070 + 419 = double scam

These days almost everyone's pretty well-versed in the classic "419" scam: "I represent Mr ET and have come into US$12,000,000,000.00 (TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS) and need your help to repatriate the money from Mars"

And in the UK, the missed-call 070 scam is being addressed by Ofcom (where you get a "missed call" on your cellphone from what looks like a mobile number, but in fact costs you a packet to call)

So it's refreshing to see the spirit of innovation lives on in scamland - someone's now combining the two practices. I got this email today:

Hello

It gives me a great deal of pleasure to write you this mail
and even when it might come to you as a surprise, I hope you
find it of interest.

Let me first introduce myself.

My name is David Timms. I am an Executive Auditor with a Bank here in Europe, I would like to use this means to ask your assistance in moving some fund over to your country. [....]good percentage of the fund, it is important to let you know that fifty percent

[...] For effective communication, please
kindly include in your reply, your complete Names, Address,Occupation, Age and most especially your contact number

[...] David Timms
Tel:+44 704 011 [xxxx]
Reply to: [xxxx]@crawler.com

So not only is someone trying to defraud me of money in a dodgy transaction, but he wants me to pay through the nose by using his 070 number during the negotiation.....

3G terms of service comparison... treatment of VoIP?

Based on the discussion of my post yesterday about Vodafone's stance on explicitly banning IM, P2P and VoIP traffic from its new 15MB per day for £1 data tariff, I thought I'd look at some of the other operator policies in this area to compare.

First off, 3's X-series: (unlimited for £5 per month)

“Using the X-Services to exploit the unlimited offers We will also consider your use unfair if you use the X-Series services in any way designed to unfairly exploit the unlimited usage or cause us loss, for example, by using the services for commercial purposes, accessing services that are not included or using an unauthorised device. We may make reasonable changes this policy in accordance with the Terms for 3 Services and any new version will replace this version.”

This gives 3 the right to control “services that are not included”, if they “cause loss”, which in theory could be applied to VoIP if a huge chunk of voice traffic suddenly migrated. But, realistically, only a few users will likely be bothered to use VoIPo3G – and they’d have to be using it so much that the transport costs offset the extra £5 a month they’re paying for the X-series service anyway. Also, it is worth noting that sat the launch event, a senior 3 representative confirmed verbally to Disruptive Analysis that using VoIP was acceptable “Yes, you can even download a packet-based Skype client if you want”

Next, a senior excutive from ONE Austria, speaking at a wVoIP conference in March 2007 said, regarding VoIP that “you’re very welcome” to use it on his company’s HSDPA service. He also took thge view that hardly anyone would be bothered, so he didn't care, especially as this would probably help with fixed-mobile substitution even more. I can't find the detailed T's and C's on its website, but if any German speakers want to help out I'd be interested in seeing the legalese.

Now, T-Mobile UK’s Web’n’Walk Fair Use terms vary according to the tiers of service chosen. So, some of the more basic packages stipulate “We do not permit use of this service to provide modem access for a computer or for peer to peer file sharing, internet phone calls or instant messaging”. However, others just say “We do not permit use of this service for internet phone calls.”, and the highest tiers have no apparent usage restrictions at all beyond bandwidth caps. This looks like a pretty sensible compromise to me, although it is for use only on monthly contract rather than daily / prepay. And at the same conference as above, a T-Mobile Czech Republic representative was also talking about permitting the use of VoIP via PCs on 3G to help compete vs. DSL.

Although I don't have a direct link to the terms themselves, it was reported here last week that Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO terms of service (for laptops, it seems) included the conditions: … may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation, the following: (i) continuous uploading, downloading or streaming of audio or video programming or games; (ii) server devices or host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, automated machine–to–machine connections or peer–to–peer (P2P) file sharing; or (iii) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections. Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to exclude VoIP explicitly, especially in the case of enterprises wanting to connect to voice servers & application on their intranets.

And then Telstra’s mobile data service terms & conditions include about 214 pages of details, which do not at first glance appear to prohibit VoIP use on its myriad different wireless offerings. However, its general terms stipulate what it terms a “fairplay policy” applicable to mobile data – “Unreasonable use: You must not use any of our FairPlay offers in a way that is unreasonable. We consider it unreasonable where you use a FairPlay offer fraudulently or in a manner that causes significant network congestion. Fraudulent use of a FairPlay offer covers resupplying our mobile service without our consent, so that someone else can take advantage of a FairPlay offer”. Whether VoIP is “unreasonable” is an interesting discussion…..

Interestingly neither Vodafone nor T-Mobile seem to specifically exclude SlingBox-type TV placeshifting services, which I would have thought were much more dangerous to the network than VoIP.

Vodafone's new data plan - defensive measures leave plenty of loopholes & questions

Interesting to look through Voda's new UK data plan pricing - up to 15MB per day for a capped £1, then £2/MB after that. Both the pricing structure and terms & conditions are cleverly (cynically?) crafted to mitigate the risk of any substitution by 3rd party services.

"The £1 per day charge and monthly data subscription cannot be used for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype or Peer-to-Peer services (such as instant messenger services, text messaging clients or file sharing). These services will not count towards the £1 per day charge or monthly bundle, and are charged separately at £2 per MB, with a 5p minimum charge for each data session"

In principle it sounds eminently reasonable, and I've got to admire Vodafone's intention to protect its legacy revenue base while trying to compete & provide decent mobile Internet access. Unfortunately, as always, the devil's in the detail, and I suspect that the complexity & diversity of open IP applications is going to cause trouble, as per usual.

I'd love to know how the precise definitions & packet inspection mechanisms are going to work though, and what Voda intends to do about the possible "false negatives" and "false positives".

"VoIP services such as Skype" - so what does "such as" mean? Does it include web-based callback initiated via a data connection but the voice is still circuit-based(Rebtel etc)? Is a game with "embedded VoIP" included in this? Does downloading a spoken poem count as VoIP? Can I steganographically encode voice into a JPEG image? Is a VoIP softphone connecting to an IP-PBX actually a "VoIP service" or just a "VoIP application"?

....and does Vodafone want to set a precedent and start to charge for inbound VoIP calls, thus breaking the "calling party pays" paradigm? (Ironic, given Keith's Voda/Truphone analysis last week)

Peer-to-peer.... does that include peer-to-server-to-peer? Does it include things based on JavaScript & Widgets or just a SIP- or other IM client? Does accessing a web forum count as "text messaging", especially if I send a private message to someone else? Or leaving a message on someone's social networking page? Is accessing webmail permitted or prohibited?

And what happens if a given software client - Yahoo Messenger, perhaps, or a game - is used for a mix of permitted and non-permitted usage? How do they separate it all out?

And what's a "session" - is that a technical term, eg as long as your phone is registered online with the SGSN, and does it change if the radio network puts your device into idle mode, or if you go out of coverage temporarily? Or does it refer to an application-level session like having a text messaging window open? Or is a single IM message or data flow a "session"?

How does anyone prove any of this? Especially if it's done inside a VPN tunnel? Or if it's all done in XML, with componentised data/software that could relate to 1001 different applications.

My expectation - this type of data contract has a lifespan of 12 months, maximum. Any of the questions above would probably cost Vodafone's customer services about £20 to answer properly, let alone managing the possible billing queries.

Of course the whole thing could just be FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). If they can dissuade 80% of people from even trying to do anything too edgy with a 3rd party app, then they may just shrug about the other 20%.

But given that plenty of operators don't care what you do with their data plans - 3, for example, or ONE in Austria, maybe the 80% will just churn instead.

When is an IMS not an IMS?

...when it's an "R4 IMS".

For those of you not deeply involved in 3GPP's acronymic world, IMS is part of Release 5 of its huge standards programme. Releases 6 and 7 provide enhancements to it.

One of the original ideas behind IMS was to stop operators wasting money on "reinventing the wheel", deploying new "silos" of equipment dedicated to each new application, when various of the components were essentially duplicated. Why should email, voicemail, IM and SMS all have separate boxes, with separate customer databases, and separate authentication, for example? Why have multiple instances of audio processing engines through the operator for different applications, when they could all be concentrated in one place - and maybe even outsourced to a 3rd party?

Obviously there's a lot more to IMS in terms of improved opex of an IP underlying network as well (a sort of bottom-up business case), but certainly the "top down" efficient application-layer argument is still used regularly.

But as Brough Turner from NMS eloquently describes in the exampled linked to above, there's a big gap between the theory (elegant though it may be) and the practical reality of creating applications. He uses ringback tones as an example, and constructs a compelling argument about why it still makes sense to have dedicated audio processing and subscriber engines within the individual application, rather than having them all centralised. Cost allocation, ringfencing vendor responsibility, optimising latency and so forth all point towards not sharing everything.

And this is all for an application that doesn't need a specific client on the phone. Extend this argument further and you have the issue I've discussed before - the complexity of mixing "full IMS" and "non-IMS" on the end devices.

The other interesting angle that Brough mentions is that around the R4 issue. Softswitches - building blocks of IMS, are also used in other "related" communications architectures (3GPP R4, MSF, TISPAN, Packetcable etc). They've been around for some time, and these separate architectures are (broadly) converging over the next few years, notably in R7. But not yet.

R4 isn't IMS, except in a marketing sense. Sure, it brings in some of the benefits of IP, but so do lots of other things. I'll make sure I grill any vendors or operators that claim "IMS deployments" on exactly what they mean.

xG Technology's xMax - I guess we'll know if it works fairly soon....

Quite a long time ago I wrote about a startup called xG that claimed to have a wonder-technology that would render high-speed cellular, WiMAX and most other radio networks horribly obsolete. Supposedly it gives huge increases in range, bandwidth & power usage. I was pretty skeptical, especially given the stated intention to focus on wVoIP as an initial application.

My view that there might be something clever in the air interface bit (although most people I've spoken to have dismissed it as snake-oil), but even so, there was no way that a small RF company was going to be able to put together the whole value-chain including handsets, software, backhaul, authentication, application layer, network security and all the other 2000 "moving parts" that make up a working system.

Since then quite a lot has changed. Firstly, it has floated on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market. It has a scarcely believable £1.8bn market capitalisation [correction, the mkt cap should be US$1.8bn not £, even thought it's quoted in London the price is in $], given that it's had virtually zero revenues and clearly has a lot of risk attached, even if it's viewed as a potential future Qualcomm clone. For some reason it raised cash as "convertible preferred equity agreements of $120 million", although my financial knowledge isn't good enough to know if that's a good thing or not. It's missed its original end-2006 goal for launch of VoIP phones, which surprises me not at all. And it's claiming today to have shipped its first commercial base stations. (It's using 900MHz initially, so not usable in most of the world where that's used for GSM).

The lucky recipient is that well-known small Florida ISP & web hosting company, Far Reach Technologies. It's also signed an evaluation & test deal with Telefonica Mexico. Now I'm not a huge fan of over-designed websites, but I have to wonder about a service provider which has a "web design service" page like this (spelled "Developement"). If it can't afford a spellchecker/proofreader, or a copy of a decent web authoring package.... just how much is it spending on xMax base stations to help justify £1.8bn valuation for its supplier? You might also wonder about the conspicuous lack of an "about" page, or the words "privacy policy" at the bottom of the page that isn't actually a live link. I realise all startups have to begin somewhere, but this strikes me as a pretty odd choice of reference site if your ultimate aim is to sell to the world's major service providers.

... but then I find this announcement. "The first system launch will occur in March, 2007 in Volusia County, Florida. The additional launches will take place in the second quarter of 2007. Far Reach’s deployment has been funded with $100 million by the multi-billion dollar US based Phoenix Foundation and underwritten by a major UK based bank. Far Reach will initially offer the first ever metropolitan area mobile VoIP, with internet access and data services to follow in November of 2007. In 2008 the service offering will expand to IP Television". The only Phoenix Foundations I can find are a New Zealand rock band, a Canadian charity foundation, and this rather weird one. Now it's possible that this is some shadowy hedge fund that stays well out of the limelight, but again, this is all raises lots of questions.

Bottom line: I'm still extremely skeptical.

Some reality entering the pointless muni-WiFi market

Nice to see that Earthlink is scaling back some of its municipal WiFi aspirations. I'm still a fervent believer that citywide WiFi is a completely useless concept, almost verging on a scam perpetrated by bored local council IT drones, who just want to do more exciting projects than another call centre or local tax accounting system. Unreliability of penetration of outdoor WiFi into buildings mean it's only useful for traffic wardens, CCTV cameras and about the 17 people globally who really need to use laptops in the street but not indoors.

Ironically I'm possibly one of the very few people who could ever see positive ROI on metro WiFi, as I live in central London, which has the world's fiercest traffic wardens, and could therefore probably generate an extra £2 in parking fine profit for every £1 wasted on local WiFi.

Handsets, Naked SIP, openness, VoIP, N95s and operator intervention

I've been trying to get to the bottom of the whole N95 / Vodafone / Orange / VoIP issue. There's an awful lot of vitriol, supposition about dark conspiracies and plain misunderstanding that have come out over the past 2 weeks, as well as some interesting forensic analysis.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am broadly supportive of 3rd-party applications running on smartphones that enable innovative communications experiences. I coined the term "Naked SIP" to refer to phones with an open OS or Java plus a developer-accessible SIP stack, and I've also been a fan of both consumer and enterprise VoIP innovators. I regard it as folly for mobile operators to attempt to "block" things in phones or network, rather than compete head-on (with the exception of things like P2P that could break the network).

On the other hand, I also believe that operators can (and should) take sensible commercial precautions which make it difficult for others to eat their lunch, as long as it doesn't impact materially on the customer's reasonable expectations. So if they want to compete on which of them has the most "open" terms & conditions, or want to explicitly prohibit things like VoIP if you take their bribe of a free phone, that's fine. Things get a little bit more grey where they insist that use of Skype or Truphone or other third party services need you to sign up to the "over 18s adults only" content policy on the rather spurious grounds of child protection because of the messaging component. And adopting a stance of "well, you didn't ask the salesman if XYZ feature works on our version" is also not really reasonable when there's 100+ features, and when the typical mobile salesman doesn't know how to do his own shoelaces, let alone comment knowledgeably on VoIP.

So, inevitably, problems occur where these reasonable expectations conflict. Most phone users in the UK "expect" to have phones subsidised. High-end phone users "expect" to have access to a wide range of 3rd-party applications. Operators "expect" to have more control over the look-and-feel of their subsidised devices. Developers "expect" that phones will work fairly consistently across operator & vanilla variants with regards to APIs and certain embedded features. Hence the N95 debacle over recent weeks.

So, after a bit more research, some further thoughts on the N95 thing:

• To be fair to the operators, Nokia hasn't actually made a big deal over the native VoIP capabilities of the N95 (unlike some of its other devices), focusing more on the 5MP camera & GPS. VoIP isn't mentioned in the original launch press release , the UK full tech specs of the N95, or even the developers' main page about the phone. It does however feature on this developers' page listing VoIP-capable phones.
• However, to even a casual observer, the N95 has "geektastic" written all over it, so it's clearly going to be bought by people who like to download the coolest app they've read about on their favourite blogs. And who are the leading VoIP adopters & enthusiasts. And who like to complain vociferously about the operators' hegemony. You don't have to have been to many telecom events to see that E- and N-series WiFi-enabled devices are the VoIPistas favourites. So taking out or hobbling one of these customers' probable favourite features is asking for trouble, even if the subsidy notionally gives you reasonable moral grounds for doing it.
• My understanding is that Nokia & other handset vendors offer operators a "menu" of which applications/functions can be included at the factory in their specific variants of phones. The operators also have a bunch of their own applications they want added in, plus a range of modifications according to their inhouse UI template. Some (eg Orange Signature, Vodafone Live) are much more detailed than other specs, and go into a lot of detail about menu structures, what happens with phonebook & connectivity between apps. Now in some cases, there isn't enough memory to fit everything possible in, or enough display space to display all the icons without scrolling down for 27 screens-full. So some things get removed or at least hidden.
• Speaking to WDS Global the other day (which does outsourced technical customer support for the mobile industry), they commented that the biggest sources of helpline costs for operators are handset features that create configuration nightmares. Email is top of the list, along with setting up the phone as a modem, Bluetooth pairing and so on. VoIP/SIP/WiFi is probably going to appear on that list over the next year or so, I'd guess, so you can forgive operators who want to minimise their exposure to this. That said, the "techiest" users will probably fix things themselves anyway, and over time certain groups of consumers will mandate these features so removing them may be a false economy.
• There will be some interesting user experience issues that occur when phones have 2+ VoIP clients running simultaneously, especially if one is the operator's own or a close partner's. A lot of operators are looking at this, perhaps developing own-brand services (especially if they also have a fixed-line VoIP strategy) or are considering partnering with the likes of Skype, Truphone, Cisco, Fring or assorted others. In theory multiple VoIP services can work fine in parallel, but I'm sure that won't be universally true, in which case an operator might want to optimise for its own.
• Different VoIP applications use different bits of the underlying OS of the phone. Some use Nokia's own VoIP app as an engine (eg Truphone, Cisco) while others just use the SIP stack (Fring, I think) and others do virtually everything themselves (Yeigo, Skype). Some are intended as "primary line replacement" and so everything is done to integrate well with phonebook, call register etc, while others are more about embedding VoIP into an app like IM or gaming or conferencing. I have to say I was originally pretty surprised by Nokia doing their own VoIP - I thought they'd leave it up to 3rd parties, but clearly this is part of their "N-series is the future of the Internet" pitch.

So taking everything together, I don't think this is specifically some dark anti-Truphone strategic conspiracy, although it's clearly one of the key VoIP players that's ruffling a few feathers at the moment.

I think this is what happened here - "VoIP? Nah, we can't get any money from that, so ditch it or hide it, so we can fit the ringtones store icon on the menu" or maybe "no. that menu entry doesn't conform to specification section 2.3.2.44 subsection q and we don't have a testing plan detailed in volume 17 of the user experience manual". There's also possibly a near-term angle of "the out-of-the-box VoIP experience is going to be our own"

My advice to operators:

• Be sensible about what usage cases will be expected of particular new devices. If it's obviously going to be a techies' favourite, think about how they'll probably want to use it and work with them, not against them. It's not worth the grief.
• Feel free to be more draconian about your own "exclusive" versions of devices than you are with mildly-tuned generic ones. You don't really want to be competing with your rivals, or Carphone Warehouse or Expansys or Nokia's online store about "whose N95 is the best" . But if it's in a different plastic shell, and called an N96 or V95 or whatever, then there's no spec sheet up on Forum Nokia and developers have to call & ask you what apps and APIs there are available.
• Think about the knock-on effects elsewhere. You want people to buy your HSPA-embedded laptops at some point, right? Am I going to trust you not to have monkeyed around with it, if I perceive you as having "crippled" a high end "multimedia computer"[Nokia's phrase] in the past?
• Train your (and partners') sales & customer service staff. Put full spec sheets up on the web. Highlight any changes that impact on your customers' reasonable expectations. Ask your customers want they expect from different types of devices, and how they expect to use them. Bear in mind that those expectations are partly set by the manufacturer's initial press release, reviews & tech specs etc.
• Think about how multiple VoIP clients (or IM, or whatever) can coexist peacefully on devices. It's going to happen, so don't pull the blanket over your head & pretend the problem will go away. It won't.
• Have respect for popular 3rd-party developers, even if they compete with you. Especially if they're clever at using the blogosphere, Web 2.0 things like YouTube & PR in general. Bear in mind that you may want to partner them in future.
• Consider selling two versions of some devices, subsidised & unsubsidised.

More motion-sensing phones...

This time courtesy of DoCoMo. As I've written before a couple of times now, motion sensors are the next standardised thing to be embedded in phones, not GPS, DVB-H or WiFi.....

... and some of them are supporting "2-in-1" multiplicity capability as well. 2 numbers & "virtual phones" in one physical handset.

HSPA and "accidental VoIP"

I'm currently wading through a book called "IMS Multimedia Telephony over Cellular Systems" (published here) for a project I'm working on at the moment. I'll cover more details on the overall topic in coming weeks, but there's a couple of things that have struck me.

The book is written by four people from the Swedish & Finnish arms of Ericsson Research, who are deeply involved with the 3GPP's new Multimedia Telephony standard, which is intended to underpin the long-term shift from circuit-switched voice to VoIP within IMS.

Lets leave aside for the minute the continued lack of a business case for IMS for cellular-only networks (another major European operator told me last week that aside from 'adjunct' fixed-VoIP, they couldn't see any major revenue opportunity or compelling new services).

Instead, lets think about different radio networks and their support for VoIP.

• WLAN. Standardised 802.11b WLAN networks have been supporting VoIP since 2001, albeit with proprietary voice & QoS mechanisms. The 802.11e QoS standard suitable for prioritising traffic like VoIP was finalised in 2005, and had been discussed since 2001 as well.
• CDMA: The specifications for EV-DO Revision A were approved in April 2004, with the earlier intention to create a separate voice/video technology EV-DV essentially having been sidelined. Subsequently, there has been a fairly concerted effort to support VoIP in Rev A, with Qualcomm & various other vendors and their top operators ensuring an end-to-end voice proposition is viable more-or-less from the start of Rev A deployment.
• 3GPP: Clearly, the future all-IP LTE (long term evolution) technology will need to support VoIP. However, the radio networks won't start to be deployed until (optimistically) 2010, with further dependencies on the upcoming SAE architecture and of course IMS. In the meantime, we have HSPA networks being deployed now (HSDPA plus HSUPA is just starting), with probably the enhanced HSPA+ coming down the line as well. HSDPA is part of 3GPP Release 5, and full HSPA (ie including HSUPA as well) is part of Release 6. Rel 5 was finalised in 2002, and Rel 6 in early 2005.

So it's not as though HSPA has been developed in a vacuum, without awareness and even early deployment of some forms of wireless VoIP. Which makes this line in the book's preface even more startling:

"it never occurred to me that there would be any interest in providing a high capacity voice channel over the HSPA channels we had created.... The outcome was surprising, when designing HSPA we had accidentally designed an air interface that was capable of supporting voice applications with higher efficiency than existing circuit-switched bearers"

Now lets ponder... what usually happens when a technology "accidentally" supports an unanticipated application? More on my thoughts on this over coming weeks.....

[If this topic is of urgent commercial interest to you, please contact me via wvoip@disruptive-analysis.com]

VoIP and the Nokia N95

I've been quite surprised to see the huge marketing campaign behind Nokia's latest top-end handset, the N95, which has "all the toys" - HSDPA, WiFi, GPS, 5-megapixel camera and so on. And like a number of recent E- and N-series phones, it comes with native VoIP capability. It's also pretty expensive, so I the fact that it's being pushed through many major retail channels (in the UK via Carphone Warehouse and Vodafone, including posters in the windows, advertising spots usually reserved for the biggest-selling & most profitable massmarket offers).

And then I saw a link on ForumOxford mentioning this - it appears that some operator-specific variants (Orange & Voda have been named and shamed) have the native VoIP capability crippled, and also apparently don't work with downloaded 3rd-party VoIP apps like Truphone's.

This is very interesting as I had a conversation last week with a senior devices honcho at one of Europe's main operators. He actually made some slightly opaque references to removing some of the native VoIP capabilities from smartphones, but he described it more about stopping Nokia (or whoever) from putting Skype or similar services preloaded onto the phone when it ships. Basically he said he didn't want users to be able to make out-of-the-box VoIP calls with a competing provider on a phone he'd subsidised, and that all VoIP calls from the phone would initially be routed via the operator's own VoIP servers. When I asked him whether he was talking about disabling the underlying VoIP capability down in the operating system, he said that no, that wouldn't happen. Advanced users would still be able to download Truphone or Fring or whatever - these "clever" users, he recognised, would always be able to use VoIP if they chose, and alienating them was stupid, as they'd just churn - not ideal, as these are exactly the sort of high-end users who use data and other interesting new services if they're pitched right.

What's not clear is whether the Orange & Voda folk have been so ham-fisted that they've blocked all "naked SIP" capabilities or just the VoIP. Personally, I think they're being particularly stupid to cripple a phone and not be completely up-front about it. Face it, the customer base for N95's is likely to be pretty tech-savvy - if you lie to them about the device's capabilities, or don't ensure that your sales staff & customer service reps know exactly what the modified functions & policies are, then you're going to irk an awful lot of customers.

I also remember asking the 3 folk at the time of X-series launching whether they'd block "real" VoIP running alongside the circuit-switched Skype/iSkoot service. No, they replied, if you wanted to download the packet version of Skype (assuming a Symbian one ever launches...) they wouldn't stop you or interfere with it.

Separately, I got an email yesterday from a senior exec at a major mobile software firm. He'd just bought an N95 (a "vanilla" version) and had been using it on a business trip to make VoIP calls from his company's US office, and his hotel. "So far I’ve spent 137 minutes on SIP calls using the N95. Setup was trivial, dialling is as simple as pressing “internet call” on a contact. Call quality is indistinguishable from GSM roaming call..... I've saved $292 so far, so that's payback in 9 days [for the phone purchase price]"

I foresee high-end users switching over to vanilla phones (especially businesses), or churning to operators like 3 which publicly state they don't screw around with the software too much. While this may have the long hoped-for effect of weaning many of us off of our addiction to subsidy, it will have the corollary effect of making us want proper ex-factory vanilla phones which work "to spec". I can't see anyone wanting an unsubsidised operator-custom handset that clearly has a risk that the software has been crudely hacked for "revenue protection" reasons.

In theory I have no problem with subsidised devices being limited to certain types of usage. I also have no problem with T's and C's being restrictive if all parties enter into the contract with open eyes. But I think that there needs to be increasing transparency about all types of "policy" with both mobile & fixed services. If you get a subsidised phone, you should be made to sign a form which says "I understand & agree that the operator can delete X Y & Z capabilities from the device's published specifications". If you sign up to an ISP, they should have similar transparency concerning any bandwidth management / port-blocking / throttling. I met someone recently planning to take this type of suggestion to Ofcom & other regulators: more power to you.

UPDATE

Truphone has posted a clip on YouTube showing an Orange-ised N95 with its VoIP capability amputated and unable to work with aftermarket applications which use the native dialler & menu integration.

Wireless VoIP provider Barablu bidding for GSM spectrum

Apparently, Barablu, a WiFi-oriented mobile VoIP provider, has been named by Ofcom as one of only two eligible bidders for a slice of GSM spectrum in Northern Ireland.

Now, I haven't delved into the details of that spectrum award, but I wonder if this is a similar pitch to Truphone's in the UK - get recognised as a "mobile operator", get a cellular number range.... but don't build a cellular network. Instead, just use WiFi wherever possible, and benefit from the inbound interconnect fees levied on other operators for terminating calls on those mobile numbers.

Obviously this would only work if there was some pretty lax definitions of both the coverage requirements of the licence, and the interconnect regime for calls to mobile numbers terminating via non-cellular mechanisms.

On the other hand, maybe they do want to deploy a proper cellular network, or a femto/picocell-based one.

If you're going to guess a user's context, get it right....

I'm sitting in a central London branch of Starbucks, connected via WiFi - my provider is BT OpenZone, roaming via T-Mobile.

Weirdly, I've had both Google.com and Blogger appear in German-language variants, and I've had to reset the language to English manually on both sites. I guess T-Mo must funnel all its traffic through a centralised egress point in Germany with a particular IP address, or else Google's making some weird assumptions that T-Mo = German company = German langage. . Thankfully it doesn't go via China or Hungary, where I probably wouldn't have even recognised the link for alternate languages....

This is one example of why any form of so-called intelligent, context-aware function, on a PC or a mobile phone, needs to be 100% accurate, tested continually & rigorously - or not exist at all. Services which guess your context wrongly (status, location, device, whatever...) are worse than useless - they make the providers look like idiots, as well as wasting your time.

DoCoMo Intel dual-OS handsets for enterprise use

This was announced a few months ago, but I've only just had a chance to read through the details. NTT DoCoMo and Intel are working on an architecture for dual-OS handsets for corporate users.

The full spec gives more details, suggesting that it could allow phones which use Symbian or Linux as the "Operator OS", with a separate and switchable domain for an "Enterprise OS" for Windows Mobile, using virtualisation technology in the hardware.

This could enable DoCoMo to provide corporates with phones that do a full range of enterprise apps including VoWLAN, for example with a WiFi access available solely to the enterprise OS and with the specific demand that the underlying platform "not impose any restrictions on its use".

It seems to me that DoCoMo has come up with a clever way of ensuring that:

• Enterprises can do what they want with their handsets
• DoCoMo retains control of the overall handset value chain & architecture
• Consumers may not be able to buy fully-open phones even if businesses can

Now obviously there are going to be issues with the "switching" process, especially if the operator part of the phone can pre-empt the enterprise OS while it's in the middle of something important like a phone call. But I suspect that for many users, a hybrid "two personality" device should go a long way to creating an acceptable blend of IT/Internet openness and operator-optimisation on the same platform.

SonyEricsson Z750: first-to-market featurephone with Naked SIP?

[edited - thanks to a keen-eyed contributor for pointing out that I'd initially referred to the old K750 rather than the shiny new Z750]

When I published my report on SIP- and IMS-capable handsets last year, one of my underlying assumptions in the forecasts was that "Naked SIP" capabilities would start to extend beyond smartphones into the high-end featurephone arena during 2007. I anticipated that the pivotal enabler would be an extension to mobile Java called JSR-180, which gives developers access to a SIP API from within Java applets.

So it's nice to see that Sony Ericsson's newly-announced Z750 and indeed its new variant of its Java platform, supports MSA JSR-248, an "umbrella" Java extension intended to be a new standard, which includes JSR-180 as one of its mandatory components when implemented in its "full" rather than "subset" version. This line in the press release is quite telling when it comes to SIP-enabled applications "Java Platform 8 (JP-8), supporting a range of new Java programming features including instant messaging / chat and presence based functionality"

Two other things stand out:

• The inclusion of JSR-256 to give access to accelerometers for motion-sensing applications. As I mentioned a while back, I think this going to be a key inclusion in a lot of new handsets, enabling "multi-context" operation, which will be far more important than multimedia. To be honest, I hadn't even realised a Java API for sensors was on the cards, but this just adds to my conviction that sensors are the next "big thing" in terms of massmarket handset features.
• The apparent exclusion of JSR-281, the IMS Java API, although I guess that may be implemented on a case-by-case basis on specific phones.

Fixed broadband is defining global user expectations for access

Good post at GigaOM about the current state-of-play in broadband. 281m global subs - so I'd guess probably around 500-600m broadband users if it averages around 2 per house. Add in some more who use broadband at work, school or in public Internet locations and I guess we must get to around 800m regular high-speed Internet users. That also seems to fit pretty well with other numbers like 150m-odd Skype users.

Now, obviously that's still much less than the 2.5bn-odd mobile users (ie equating to around 3bn subs) - around 30% of the figure. But I'd guess in terms of many metrics like purchasing power, propensity to "generate content", sophistication of expertise and so on, that the numbers are much closer to parity. 800m isn't just "early adopters", either - it's early majority. And I strongly suspect it's also higher than the total sum of people who use anything more than voice & SMS on their mobiles.

In other words, pretty much everyone on the planet who's worth advertising at heavily, or who has sufficient disposable income for mobile "content", or is open-minded enough to experiment with new Web 2.0 community-type stuff, is already using PC-based broadband. Which sets expectations in terms of speed, latency and of course, price. As well as disaggregation of access and application. It also means that 800m people aren't that bothered about QoS for many activities.

Now, that doesn't mean that all new mobile services are doomed to failure. It's just that providers need to bear in mind that fixed broadband sets a pretty high bar in terms of useability, value and openness. And that for many services, it is folly to ignore users' related PC-based activities - integration or at least dual-platform strategies will become mandatory. Continuing to assume that the mobile world is an island is not an option for 90% of future services. It's against this backdrop that Vodafone & 3's more Internet-friendly partnerships make an awful lot of sense. And it also impinges on the opportunity for walled/"controlled" gardens like IMS.

One last thing - I guess we must be getting very close to 100m WiFi households, then. In other words, the same philosophy will also apply to future femto/in-home cellular deployments - almost every home installing a femto will already have WiFi, and business models & device/service strategies that ignore this will have problems.

[Side note: something I absolutely hate is "spurious accuracy". Given that most operators report figures rounded up/down to the nearest 10k/100k, citing 281,592,583 subs is mathematically unjustifiable. Even 3-sig-fig accuracy of 281m is questionable, given the definitional inconsistency of the data sources]

Evolving enterprise comms & Microsoft: it's not just about mobility and FMC

Great post by Alec Saunders about the role of Microsoft in enterprise VoIP, which has spawned further commentary by Andy Abramson and others.

I'll add in a couple of my own thoughts about this:

a) Microsoft seems completely and utterly disinterested in IMS. Yes, I'm sure there someone selling to carriers who is pitching LCS as a SIP app server, but in terms of an end-to-end story, this is all about turning voice and messaging into "another feature" in the general corporate IT domain. Certainly whenever I've asked about IMS-capable phones, I've got blank looks, or "Oh, you mean SIP? Windows Mobile's got that already"

b) Alec's post should be required reading for "mobile PBX" and centrex enthusiasts. About twice a week I have to counter the argument that all enterprises will just ditch their PBX-based phones (plastic or WiFi) and switches, and just start using mobiles with telephony as a "service". Normally I talk about higher-end IP-PBXs becoming part of corporations' IT infrastructure, and the fact that many companies like to retain control of their own voice systems for a variety of reasons. Migration stories are also important here - even if companies do want to be "all mobile", cellular operators aren't going to assist a huge 2-year migration towards that goal as they usually lack the integration and consulting expertise. I've also recently started talking about Asterisk and other server-based platforms dragging corporate voice even further away from network-based mobility solutions, but I hadn't really recognised the depth of movement towards embedding PBX capability in low-end boxes.

The argument that "SMEs will just buy a femtocell / WiFi router and use a hosted mobile PBX solution from the carrier, linked to mobile phones for the employees" starts to carry much less weight when you consider that the femtocell / WiFi router might just have a PBX built into it for peanuts.

Geo-locking femtocells

Interesting to see that this femto from Samsung has a GPS device in it, which is used to "geo lock" it to an operator's licenced territory.

I presume this is particularly relevant for countries like the US where there are regional operators. For markets elsewhere with nationwide licences, I guess that the IP address of the broadband connection should be sufficient to ensure customers don't put the device in a suitcase and try & plug it in somewhere the provider isn't permitted to operate.

Interesting to see the real-world practicalities starting to come out, though. I suspect there's going to be a range of issues around security/authentication for femtocells that are only now being recognised.

Making handsets bearer-aware or location-aware for FMC

One of the biggest fallacies about IMS (and UMA and some other FMC approaches) is that applications should be "bearer agnostic" - ie work the same irrespective of whether a device is connected over cellular, WiFi, fixed broadband and so on, and irrespective of location. It's all just "a connection"; it shouldn't matter to the user, so the story goes. For pico/femtocells there's a related fallacy, "you can use a completely cellular normal handset".

This is of course total nonsense, on several grounds:

1) Some bearers only offer connectivity through an operator's network (eg cellular), while others also offer connectivity direct to the Internet or local resources owned by the end-user (eg WiFi, fixed broadband, LAN). Clearly it makes sense for some applications to be aware that, if the device is connected via WiFi for example, it may have access to IT or consumer-electronics capabilities outside the operator's control (eg a PC, printer, server, IP-PBX, TV, game console, hifi etc)

2) Different bearers have different characteristics - bandwidth, latency, quality, security, ownership, power consumption and obviously price. Applications (and sometimes the end user) should monitor bearers and make appropriate decisions. When Microsoft announces Service Pack 1 for Vista in a year's time, you'd rather have the download manager app know what network you're connected to. If it detects that you're roaming on GPRS at $10 per MB, it should wait until you're on a more sensible bearer before proceeding. Similarly, if the battery on a phone is really low, the telephony client might decide to "prefer" GSM to WiFi even if it's more expensive.

3) An operator or 3rd party may well decide to optimise for certain bearers, rather than rely on a lowest common denominator. If you're at home on an HSDPA femtocell, or WiFi, then you'll probably get more data throughput. This may mean reengineering the browser with a bigger cache or memory buffer to take advantage of it. It could mean the handset decides to use a higher-quality codec for better sound. It might switch on (or off) functions like advertising, or different sorts of messaging, or 101 other location-specific applications. The user interface might change automatically, or it could display location-dependent tariffs.

4) There may be more efficient routing through the network for a given application in certain locations/on a specific bearer. Take BT as an example. When a Fusion phone is at home on the WiFi connection, the browser would ideally send all web traffic straight out over the broadband connection direct to the Internet... and not first via Vodafone's cellular core network used as part of BT's MVNO relationship, as UMA would normally enforce. Even for an integrated operator like FT/Orange, there's no point unnecessarily taking up capacity in the MSCs and GGSNs for IP traffic that's then going straight to the Internet. (Potentially this function could be done in the home gateway rather than the phone itself).

A lot of people don't understand all this, particularly if they work at a mobile operator and still fervently believe that anything you do on a handset is "a service", rather than understanding that sometimes you want to do non-service activities as well.

Some handset software companies do get this. Most obviously, the enterprise-centric dual-mode clients from Avaya, Cisco, Divitas, Siemens etc have "multiple personalities", making the phone behave differently when it's in WiFi mode.

But I've also had discussions with Symbian (which has a thing called a Bearer Abstraction Layer, or something like that) which passes bearer information to the apps, so developers can embed the sort of intelligence I discuss above. Nokia's inclusion of UPnP technology in some of its WiFi handsets reflects the fact that it also"gets it" about making phones good citizens of the consumer-electronics ecosystem, as well as being operator-centric.

And this morning I had a discussion with a company called Abaxia, which is also completely on-message about the above. It has some dynamic UI technology that alters the handset idle screen and applications, depending on the network context. Interestingly, it's working on both bearer-aware (eg cellular vs WiFi) or location-aware (eg whether you're in a homezone) variants. On the homezone side, it's working with Orga on a SIM-based solution that works out if the user is in a given cell (or triangulates from a set of base stations), and enables the UI to adapt accordingly.

The Orga solution sounds a bit similar to the one from Seeker Wireless, albeit without the network-side location server element containing a map of base station locations. They both have the handset/SIM locate the network, rather than vice versa. I'll do another post about non-WiFi/non-femtocell FMC solutions at some point - they generally offer location-based tariffing discrimination but don't add any dedicated indoor wireless coverage or capacity.

I foresee a lot more work in this area, as operators & device vendors realise that optimising the user experience, for different bearers or locations, is an essential aspect of FMC. Different bearers are inherently different - don't treat this as inconvenient, treat it as an opportunity and exploit it.

If you're going to win in broadband, you need a corporate sense of humour

http://www.google.com/tisp/

The FAQ & How it Works sections are just brilliant.... "on-site technical support in the event of backup problems, brownouts and data wipes"


Somehow, I just can't see BT, Vodafone, AT&T, Qualcomm or Cisco competing successfully in the "Telecom Toilet Humour" stakes, even on April 1.....


EDIT

... or Microsoft, Yahoo or RIM in the "Email Humour" stakes either....
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html

Nokia N800.... yeah OK it's cool, but please don't overdo the hype

What is it with Nokia at the moment? I've been at 3 conference sessions during March where a representative has turned up brandishing their N800 Linux-powered WiFi tablet, and then given a presentation focused almost entirely on it and Nokia's peculiar notion that it somehow completely redefines computers to be "Internet optimised".

Typically the events were about telecoms or VoIP. Yes, sure there are some VoIP clients that run on it, but it's hardly the number one usage case for the N800. I cannot believe that internally, Nokia believes this class of device will ever carry more than 1% of the world's VoIP traffic, let alone overall voice.

Yet in at least one of the presentations, both PCs and mobile phones (and also handheld gaming consoles) were dismissed as essentially legacy devices. That "everything will be Internet-based", and that "bundling network services and a SIM" was an old business model.

Now even I, a fairly ardent supporter of most open-IP principles & a detractor of walled gardens and SIM-authenticated WiFi, do not take things that far. Sure, there will be some hugely interesting and important innovations will mean that VoIP, WiFi and pure Internet-resident capabilities become viable challengers for many users' spend and time. But equally there are certain things that licenced spectrum - and licenced operators - are actually pretty good at, which will mean that tied device+service combinations are not going to disappear.

More confusingly, I don't understand why Nokia feels it necessary or appropriate to pitch the Web Tablet type device as a PC or notebook alternative. An alternative to UMPCs, OK, I can buy that. But even Nokia has to appreciate that the web isn't just following Moore's Law on processor speeds and memory - it's also being driven by LCD display pricing, which is why more PCs and Apples ship with 20" screens, and many laptops are similarly-endowed: it ain't for spreadsheets, it's for better Internet and multimedia display.

I'd understand it all a bit better if the N800 had a slide-out keyboard, or even a decent camera, but in its current incarnation it's not even optimised for "user generated content".

To be honest, I find Nokia's positioning of its broader N-Series smartphone devices as "multimedia computers" a little contrived too. "The device formerly know as the cellphone"...oh, please.

I suspect that all this may be an attempt to put clear water between the N-Series and the more operator-centric approach taken by the Mobile Phones division. But to be honest, there's really not that much difference between an N73 and most of the Series-60 phones developed in the other units. Sure, most of the N9x devices are probably sold through non-operator channels, but I think it's too early for most buyers to think of them as anything other than cool phones.

RIM risks marginalising itself in enterprise-controlled comms

Interesting to see that RIM has announced a new set of APIs for its Java developer environment. While there's a bunch of stuff in there which is obviously useful like the multimedia side, there's something conspicuously absent - support for SIP, via the JSR-180 Java API.

Assuming it's not lurking somewhere else in the depths of the release's specifications, this seems to put RIM at a serious disadvantage for developers looking to innovate communications applications within the IP domain, such as hooking up to enterprises' IP-PBXs or assorted Internet-based and enterprise applications.

I don't think I'll be alone in suggesting that SIP's omission will have been heavily influenced by the more paranoid and backward-looking of RIM's operator partners.

It's interesting to contrast this with the hugely pro-SIP attitude of Nokia's E-series and N-series groups, as well as Windows Mobile manufacturers. As far as I can see, this should limit RIMs attractiveness to the growing swarm of enterprise FMC systems providers, and their operator partners.

Looks like a missed chance to me.

Zynetix acquired by Sonus Networks

I see that Zynetix has been acquired by VoIP and softswitch specialist Sonus Networks. I've known Zynetix for several years - the company has some interesting bits of GSM infrastructure used to connect picocells via IP into miniaturised cellular network elements, especially small MSCs. It's used these in a variety of niche contexts such as on-ship cellular deployments, network fill-in for remote areas and various military applications, as well as having a pitch for connecting up PBXs to cellular in the enterprise.

Sonus should provide the company with a framework to scale up more fully than it could have done on its own, especially given the continued noise around femtos, many of which are designed with VoIP "coming out the back" and look essentially like VoIP phones to the rest of the network. However, while femtos are currently the "sexiest" part of the wireless access arena, it's their bigger brothers picos that have more current real-world sales (and shipments). Typically servicing 10-30 users and costing $1000+ (vs. maybe 4 users / $200 for femtos), there's definitely some interesting use cases that Sonus' scale, channels and VoIP focus should help address.

Congratulations to Ian, Andy & co. in Twickenham.

Ofcom new UK mobile interconnect rates & FMC

I see that Ofcom has unveiled its new interconnect costs for UK mobile operators, lasting from this April for 4 years. Interestingly the first line of the press release uses the specific phrase "for connecting calls on their mobile networks".

I haven't had a chance to wade through all the legislative bumph behind the PR page yet. If any lawyers would like to to have a look & see what the new rules might mean for MNOs "connecting calls on their fixed, WiFi or VoIP networks or to voicemail servers, but using their mobile numbers", I'd be fascinated.....

VoIP is about more than telephony... but not multimedia

Last week's VON stimulated thoughts about the nature of VoIP, and especially wireless VoIP. I think that the voice market will become increasingly fragmented, going beyond today’s normal expectation of conversational “telephony”. Voice calls/sessions will be embedded within many other applications, many of which may not need to use the same telephony-centric features like phonebooks, voicemail or call registers. It seems likely that, far from having a single “operator” that mediates all voice traffic going to or from a user, that most individuals will avail themselves of multiple providers or applications.

To some extent this already happens – not just because many people have two mobile phones, or a mobile and a fixed line or corporate PBX extension, but because they obtain “voice connectivity” in other fashions.

Networked voice has already been embedded into myriad non-phone platforms and software: PC-based applications like IM, gaming consoles, camcorders and CCTV, alarm and security systems, medical alert systems, baby monitors, conferencing systems, podcasting and so forth. In all these cases, voice traffic does not have to involve a traditional “phone call”, involving numbers and regulation, but can exist in a completely parallel fashion to the user’s telephony experience. In many (but not all) cases, these techniques use IP connectivity.

In theory, it would perhaps be appropriate to divide the world between “Telephony over IP” and “Non-Telephony Voice over IP”. It is a matter of one’s personal viewpoint as to whether PC-to-PC based Internet calling (eg on-net, fixed Skype calls) would fall into the first or second category.

There is no reason to believe that this will be different in mobile, especially for applications like

- Gaming
- Corporate
- Entertainment / communities
- Conferencing

Of course, this fragmentation will not happen smoothly, or without definitions being blurred. This will lead to problems. Nobody would suggest that a piece of software enabling player-to-player chat “inside a game” should also be able to call emergency services in the real world. But on the other hand…. maybe it should be open to lawful interception? And how do you define something like Second Life – are the rules for a “game” the same as the rules for a “virtual world”? And how does this fit with the operators, and their capabilities, or terms of service?

As far as Disruptive Analysis is aware, nobody has yet quantified the volume of traffic involved in “non-telephony VoIP”. If one excludes PC-to-PC calling within clients like Skype, Yahoo, MSN and Google, it is probably still less than 1% of all overall voice minutes. It will probably never get beyond 10%, simply because of the sheer volume of plain-old boring voice calls used for mundane applications, by billions of users around the world. Interestingly, though, the proportion in 3G (and over DSL lines) may well be higher, reflecting the richer and more application-centric devices at the end-points (PCs, handhelds, smartphones, high-end featurephones and so on). But the overall value and profitability of those voice-embedded apps is likely to be disproportionately high, and not subject to the usual fierce competition & commoditisation of telephony.

One thing is certain – many such application-embedded voice calls will exist, at one end at least, outside of operators’ control. A Second Life avatar-to-avatar conversation may be between a PC user on a cable modem, a mobile phone via 3G, maybe even bridged into the real telephony network. Now in theory, an operator would love to have a Second Life-equivalent virtual world running as an IMS application, and in some cases this will probably happen. But in others, it seems inevitable that the application will run on a standalone basis, especially in the business world or in instances where software development has initially been more PC-centric.

The interesting thing is that the IMS community appears to have got the whole concept inside-out. It is pursuing the notion of "multimedia telephony", which seems largely predicated on the notion of adding in elements like video or messaging to a voice conversation. In my view, this is 1980s-style thinking reminiscent of ISDN. It's much more important to either add context to voice calls, or as discussed here, add voice in to other applications.

BT - building a patchwork of MVNO deals?

Interesting to see that BT has persuaded Vodafone Spain to allow it to become an MVNO. The Spanish regulator CMT has been forcing the market to accept MVNOs over the last year or so, and there is a long queue of operators wanting to launch services, including Carphone Warehouse and KPN. BT's service however, is aimed firmly at "businesses and the public sector" - a very wise move in my view, as there are remarkably few operators that are able to grasp both mobility and the practical realities of corporate networked IT. I've talked before about the opportunity for enterprise MVNOs, and I'm surprised there hasn't been more movement in this field to date.

The fact that BT is working with Voda again is highly significant. The UK MVNO deal raised eyebrows at the time - including quite a few inside Vodafone itself. I remember being at the original launch of Fusion, and there seemed to be an underlying attitude among the lines of "it'll never work, so what have we got to lose?". I think it's actually quite a wise move - there's clearly a demand for some hardcore PBX-centric bits of FMC, and other top-end international IT outsourcing-style comms services, that Vodafone isn't really positioned to service but BT is. Wholesaling - especially if it's done in multiple markets with similar technical architecture - offers Voda a hedge against limits to mobile substitution in the enterprise.

Thoughts from VON - dualmode devices

I've been at VON in San Jose this week. This morning I moderated a panel session on dualmode WiFi/cellular handsets, and putting together the intro slides made me crystallise my thoughts on them a bit more clearly, as I seem to have contradictory optimistic/pessimistic thoughts about them.

In a nutshell, dualmode phones are:

a) Qualitatively more important than many people think
b) Quantitatively less important than many people think

Point (a) refers to the catalytic nature of WiFi-capable phones - stimulating new business models & service providers in the mobile space, teaching end-users about using phones to connect to non-service applications and devices (PBXs, PCs etc), driving diversity & maturity into the non-carrier channel for phones, and so forth. The inclusion of WiFi also points out the absurdity of paying a premium for "mobility" when you're not actually moving about.

One of the panellists this morning said that the average number of cell base stations used in the course of a call is just 1.06. In other words, less than 6% of calls make use of the hugely complex & expensive cell-to-cell handoff capability in the network; the remainder is in a single cell, and often in range of a single WiFi AP.

Point (b) is the counter to this. I keep seeing forecasts from my analyst peers about hundreds of millions of dualmode phones shipping in the near future. I think this is wrong - I honestly can't see the "attach rate" of WiFi going beyond 10%, maybe 15%, of phones. It's so much more than just adding a $5 chip - it's the software, the integration, the application & UI optimisation work.

And when you think in a bit more detail about the handset market, the addressable segment of phones for which WiFI makes sense is actually quite small. So, for example, about 60-70% of phones worldwide are sold to prepay customers, often sold independently of any service provider customisation. In my view, I see almost no justification of including WiFi in these devices - certainly, I'd bet almost no dualmode devices have shipped into the prepay market to date.

Then there's CDMA - about 20%-ish of handset shipments. There has been much less interest in CDMA/WiFi dualmode to date - no equivalent of UMA, and not much interest in VCC or proprietary SIP-based dualmode. Sure, this might change, but not immediately.

Then there's the simple issue that outside N America, Europe & a couple of Asian countries, there's simply not that much residential broadband, let alone WiFi-enabled APs or gateways.

And, lastly, there's so much other cool stuff you could put in phones - GPS, VGA screens, TV, motion sensors - that WiFi is competing against lots of other hardware & software for space on handset designers' priority lists.

Getting spammers to pay up... the first stage in consumers tackling the marketing industry

Good to see this Scotsman getting an unsolicited email advertiser to pay up, albeit in an out of court settlement.

I still reckon there will be a longterm trend whereby advertisers will - in some circumstances - need to pay consumers to watch/see their marketing.

"You want to know if I've got a pension or not, and then advertise a new/alternative one to me? Pay me £50 first and I'll let you. I might even give you a refund if I decide you're not wasting my time"

Put simply, marketing and advertising budgets are too large to simply be spent on ad agencies and media channels. Part of that budget should go directly to the consumers expected to be subjected to the advertising, who are expected to spend their time viewing/thinking/filtering through it.

Now obviously there will be exceptions - if I want to listen to free-to-air FM radio, for example, I recognise that it's advertising-funded, and in the first phase at least, I should have to accept I need to listen to ads if I want to hear the music. Same deal with Google searches - the big G provides me a useful service for free, so I'm prepared to put up with relatively unobtrusive ads.

But email spam, direct post junkmail, telephone cold-calls, mobile idle-screen on an unsubsidised phone - or even street-side advertising hoardings? No. You're taking my time, stealing parts of my field of eyesight or hearing that could be useful occupied by other more valuable things, even if it's just for a brief time. You should pay me by the second, or by metrics like (% field of vision X time exposed)

In the ultimate phase, I should even be able to monetise Google ads and the like, if I'm a "valuable enough" user. If I've bought 3 things, provably, n the past week after seeing a advert in a Google sidebar, I've got a "reputation", and should be rewarded accordingly.

Clearly, the mechanisms for this will be fiendishly complex. But the first part is for consumers to make sure they are not "owned" by any particular service provider. In particular, they should be wary of 3rd-party "identity services" that are looking to greedily monetise the advertising potential just for themselves. Be wary of the non-financial implications of bundling or consumer loyalty schemes... there's no such thing as a free lunch, so consumers should be certain they "negotiate" the most favourable terms for their information and loyalty.

So, an open challenge to innovators - don't assume we have to always be "advertised at" for free. Develop cool ID and profiling software we can use for charging back to advertisers, personal billing systems, smartphone anti-advert filtering clients, and maybe even intelligent spectacles that spot & block out ads in your field of vision that are trying to freeload. The global marketing industry must be worth a trillion dollars or more. Claim your share.

Vodafone Euro flatrate data roaming - looks like a WiFi hotspot killer to me

Just seen the announcement over the wires that Voda is extending its Passport service to encompass a flatrate (well, for 50MB) data roaming fee of €12 a day for laptop users travelling in Europe.

Given that a typical European hotspot costs about €6 an hour, or €20-30 in business-class hotels, this would make it largely pointless for business travellers to use WiFi hotspots, except where 3G coverage is lousy (eg conference rooms in hotels' basements), or if 50MB is not enough (eg 2 hours of Skype calls plus lots of emailed powerpoint documents). I imagine most European business travellers rack up €12 in phone bills, plus at least that in taxi fares and restaurant bills, so it should be absorbed pretty easily into travel budgets.

Once again, this shows up just how badly the European WiFi industry has been managed. It has managed to squander more than a 3-year lead over the cellular data industry. It has been plagued by lousy interoperability, grudging roaming relationships, and stupid pricing. Obviously the right price for hotspot pricing has been on a par with public Internet cafes - about €1-2 per hour, in other words paying a bit more for the more complex infrastructure and security, offset by the fact you're not using a public facility's PCs but your own instead. Instead, you have rapacious tariffs from the likes of Swisscom Eurospot (once of the worst offenders) and peers. The 5* hotel in Budapest at which I gave a conference presentation today charged €20 per day for WiFi. The hotel I stayed in around the corner gave it away for free (and more reliably, perhaps because of less marble) on a room tariff of only €60.

The fact that hotspot operators have tried to replicate the cellular industry's roaming model & charge premium rates for travellers further highlights their lack of credibility. Unlike mobile, there isn't even the complex HLR/VLR-type interconnect arrangement that could be used as an excuse for high costs of roaming. As far as I know, no hotspot roaming deal involves tunnelling all your Internet traffic back via your original WiFi provider, you just get a direct local connection. (iPass might be an exception because of its fancy security/enterprise functionality, I don't know)

There are however a couple of questions outstanding about Voda's new plan - firstly, why isn't it available on handsets as well as laptops? And secondly, it cites its applicability to "mobile-enabled laptops". I hope this includes laptops with external cards/USB modems, and not just embedded 3G, as for various reasons I have significant doubts that that particular category is going to fly - as well as it having a huge existing base of existing card-based users.

Incidentally, for those intending to use the service for VoIP - typically, reckon on about 500kb-1MB per minute. Assuming Big Red doesn't try something silly like trying to block it, that is.

FMC interconnect... something will have to be done

The more I think about it, the more I reckon that the differential between fixed and mobile interconnect rates is going to be a distortion, as FMC and related business models become more prevalent. Listening to a conference presentation this morning (credit
a very knowledgeable competitor of mine from Ovum) I realised that the whole thing hinges on the notion of interconnect being "cost based". Now obviously operators are going to fiddle around the edges to get the actual cost down a bit below the regulator-envisioned baseline, but it's not designed to be blown completely out of the water by VoIP.

Apparently there was a discussion a few years ago about the possibly differing cost structures on termination via 2G and 3G, although nothing much resulted.

This time around, though, I think things may be different. I'd suggest that mere numbering (07xxx and so on) should be considered an inappropriate basis for calculating fair interconnect prices. There should perhaps be an extra dimension for network/device type used for termination, or some other indicator of the real cost. Given the speed at which FMC and VoIP technologies are evolving, it would have to be a mechanism that could easily be updated. Perhaps something like:

type-1 interconnect = completed via cellular call
type-2 = via public wifi
type 3 = via private home/office wifi
type 4 = via wimax
type 5 = to a pc client over broadband
type 6 = to voicemail server & message downloaded over IP
type 7 = call forked & terminated in 2 places
.......
type N = whatever's invented in 2009

Now I'm sure that any moves towards this sort of model would (a) be very complex, and (b) would induce screams of anger from companies with business models playing games with current termination fees. But given the legal basis for such fees is supposed to be "cost based" I reckon that there needs to be something a bit more sophisticated and granular than just mobile vs. fixed. It may even need to be multi-variable to account for differences in peering as well as transport.

I wonder if any of the interconnect billing & mediation vendors have thought about this.....

EU views on Mobile TV... policy inconsistency?

Given it seems that the European Commission is moving (albeit slowly and without consensus so far) towards accepting "technology neutrality" for mobile spectrum, it seems a bit odd that Viviane Reding has stuck her oar in on the issue of mobile TV technology. It sounds like she's trying to encourage a decidely non-neutral approach with DVB-H as the favoured technology.

I wonder if she has her facts straight about the likely impact (and timelines) of mobile TV. I haven't got a copy of the source document, but if its an accurate representation, this line in the article raises some doubts "The commission estimates that mobile TV will generate EUR11.4 billion in revenue globally in 2009, with around 50 million handsets able to receive a mobile TV service."

What, €228 mobile TV revenue per enabled handset per year? Nearly €20 per month? Assuming 100% take-up rate & loyalty among all owners? Yeah, right.

A quick word, Ms Reding - there's a couple of reasons why Europe is being "slow" on mobile TV. The first is the length of the spectrum allocation process in different countries. The second is the weakening evidence of workable business models. A decision on DVB-H vs. the rest is not the number one stumbling block at the moment, or in my view even necessary.

Telco 2.0 conference and other events....

Just a quick post to highlight some cool upcoming events, especially the 2nd Telco 2.0 conference in London later this month, for which I'll be moderating the Digital Worker stream. If you haven't encountered the Telco 2.0 guys, they include fellow blogger/analysts like Martin Geddes, and use some interesting interactive widget things to enable delegates to pose questions & make comments anonymously.

I'm also at a plethora of VoIP events.... I'm also going to be at the VoIP Summit in Budapest tomorrow & Weds; VON in San Jose next week; and the Osney Wireless VoIP event in London at the end of the month. The VoIP focus is not a coincidence... watch out for some upcoming unique research findings & a new report, as a result of a project I've been working on recently.

FMC... does it break the interconnect charging model?

Had an interesting meeting with Rebtel this morning that set me thinking about interconnect fees to fixed and mobile operators. I have a suspicion that the model is broken.

At the moment, the cost of terminating a call to a mobile number (07xxx in the UK, for instance) is much higher than to a fixed geographic number (020 xxx for London). This is rooted in the idea that mobile operators' costs are much higher (spectrum, radio network etc) and that therefore they deserve a hefty premium (maybe 10x the fixed-telco price) for the privilege of transferring another operator's call to one of their end customers. So maybe terminating a call on fixed-line costs 1p per minute, but it's 8p on mobile (roughly speaking).

This is the reason that fixed-to-mobile calls are much more expensive than vice versa. Terminating SMS's is also quite expensive, for similar reasons.

(note that in the US, there is no differentiation between fixed and mobile numbers - this doesn't apply).

Up to a point, this is all fairly reasonable - after all, mobile operators' overheads are generally pretty high, if you include the cost of spectrum & infrastructure.

But the model breaks down in two ways:

- firstly, if a VoIP service provider gets a mobile number range (& therefore the interconnect revenues for inbound calls), but uses a cheaper way to terminate the calls (eg WiFi).
- secondly, if a mobile provider uses its own mobile numbers for services that don't use the expensive spectrum and infrastructure (eg also terminates on WiFi via UMA/VCC, or alternatively uses mobile numbers for fixed-VoIP offers like softphones).

In either of these instances, the whole "moral basis" for supposed mobile 07xxx numbers to have more costly interconnect than fixed geographic numbers disappears. While there's a justification for a mobile premium when using a complex mobile network, the justification evaporates if the only difference is the number of the endpoint & the call routing.

(interesting side comment here by the CEO of Rebtel - if the call terminates on a voicemail server rather than an actual cellphone, is the costly interconnect fee still justifiable?)

Unified communications... yet another naked emperor?

I'm rapidly becoming skeptical of the opportunity for enterprise "unified communications" -basically a glorified term for combining telephony, IM, email and collaboration. It seems to work on the misguided premise that somehow businesses can coerce their employees to use a single, centrally-managed communications hub.

Maybe in really proscriptive organisations it might work - government departments, or industries in which employees are so fearful of their jobs they'll put up with whatever the IT department foists on them. And for companies' departments which are wholly dependent on teamwork, some of the functionality may get used, some of the time.

But the idea that it will stop employees running their own parallel communications channels in nonsense. Generally, there's always something on the Internet, or on personal mobile devices, that is newer, more intuitive, and most importantly, which their semi-professional friends and "network" also use. The threat that "you can't install it on company laptops" is irrelevant if everyone's got a decent browser-enabled personal mobile as well. And the threat that the company won't reimburse users for non-approved forms of communication (eg personal mobiles where the user "owns" the number etc) also loses teeth in the face of flatrate phone calls and data tariffs.

And then there's the fact that most UC platforms don't integrate many employees' favoured forms of communication - SMS, Skype, even MySpace or other social networking platforms.

I'll come back to this theme another time, but for now, I'd sum up by saying that for every form of communications "unified" in a central managed platform, another two unmanaged (and more user-friendly) ones will inevitably spring up to take its place. This all fits into the general mythology around one number / one device / one identity, which, as I've commented before, is and utterly falacious philosophy.

GPS-enabled handsets....a pedestrian problem

This article has made me think. Flavour of the month at 3GSM were handsets with built-in GPS capabilities. A million and one startups are trumpeting mobile search, mobile navigation and a whole bunch of other ideas, based on the assumption that increasing numbers of phones will have mapping capabilities. Nokia, Google and others have been pushing their mapping strengths.

All this seems to be based on the success of in-car satnav. But there's a problem... all the maps & navigation software is very vehicle oriented. It's of much less use to pedestrians - either because certain routes are inaccessible (lack of crossings, railings etc), or because many rights-of-way (footbridges, paths through parks, alleyways) aren't on the system at all.

So for example, if I wanted to get from my house to a restaurant in Camden Town in London, my GPS-phone probably wouldn't suggest a nice (and much quicker) walk through Regents Park. Interestingly, though, Transport for London's journey planner does get it right.

Unsubsidised "vanilla" phones... are we waiting for the "Swatch" effect?

I reckon the time is about ripe for decent, well-designed, "cool" GSM/GPRS (maybe EDGE) handsets, with good-enough cameras (2MP or 3MP), good-enough MP3 functionality, good-enough browsers and a memory card slot to get to the sub-$100 mark on an unsubsidised basis. We're not quite there yet (at least not in the UK), and it will be the cheaper Asian brands rather the Nokias & Motorolas that get there first.

(Note: I don't follow component prices that closely, so I may have underestimated the cost a bit. Might be another year, or maybe $150 is a more reasonable price. The argument below still applies however)

$100 (or £50 here) is about the price of a midrange Swatch or similarly interesting watch, or other fashion item like a decent shirt, or a reasonable meal for two. In other words, the sort of money that 100s of millions of people will spend on a typical weekend afternoon or evening without flinching. It's the sort of price, in other words, at which subsidy becomes much less important, and a handset could become an impulse purchase.

It could be argued that people will always want an even better phone - 3G, bigger screen, good email experience, accessories, full OS, better browser, 5MP camera etc etc. But to be honest, I think that's a relatively small proportion of customers. After the addition of camera & music player, I don't see any other "must have" feature has emerged for phones in the past 2 years, except for the relatively small proportion who definitely want ultra-converged smartphone functionality. Most "civilians" I talk to (of all ages) can't/won't even do basic web & email on the phone.

I got the definite impression at 3GSM this year that handsets were starting to come to the end of their "cram in more functions" phase of evolution. If design is the last real differentiator, the market may shift very rapidly indeed, as "good enough" phones commoditise apart from aesthetics. GPS could possibly be a saviour, I suppose. TV? Hmm, don't think so - a new "killer feature" needs to have a "non-revenue" angle to it, the way that cameraphones and MP3-phones don't have to be used with carrier services. (Neither 3G nor WiFi is 'must-have', by the way - most people just don't care).

This could have a couple of effects:

Firstly, people will have a tendency to own even more multiple devices than they have now. If it's cool & funky & different & only $100, why not buy 3 of them? (caveat - clearly, there needs to be a zero-click way to share the phonebook between them. Constantly swapping SIMs is a barrier too).

Secondly, there's perhaps going to be more demand for "vanilla" handsets rather than operator-specific variants. This isn't certain... but it only takes one innovator with a hypercool product to take a risk and only sell direct to end users and not via carriers, and perhaps the market shifts. This is why the price is important - Apple's iPhone is too pricey to sell in large enough numbers to overturn the carrier channel for the mass market, for example - hence why it's gone with Cingular I suspect. Cutting an exclusive deal with a high-profile retailer that doesn't sell mobiles normally could be a good route here. And hamfisted lock-downs of phones by some operators provide additional impetus (step forward most of the US carriers, in particular - I see T-Mo has darkened its reputation in recent weeks)

I'm not sure this will definitely happen. There's a huge amount of intertia in both handset subsidy and users purchasing through operator channels. But it's a scenario I see as becoming more likely, without any other "must have" features on phones.

Mobile and advertising - forget about one-to-one marketing

I've been having a spirited debate over at the Forum Oxford discussion forum, following on from Tomi Ahonen's blog post on whether mobile will become "the 7th mass media", displacing TV, Internet etc.

I think he vastly overstates the case, and that it's more evangelical posturing than objective analysis and prediction.

I think some of the biggest fallacies are around advertising & the supposed "personal" nature of mobile.

The first issue - what is the definition of "mobile"? Is it a normal cellphone, on a "normal" network? Is it a unique number, or a SIM card? A laptop with WiFi is mobile. The free newspaper I read on the tube is mobile. The radio in my car is mobile. Even if you say "mobile electronic devices that link to a two-way wireless network", you have a broadening definition. We might find that Rupert Murdoch introduces a portable 6-inch WiMAX tablet optimised for full-browser MySpace & Sky TV, is that "mobile"? If the Economist moves to an e-book or flexible electronic paper & you get content downloaded via Bluetooth or UWB or NFC.... is that "mobile"?

But the main fallacy is "One SIM = 1 Mobile Number = 1 identifiable Person". This is only partly true today, and will be completely false tomorrow. Sorry advertisers, forget about one-to-one marketing hype, it's an unattainable dream, which ignores technology evolution.

• Firstly, fixed and mobile numbers are being blurred. A fixed number may end up on a mobile device, or vice versa.
• Secondly, the mobile industry is pushing SIMs and mobile numbers towards non-personal, and even non-display oriented devices, like femtocells or PCs or even consumer electronics products.
• Thirdly, mobile phones are being pushed as "gateways" for multiple users or multiple devices - almost like broadband modems/routers. I saw a device at 3GSM which pushes video from the phone screen to an external TV. So, advertisers, +44 7934 104943 might be a phone... or a plasma TV with 10 people watching. This data will probably not be fed back via the network.
• Fourthly, the average number of mobile devices owned by an individual will grow exponentially. Cellular radios are cheap, so people will own a bunch of phones & other connected gadgets, with multiple numbers and multiple service providers, making total media consumption impossible to track.
• Fifthly, and especially in emerging economies, mobile devices are shared, perhaps between all the members of a village
• Sixthly, while anonymous prepaid users' behaviour can be tracked up to a point, there is much less "hard" data available about the subscriber
• Seventh, people switch phones & operators regularly. There is no obvious & easy mechanism to port measurement of media consumption.

So, advertisers - don't believe the hype about unlimited, exquisitely-targetable marketing enabled by mobile communications. It's simply not true. Yes, mobile advertising will become very important, but it's critical to have realistic expectations which take into account.

[Personal story] O2 - incompetence verging on negligence

Bad timing O2, putting a banner advert in front of me for a 1-month contract SIM this morning. Hopefully, people will find this page via Google and realise that the way you can offer 1-month services like this is by failing to register peoples' new SIMs in the first place. O2, You've cost me business, time & reputation over the last few days - it's my turn to return the compliment.

My advice: STAY AWAY, potential new O2 customers. And CHURN, existing O2 customers. I know I will when I get a chance.

The sorry saga of my lost phone and unregistered new SIM has finally come to an end. After only about 60 hours of failure to register the new card on the network on the network - and countless calls to helplful Carphone Warehouse people, whose efforts were hamstrung by O2's "network error" message locking their systems, and O2's inaccessible and seemingly incompetent support staff.

Without going into detail, CPW's system doesn't allow them to enact changes on a customer account while their network provider (O2 here) has an unspecified "network error" in place. Their hands are tied, and the best CPW staff can do is "monitor the status" until O2 fixes the problem in their own sweet time. I tried to get contact details for the O2 network support department so I could give the people there a kick myself. But there's no inbound number, as they're too arrogant, scared or poorly-trained to talk to real end-customers. Or else they just spend the day in the pub instead.

Eventually I hear from CPW yesterday afternoon at 2pm to say things have been resolved, that my new SIM's registration is now going through the system & should be up and running soon. I say that I've retrieved the phone from Lost Property, and can they reactivate the IMEI on that as well. They agree, and tell me to throw away the old SIM card. Now roll forward another 10 hours. I'm STILL getting "SIM card not registered". I get a sinking feeling.

And then I have a brainwave. Maybe... just maybe.... and I'm right.

The old SIM card - the one I reported lost on Sunday night (directly to O2, not CPW as it was out-of-hours), but which I got back when I picked up the phone, is working. Luckily, I haven't yet thrown it away or destroyed it as was suggested to me. But not the new one, the number of which I have now given 4 times, is still dead as a dodo. As I hadn't had the phone for three days, I can't tell if the old SIM's been reactivated... or simply not barred in the first place. I suspect the latter, which is why an error might have occurred when I & CPW tried to register the new one in its place.

Frankly, this is appalling - and quite possibly negligent. If I have time, I'll put in a complaint to Ofcom about it. I'm certainly getting a refund for the useless new SIM. Luckily the phone was found by the honest & admirable people at Ariva bus company, not someone dodgier, as I'd have had a nightmare to prove I'd actually reported it lost in the first place in time.

Full marks to Dan, Jon & Charlotte at CPW, who've actually given me real personal customer service , though. I could sense their frustration at the inexplicable "network error" message. What they didn't realise was that it actually meant "sorry, you chose the wrong network in the first place, why don't you go to one of our competitors instead?"

Mobile network backhaul upgrades... are we there yet?

I realise I've "taken my eye off the ball" a bit over the last few months with regard to operators' strategies for upgrading their ageing, low-bandwidth backhaul networks. I'd sort of assumed it was in the progress of being fixed, and was only a short-term issue.

It's not as simple as that.

I went to an event last week called NetEvents. I've been going for years - it's an interesting 2 days of presentations and a dozen or so pre-organised vendor briefings, speed-dating style. (The bell rings and... "next!"). Mobile/wireless is only a small part, so I'm forced to catch up with bits of the networking industry I don't normally get exposure to. This time, there were a variety of metro ethernet vendors, as well as the metro ethernet forum, and some people doing clever things making multiple copper pairs work together where fibre isn't available. (step forward Hatteras, Actelis, Resolute)

I'll be honest, I find most in-the-background things to do with metropolitan fibre or copper networks deathly boring. But like many dull-but-worthy areas of the tech industry (I used to analyse enterprise storage for a while too...) it has a story to tell. I tackled the vendors about how fast they were seeing the much-ballyhooed wireless backhaul upgrades going.

The general consensus seemed to be that in the US and bits of Asia, things are going pretty well. Most North American cell sites have decent upstream capacity. But in Europe and some other countries, especially where there are older 3G networks (and limited fibre installed), progress remains very slow. Yes, this varies a lot between operators, and sure there's also a lot of microwave installation going on. Metro ethernet and all that cool stuff is still "in trials" rather than being rolled out aggressively in many wireless networks.

But the bottom line is that there's still an awful lot of base stations out there with 2 or 3 E1 connections (ie 4 or 6MBit/s connection to the network). Some of these are old and can't even support ethernet/fibre if the operator wanted, and will need outright replacement instead. These are bottlenecks as we move towards HSPA, LTE and so on. There's no point putting 100MBit/s on the radio side at a cell site if it's connected back to the core with a piece of wet string.

One of the problems is that the existing networks aren't at full capacity, and so convincing CFOs to stump up the case to replace them is tricky.

The paradox is that the "headroom" is now much lower. Imagine you have a 4Mb pipe from the cell site, and are selling normal WCDMA at 384kbit/s data speeds. You monitor usage... and at peak times maybe it's getting 3 users... then 4 users the next month.... 5 users two months later... you get time to plan an upgrade so that capacity is in place by the time 10x384 = about 4Mbit/s. Now move to today, launching 3.6Mbit/s-capable HSDPA devices. You monitor usage again, and this month you have zero users... then 1 user next month... and it's full.

Let's see how long it takes before the Metro ethernet community really reports some movement on actual deployments, representing a decent proportion of the installed base of cell locations.