disruptive Analysis' sponsored material, I only take on topics where I already have a strong opinion - I'd written positively about VoLGA since March , despite having been a thorn in UMA's side since its launch in 2004. (I'm convinced that somewhere in Kineto HQ is a dartboard with a picture of my face on it). It's not perfect either, but it seems much better than CSFB or IMS.

I'd also previously written about CS over HSPA (which is the same basic principle of 2G voice over a 3G IP bearer) in early 2008. I'd even originally suggested doing "2G over 3G" as a possible better use case for UMA than WiFi, way back in 2005/6, albeit a bit flippantly at the time.

The bottom line is that I think that 3GPP should reconsider VoLGA or something close to it. CS Fallback looks like a terrible interim solution for voice-on-LTE, especially for operators who aren't sure that their particular endpoint is IMS voice. The current two-solution approach (CSFB / IMS) seems guaranteed to either promote 3rd-party VoIP solutions, or delay LTE entirely. If the whole thing *has* been some sort of standards conspiracy to force IMS into the hands of the unwilling, I'd make a suggestion to include some game theorists in the discussion next time.

One thing I should note for completeness is that there are a couple of other options out there, notably NSN's Fast Track and another from Acme Packet and Mavenir. I haven't had a chance to drill into those as much, but from an external perspective they don't seem to have as much traction or behind-the-scenes support as VoLGA.

Once again, the white paper on why I feel CSFB is "not fit for purpose" is here.

Facebook just added a small Twitter bird to its farm on Farmville

I'm a longstanding Twitter skeptic.

I'm convinced that its importance is vastly over-blown by the media industry itself, especially lazy journalists who use it as a quick barometer of opinion. Nobody "real" actually seems to use it, just a few people who either like talking to themselves, or who like the external validation of lots of "followers" (celebrities, politicians, social media commentators and other assorted narcissists). Some of my friends in the tech PR community have also succumbed to it, despite my attempts at re-educating them.

So I found it deeply amusing that an even more annoying social web phenomenon has now grown much larger than Twitter - the intensely irritating Farmville apparently has 69m users - a subset of Facebook's 350m. I'm one of the other 280m who've switched off all Farmville notifications from our addicted friends.

An early prediction for 2010-11: Twitter falters a bit..... then gets acquired by some wannabe media-turned-social-media company... then disappears into a black hole to join PointCast, FriendsReunited, Second Life and Friendster as one of the long list of Internet has-beens. And it's joined shortly thereafter by Farmville as well, in a pleasing sort of symmetry.

Does anyone really want to converge mobile social networks?

I'm losing count of the times I've heard people come out with a variation on the theme of:

"Here's a single piece of software that aggregates all your social networks into one convenient application or screen".

However, I most certainly have not lost count of the number of times I've heard people tell me:

"I wish I had a single piece of software that aggregates all my social networks"....

....because the total number of people who've told me that is a big round zero.

Am I missing something, or does this Emperor really have no clothes? This problem just doesn't seem to exist - and indeed potentially it introduces massive risks to the average end user, who is probably not as stupid as many of the proponents of the concept seem to think.

Why would I want my operator / device vendor / OS provider / application shop to act as a front end and filter for my other services? I specifically don't want my contacts or addressbook converged - I keep separate lists for very good reasons. I don't want any one organisation to be able to aggregate all the info about my multiple online personae - I'm very happy having my LinkedIn and FaceBook profiles as separate as possible, and neither linked into my Yahoo contacts or Skype friends, nor my handset's contact list. The aggregation point is in my head, which is pretty good at multi-tasking.

All the people I know who are active on multiple networks do so for very good reasons, usually that they want to segregate separate groups of individuals. I do the same with IM services, using Yahoo, Skype and Facebook messaging for different sets of work / personal / family contacts. I don't want a multi-headed IM client.

Plus, most of the "converged networks" businesses seem to be predicated about adding another layer of lock-in or advertising, often with some spurious marketing verbiage and trust and security. Surely one of the nicest things about widgets and mobile web applications is that they can *diverge* easily and simply? It just strikes me that attempting to shoe-horn all these disparate networks and communications methods together risks destroying the unique "social value" of each one, not adding to it.

Tethering and mobile connection-sharing. Microsoft's thinking about it too

I wrote a few weeks ago about Joiku's new connection-sharing application Boost, which connects smartphones into local groups via WiFi, allowing them to combine and load-balance across multiple mobile data connections. I talked about the potential for "operator diversity", where you might have a number of people sharing multiple connections on different networks, and perhaps using different frequency bands and technologies.

Basically, it's software-defined-radio at the application layer. Not easy, but not impossible either - and with huge disruptive potential.

What's really interesting is that it's not just Joiku that's been playing with this concept. After seeing an article in New Scientis, I've found this really interesting paper from Microsoft on what it cools the "Cool-Tether" concept, which has lots of detail about the power management implications of this as well.

Some of the possibilities around this area are so interesting, I'm hesitant to write about them. In fact, if anyone wants to discuss commercial opportunities for collaboration around applications or IPR, let me know.....

SMS spam advertising - completely unacceptable

I have an almost irrational hatred of SMS-based advertising, which is shared by quite a number of other people I know. It's deeply intrusive, interruptive and time-consuming - and the idea that I should take even more of my time to send STOP messages to something unsolicited in the first place makes me shudder with disgust at the perpetrator.

Case in point: I got a random, unsolicited SMS from Virgin Atlantic today. I've been a member of their frequent flyer scheme for some time, and unfortunately they do not have a method to allow you to discriminate about how you receive information. The "communications preferences" page just says "Communications will be either by email, post, telephone or SMS. By opting in you will be agreeing to receive communications from us." No way to specify which you are willing to accept. It may well have changed since I first signed up, I'm normally pretty careful about this.

I don't mind emails as I don't have to take time to read them - I can see the headers. But on my personal phone, I absolutely, never, ever want spam. Yes I know I could get some fancy client for filtering SMS on an iPhone or whatever, but I do not care. SMS adverts = spam = unacceptable, as far as my personal life is concerned.

Too late for Virgin anyway - I won't be using the airline again, and I've told customer service to delete me from the frequent flyer database. No second chances.

Edit - I'm dismayed that the UK's Telephone Preference Service which acts as a central "do not call" database for telemarketing, does not extend to preventing SMS spam as well. There ought to be a centralised mechanism for opting out of all marketing-related text messages, enforced in law so that all bulk-SMS providers need to validate against it. Alternatively, I'm wondering if there are any applications for Android, iPhone or other platforms that use the same sort of Bayesian approach that PC email antispam software exploits.

A quick way of deciding if you're being ripped off for data roaming fees

A lighthearted thought experiment:

.... visit a city in a new country. Plan a journey from your hotel to a typical "point of interest" perhaps a mile (1.6km) distant.

Is it cheaper to:

(a) Walk, using Google Maps or a similar mapping product on your phone, consuming roaming data to show you the city's layout and plot a route as you stroll across town.
(b) Jump in a taxi. the driver worry about the route instead, and pay based on the meter

If the cost of the data roaming > cost of a local taxi, I think you can be fairly confident that you're paying your operator too much. Or else you're somewhere with really cheap taxis.

Is it worth going to MWC next February?

I'm currently trying to decide whether or not to take my normal week's trip to Barcelona in 2010.

At one level, it's "obvious" - it's what everyone does, isn't it? And certainly I usually have an intense week of briefings, conference-style sessions, client meetings, dinners and (of course) late nights. Bits of it are fun, and bits of it are simply a hard slog.

I think last year I ended up having about 50-60 engagements of one form or another, plus extra ones at another conference (NetEvents) that started 2 days' earlier. I managed to find some quite cheap accommodation and flights, and I had at least one "paid gig" while I was there, so that made it worth my time financially. On the other hand, I spent a good % of the preceding month playing email and phone hockey, to set everything up - and probably turning down another 100+ invitations, having pre-MWC briefings and so forth. It's hard to work out the fully-loaded ROI.

This time, I'm debating whether it's worth it at all. I meet lots of companies and individuals at smaller conferences year-round, usually without their PR minders and carefully-messaged analyst-facing slides. Maybe a couple more of those - I get no shortage of invites to speak. And I don't usually go to CTIA Wireless or one of the Asian events, so maybe I should take a week out for one of those instead?

I'm not the only one thinking this - quite a few other firms and individuals either pass entirely (Apple?) or have scaled back their presence. This isn't because of travel budget either - it's just a hard-nosed view on what & where is the most effective use of *time* rather than cash. (The answer isn't in "virtual conferences" either in my view - they're uniformly dreadful and I usually switch off after the first hour, if that). And for all those traditionalists out there - sorry, if MWC went back to being 3GSM Cannes, it'd be a *definite* no from me.

I think I'm going to give it another couple of weeks. If by then I've got a few things lined up that are direct revenue-earners (moderating panel sessions, giving customer presentations, using it as a basis for a specific research effort) then it's a no-brainer. Otherwise, maybe I'll try an experiment and skip it for once and just set up an auto-responder on my email saying "sorry, not going".

(Oh and if anyone *does* need a thought-provoking speaker or lively moderator, please email information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com)

The quadplay myth

One of the perpetual themes I encounter at the moment is the notion that the world is moving towards a "converged" situation in which individuals or families purchase all their communications services from a single operator.

In particular, there is a fervent belief that people will choose the same cellular providers and fixed broadband providers, tempted by bundling deals and wondrous "three screen" content and entertainment services.

Not only that, but these ultra-loyal users will happily spend more in aggregate, persuade their entire families to follow their lead, churn less and will be happy to have femtocells or WiFi to offload "mobile broadband" onto their own paid-for fixed connections.

For the larger hybrid operators, that is a Utopian ideal. And to be fair, in some circumstances it will actually happen.

But realistically, it strikes me as a 10-20% thing whichever way you slice it.

- Maybe 10-20% of households will have a single family plan for all mobile devices coupled to the same provider's DSL or cable or fibre
- Maybe 10-20% of fixed broadband subscriptions will incorporate a bundled "for free" mobile extension (perhaps with a detachable dongle in the gateway)
- Maybe 10-20% of triple-play (voice/Internet/TV) subscriptions will expand to quad-play with mobile as well

There are too many factors driving *divergence* here, not convergence. A partial list:

- Operator-exclusive devices like the iPhone and Motorola Droid will often drive operator choice, not the other way around.
- Some mobile operators have no fixed arms (eg 3, or some T-Mobile properties)
- Some mobile operators only have fixed coverage in certain places (eg AT&T)
- Some mobile operators have lousy coverage in certain places (or certain buildings) where their fixed arms are strong
- Devices like the Amazon Kindle and laptop/dongle combinations will proliferate with an unknown "Brand X" mobile operator behind the scenes, thus non-connectable into an existing household plan
- Prepay-centric markets tend to have many people with multiple devices, specifically chosen to be on different operators to enable tariff arbitrage
- Many users have company-issued devices on a different network to their personal devices and broadband
- Few users are ever willing to churn fixed broadband provider for a variety of reasons (unique content / IPTV, difficulties in switching phone numbers or email address, perception of disruption etc)
- Unusual households (flat-sharers, students in accommodation blocks etc)
- Preference of children to buy own devices / services with pocket money rather than as part of a family plan

You get the picture.

Now, the 10-20% of quadplay-receptive households are definitely a target worth pursuing. But let's not kid ourselves that they represent the *typical* future household rather than the ideal telco-dream segment. Yes, the picture will vary substantially by country and specific operator, but overall it's worth betting on divergence and not convergence (as per usual in the telecoms industry).

Some thoughts on Android

I'm slowly starting to become a bit more positive about Android. I've been in the US for most of the last week, and it was interesting to see how many "normal" people had Android devices, compared with the UK where it's still viewed as geektastic. Google's introduction of free turn-by-turn navigation is a bit of a smart move too: this article makes a fascinating read about the Google business model evolving.

It seems to me that the OS is maturing faster than anticipated, and certainly more quickly than Symbian and Windows Mobile. It looks as though Google will take a leaf out of Microsoft's book and jump all over its rivals if they make a mis-step (which certainly seems to be true of recent S60 and WM6.5 devices). It will be interesting to see if Maemo steps up to the plate, given Nokia's announcement this week.

I had a quick play with a Motorola Droid and was fairly impressed. Fast, comes with a QWERTY, decent-seeming camera etc. I could see myself possibly using one as a work device, if it's possible to buy one unlocked for a sensible price, although I wouldn't want to use it as a personal voice/SMS device.

Operators should push vendors & silicon companies to support 2.6GHz HSPA+ as an alternative to LTE

Following up on my post from two weeks ago about HSPA / HSPA+ in 2.6GHz, I'm now more sure that this is a becoming a wise option - and operators and device vendors should start pushing their suppliers to support it. I'm becoming increasingly sceptical about the short-term case for LTE, especially for GSM/UMTS operators in developed markets like Western Europe.

The received wisdom suggests that "new spectrum = new technology". I can certainly see the appeal and elegance for radio network engineers to put the newest, shiniest kit into the spanking-new bits of frequency in 2.6GHz and the digital dividend.

But I think that for current HSPA operators, they should think twice. Even the theoretical gains in efficiency for LTE vs. Release 8 or Release 9 HSPA+ are relatively modest. With 64QAM and 2x2 MIMO, I've heard figures of 20-30% *might* be achievable. However, given views of contrarians like Moray Rumney from Agilent, these gains may well not be attainable in the real world - or at least, only for a certain proportion of the time under specific user/cell scenarios. In terms of actual *average* throughput in normal usage, there may well be only a wafer-thin margin between them.

Yes, LTE has better latency (in theory), a flatter and maybe cheaper network, and the ability to use thin slivers of spectrum.

But this needs to be set against the need to run LTE as an overlay on HSPA anyway (3 sets of network opex....), plus the extra cost and complexity in handsets, the huge testing and optimisation costs, the probable flaky hand-offs between LTE and 3G/2G, the ongoing issue of voice support and numerous other unknowns. Add to this the fact that LTE does not appear to offer any obvious new business models compared with HSPA+ (especially if only used in limited "hotspots") and the business case dissipates even further.

That's not to say LTE won't be improved - after all, HSDPA has proven a superb "bug fix" for WCDMA, only 5 years after it was introduced. Prior to that point, 3G was pretty pointless - in hindsight, operators would have been better off leaving the 2.1GHz spectrum unused, or perhaps temporarily putting EDGE in it, although under old regulatory regimes that probably wouldn't have been allowed.

This time, there are more options.

I think that operators should give serious consideration to the scenario of continued upgrades to HSPA, including putting it in new spectrum bands like 2.6GHz. Much of the new radio equipment could be easily upgraded to LTE at a later date - if required. There's possibly an argument to skip current LTE entirely and wait for real 4G - LTE Advanced - as an eventual migration path.

Given that operators are currently starting to put HSPA in refarmed 900MHz (surely also a "new band" effectively?), why not also 2.6GHz?

Either way - I think that operators should start leaning on their suppliers, both infrastructure- and device-side - to support HSPA2600 as an option at least.

Edit: any game-theorists reading this might also want to ponder on the competitive impact of those most benefiting from early scale economies for LTE devices (on any band). In particular, CDMA operators moving to LTE will likely be disproportionately affected if their HSPA peers don't follow suit at about same time. Will LTE enable a marketing win vs. HSPA+? Given that neither is 4G I can't really see why - 3.75G vs. 3.9G isn't really a great headline-maker. In fact, if WiMAX and LTE operators can use 4G as a branding device, I see no reason why HSPA+ operators shouldn't too.

Thought experiment - two-sided broadband models

I've just seen another vendor presentation suggesting that broadband operators might be able to charge "upstream" content or Internet companies for differentiated QoS, enabling them to "monetise the pipe".

It's a common refrain, underlined as usual by the 2008-era reference to "over the top players".

Even leaving aside the realities of Net Neutrality legislation for a minute, there simply seem to be almost no real-world examples of "cold hard cash" changing hands for differentiated broadband in this way.

Some of the recent work I've been doing with Telco 2.0 on broadband business models has suggested a few possible niche options here - but there will need to be a lot of work to wrap them with integration and customisation. I'll be talking about these in coming weeks and months.

But every time someone suggests operators might charge the BBC or YouTube or Facebook for access to "their pipes" I can't but help wondering if the reality will be the exact opposite.

I can imagine Facebook, with its 400m users, starting to reverse the proposition. "Dear Mr Broadband operator, forget about trying to charge us per GB of data. Instead, we'd like *you to pay us* $1 per user per month for access to the latest version of Facebook's web platform. PS you can also buy adverts to target users on your rivals' access connections"

OneVoice for LTE + IMS : Necessary but not sufficient

EDIT: If you are interested in learning more about the Future of Voice, I am running a series of small-group Masterclasses together with Martin Geddes, as well as providing private internal workshops. Email me at information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com for more details

 This will surprise a few people: I'm actually quite impressed with the announcement the other day about the OneVoice profile for defining an IMS-based approach to voice on LTE. I've now had a chance to read through the full document.

It essentially de-options a lot of the implementation vagueness and distracting flexibility around using IMS for mobile voice, creating a lowest common denominator "Profile" from the existing standards. It strips away a lot of the unnecessary fripperies and boils it all down to what amounts to the minimum set of requirements for basic telephony to work - if you happen to be an operator bought into the IMS world-view, that is.

Exactly two years ago I published a report on VoIPo3G (which included an analysis of the role of VoIP on LTE, HSPA and EVDO). I wrote "Too much emphasis is placed by 3GPP on unproven ‘multimedia’ telephony concepts rather than ‘plain’ VoIPo3G". More than three years ago I wrote another report on IMS-capable handsets (or the lack thereof) in which I wrote "There is little consensus on the answer to the question "What exactly is an IMS phone?""

Well, this document is an IMS-centric take on "Plain VoIPo3G", and it does go a little further in defining the capabilities of an IMS phone. It makes it very clear that "other media types" like video are not essential, for initial deployment at least. There is not a single mention of the word "presence" in the whole document. It talks about AMR codecs and not the "HD" wideband version AMR-WB.

It appears to have taken a long hard look at the unloved MMTel standard for mobile IMS VoIP and turned it into something more practical. It might even make "bare-bones IMS VoIP" a bit cheaper and easier to implement for some of the operators who are skeptical.

All of which is good. -But the problems it addresses have been obvious for at least 2 years, and this announcement is a start of a process and not its end. This document is just a suggestion, not a standard. It will be forwarded to 3GPP and GSMA and other bodies. It's written on a template that *looks* like a standards document, but for now it's just a helpful suggestion from some interested parties. "this specification defines a common recommended feature set and selects one recommended option when multiple options exist for single functionality"

Hopefully, it will become more widely adopted over time - although it will be interesting to see if any changes are made when other companies have their say. Notable major omissions from the roster of participants are NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, LG, Apple, RIM, Motorola, Telecom Italia, T-Mobile, Qualcomm, NEC and quite a few others.

Various other commentators have suggested that this means that OneVoice is "One Ring to Rule Them All" (....and in the darkness bind them), spelling the end for Frodo (aka VoLGA), Gollum (CS Fallback) and all the other hobbit-like contenders for Voice on LTE.

I disagree.

OneVoice is necessary but not sufficient. It makes IMS less painful for mobile voice, but it doesn't make it ideal either. It makes interoperable IMS mobile voice less slow to develop, but it doesn't make it fast. It makes it less cumbersome, but doesn't make it elegant. It makes it less costly, but it doesn't obviously make it profitable. It's an important step, but it isn't the whole journey.

When the OneVoice press release came out, I was at the Telco 2.0 conference listening to Vodafone's Internet Services team discussing 360 and commenting on IMS RCS, saying "it was going in the right direction, but taking too long". They also mentioned they might think about putting a VoIP client into 360 at some point. I initially thought Voda's presence in the press release a bit strange given it seems in no hurry to deploy LTE, but on second thoughts I see no downside for them either: simplifying IMS is either neutral or positive for them, depending on which part of the company you talk to.

Either way, OneVoice isn't going to happen ubiquitously, nor overnight. Handset vendors must be breathing a sigh of relief that they *finally* have bits of a specification to work to for IMS handsets. But it's unlikely to be quick to hit the market or be optimised. And the overall business case for mobile operators to deploy IMS is still not exactly pretty, as it offers no obvious new revenue streams. For fixed IMS, there have at least been some decent arguments around cost-savings. But it's far from clear that the mobile IMS spreadsheets have a similar bottom line benefit.

So there is still likely to be a need for an interim solution for several years - as well as something that works on non-IMS LTE operators' networks. CS fallback is a bit of a train-wreck which nobody seems to like. So I think that VoLGA still makes sense for those wanting to make the most of their circuit-switching assets. And Internet-based voice services like Skype or a future "VodaVoIP" may have appeal for the more 2.0-style operators deploying LTE.

Music industry: stop whingeing

OK, a little off-topic here, but having sat through a lot of hand-wringing during the Media session at the Telco 2.0 event this morning, I thought I'd stick my oar in as well. There was a lot of discussion about banning P2P filesharers, DRM, ISP responsbilities, traffic-shaping and so on, particularly about music. We had the esteemed presence of 1980s singer Feargal Sharkey.

Now don't get me wrong - I produce content myself, and I don't like it when fake spam blogs rip of this site, and I also take steps to protect my published research from illegal copying.

But at the same time, I absolutely disagree that the whole of the Internet industry should be paying much attention to a very small minority, worried about a very small amount of what the Internet is about. I've written before that content is just a small, special sort of application, and the more I think about it, the more my opinion is confirmed.

There is no reasons that music piracy should drive government policy or Internet regulation, any more than software piracy or the online sale of fake pharmaceuticals. However, the entertainment industry tends to enjoy cosier relationships with policy-makers (the French President's wife being a musician, for example, while UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is closely linked with the content industry).

Ultimately, the music industry is designed to be (a) noisy, and (b) emotive. That's it's job. So it should be no surprise that they tend to be louder and more emphatic when it comes to shouting about its concerns.

Yet I cannot believe that anyone entering the music industry in the last 10 years has done so expecting to make $$$ from record sales. All the musicians I know are well-aware of the score. They've probably illegally downloaded music themselves. They know the value of live performances, which have been incredibly strong in recent years. If they want to exercise their creativity for purely money-making purposes, they'd be writing iPhone apps instead.

I'm not aware of any decline in the number of bands being formed, despite reducing music sales. A quick glance around the web suggests that musical instrument sales are still pretty robust too.

Bottom line - while piracy is definitely bad news for the record labels, it doesn't seem to be too apocalyptic for performers. But irrespective of the rights and wrongs (and I'm not especially animated one way or the other personally) the noise generated by the music industry is far out of proportion with its overall importance. Turn it down, please.

Finally, an MNO breaks the service/access link. Vodafone 360....

I have long been of the view that the greatest challenge to operators' hold on mobile value-added services will not necessarily come from Google, Skype and other Internet players. It will come from each other.

The unspoken threat has been that other MNOs could represent the scariest so-called "over the top" risk. That they would decouple access from service, and start providing branded services over *each others* networks and handsets.

In particular, I suggested in June this year that Vodafone's acquisition of Zyb might turn into its attempt to break out beyond the narrow confines of its own access-customer base. This follows on from an early warning last year when it launched a cross-operator Facebook SMS app.

I wrote: "My view is that it's an extremely healthy development - if you're Vodafone, or for that matter NTT DoCoMo or a small mobile operator from Africa, why *shouldn't* you have inhouse-developed cool mobile apps, which you want to make available to everyone, not just people on your own network? Sure, maybe you *optimise* for people who have both access+app from you, but why not distribute your software as widely as possible?"

In a nutshell, I was right. Vodafone 360 is available to everyone, not just Voda access subscribers. It's on PCs, there's a client downloadable to other operators' (or vanilla) Symbian or Java devices, plus there's support for other OSs in the pipeline. Yes, the in-house optimised phones from Samsung and others give a *better* 360 experience, but Vodafone has recognised it has to be available as widely as possible to gain traction.

In a way, this is completely intuitive. Businesses like Facebook can succeed because they are addressable by *all* Internet users, not just those confined to a specific broadband provider. This is the way to gain network effects, scale, loyalty and ubiquity. Why would anyone prefer an operator-specific, walled-garden service? The same is true for music (I'm watching Spotify present right now), video (YouTube) or many other services.

One last comment: Vodafone 360 is not based on IMS or RCS, it's. If at some point that changes, I might revise my views on RCS.

Update: just listened to Voda's Director of Internet Services Marketing on a panel talking about 360. RCS was "going in the right direction, but taking too long".... so they used standard web technologies instead.

Obfuscating customer behaviour to maintain privacy

Listening to a discussion about telecom operators aggregating customer data, profiling people based on behavioural software and so on. Not surprisingly, there's the usual questions about privacy, peoples' dislike of personal advert-targetting and so forth.

Don't get me wrong, some of this stuff may be useful in terms of making sure adverts are more interesting and entertaining. But many people (and some countries' legal systems) will take an exceptionally dim view of telco data mining. It fits a bit into what I mentioned last week about the "social web" last week - who really wants all their contacts and behaviour and calls and traffic aggregated and analysed?

For those who do value their privacy, I see a broad set of options emerging to ensure fragmentation will endure. Firstly, the ability to share and federate anonymised connectivity via devices using Joiku Boost or MiFi-type connection sharing. And then I would also expect to see software that makes decoy calls/SMS's with your "spare" minutes and texts, or visits random websites on your flatrate data plan. That should make for some interesting "social graph" analysis.... lastly, I expect a fair amount of messaging or other traffic to be extracted by independent platforms like Facebook (and maybe Vodafone 360)...

Telling anecdote about US views on prepay mobile

I'm at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm in London this morning. I just heard a comment which, to me, epitomises the difference between US views on prepaid mobile versus most of the rest of the world. It was made by someone who looks at subscriber data management, talking about crunching data for a "hypothetical" prepay provider.

Setting the scene, he referred to the likelihood that c50% of users would be "illegal immigrants or former convicts".

Utterly amazing. I've always recognised that prepaid had a stigma amongst many people in North America, but I hadn't realised it was that bad.

The "Social web" - does anyone actually want it?

Is this another example of The Emperor's New Clothes?

I've lost count of the number of pitches I've heard recently along the lines of "a single client to manage all your social network connections", or "a feed of updates via homescreen widgets" and so on.

I've also often been bombarded with the hideous phrase "social web", which I'm starting to think is utterly cringe-worthy, and ties in with a lot of nonsense talked about "social graph" and the farcical notion that you might be able to link together all your various communications channels.

I am genuinely unsure why anyone would want to link their various social networks or contact lists / directories, or tie together their calling and messaging patterns.

Personally, I work incredibly hard to make sure that I keep Facebook and LinkedIn almost totally exclusive. I'm happy that my Skype friend list has minimal overlap with Yahoo contacts. (Sidenote: on average Skype users have<10 contacts, but they're very "intimate").

Like most people, I'm happy with multi-tasking and compartmentalising my communications channels. I don't meet or talk to people who find they have a problem with fragmented social networks or phonebooks. And I certainly don't want *anyone* to be able to derive collated intelligence from across all of my different ways of interacting with friends, clients, acquaintances and so on. Fragmentation is safer and more comfortable.

I suspect that the only people that only really want this are aggregators and/or operators slightly irked by being usurped by Facebook et al. Plus some of the "social media connectivity freaks", who are generally just those in the social media industry itself, or its immediate neighbours like PR and politics and entertainment.

I reckon there's a near-100% overlap with the type of people people who think Twitter is important, ie a very loud and very small group who like shouting at each other repeatedly via 100 different media. The same group that sit in conferences obsessed with back-channels and Macs with Tweet-deck or whatever else they're playing with this week.

But I've seen no evidence that normal people identify with the types of problem that the "social web" attempts to cure. It's possible I'm projecting my own prejudices here, but I don't think so.

Edit: One specific problem will be that of de-duplication of messages. I already have 50%+ of personal emails being Facebook notifications, as well as the little notification icons on Facebook.com itself. So if I also had them replicated to my phone's homescreen, I'd be getting them in triplicate. Wonderful. (And no, I wouldn't turn off the email notifications as I want them on my PC as well as phones - yes, phones *plural*)

Back to low-power GSM: licence exempt?

I'm at eComm in Amsterdam - and currently listening to a very interesting presentation from James Body (historically with Truphone but wearing a different hat today).

A few years ago, I wrote about the UK's low-power GSM auctions, and the subsequent slow-burn deployment of various GSM picocell-based services from companies like Teleware. It's never really lived up to its promise, though.

I hadn't realised this before, but apparently it is now legal to deploy low-power GSM in the guard band in the Netherlands, *licence-free*. I'm not sure exactly how this is implemented, as presumably there needs to be some sort of coordination to manage interference. Maybe you act as "your own MVNO"? One of the audience reported that the Dutch military was already using this option to build their own mini GSM networks on their bases and ships.

More interesting still - apparently this approach conceivably be rolled out Europe-wide. Worth watching....