New Disruptive Analysis Report - 250m users of VoIPo3G by 2012

I've finally published the new Disruptive Analysis research study on VoIPo3G Business Models. The press release is given below and also here, and details of the report & contents are here.


250m users of VoIPo3G by 2012

VoIPo3G to be driven by both wireless carriers and independent challengers

LONDON, November 13^th 2007 - A new research study from Disruptive Analysis shows that evolution of mobile VoIP will rapidly eclipse voice over WiFi and become a mainstream form of communication. The analyst firm predicts that the number of VoIPo3G users could grow from virtually zero in 2007 to over 250m by the end of 2012. This is comfortably in excess of the expected number of FMC users with dual-mode VoWLAN/cellular phones.

The report demonstrates that it will be the operators themselves which will be mainly responsible for the push towards VoIP being carried over cellular networks. Carriers will become increasingly attracted to VoIPo3G because it will enable them to fit more phone calls into their scarce spectrum allocations, reduce operating expenses by combining fixed and mobile core networks, and launch new services like push-to-talk and voice-integrated “mashups”. VoIPo3G also fits well with the move towards femtocells. Future generations of wireless technology – 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution), 3GPP2 UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband), WiMAX – are “all-IP”, so unless mobile operators continue to run separate voice networks in parallel, they will inevitably transition to VoIP at some point.

However, because these new radio technologies are three to five years away from mainstream deployment – what happens in the meantime will provide the major disruption to operator business models. Some independent VoIP players are already exploiting the fact that today’s 3G networks can already support VoIP, putting dedicated software on smartphones, exploiting open operating systems, flat-rate data plans and features like “naked SIP” and built-in VoIP capability. These are linked to competitive ‘over the top’ phone or IM services via a mobile Internet connection.

At the same time, there is an increasing trend of carriers marketing 3G modems for PCs – not just for mobile computing, but also to compete with home DSL/cable broadband offerings. Laptop users expect to be able to use their normal broadband applications over 3G, including voice-based ones like Skype. Some operators are even offering their own VoIP software for PCs with wireless broadband.

The end-result of the push towards VoIPo3G is that by 2012, most VoIPo3G users will be using mobile carriers’ own standards-based VoIP capabilities, over the new, advanced 3G+ networks. However, a significant minority of about 60m will be using independent or Internet-based solutions – many actually operated in partnership with carriers or retailers.

Dean Bubley, author of the report and founder of Disruptive Analysis, comments: “3G networks are increasingly capable of supporting VoIP, for both traditional mobile operators and independent Internet-based VoIP challengers. But while CDMA operators will benefit from VoIP being ‘designed-in’ to their newest networks, 3GPP / HSPA operators will have to wait for several years – a window of opportunity which will be exploited by the ‘over the top’ players. Rather than competing head-on, partnership models have the potential to create win-win propositions”

The report, “VoIPo3G Business Models”, is available from Disruptive Analysis from today. It is based on a huge research effort spanning hundreds of interviews and meetings, and contains extensive market forecasts, industry commentary & analysis and company profiles.

Ends.



Commentary

Yes, 250m is a surprisingly big number. Especially when viewed against the VoWLAN users at the same time (below 100m). I did the sums and then had to triple-check my own model. But underlying it is one absolutely fundamental point:

If mobile operators roll out LTE or UMB, then VoIP is mandatory; they're all-IP networks, just as WiMAX is.

Now I've had to take a call on the realistic rollout schedules of those technologies, and if there are substantial delays, the VoIP forecasts move to the right as well. There's also an expectation that some operators will want to deploy VoIP earlier, on EVDO Rev A/B or HSPA/HSPA+ networks. This morning's announcement about FarEasTone's VoIP service is a very timely example.

I've also built in analysis of spectrum-related issues, device availability, IMS and a hundred other factors. The full set of inputs and sensitivities are in the report's methodology section.

The key thing to think about is that for many users, VoIP will be invisible. For them, it will be an underlying enabling technology, not a service in its own right. Its prime function will be to enable operators to squeeze more calls into a given slice of spectrum. Yes, its other functions are more interesting - helping independent 'over the top' VoIP providers get a foothold in the mobile market, and facilitating a new generation of 'Non-telephony VoIP' services. But they will be comparatively small compared with its main manifestation as 'necessary plumbing'.

(Non-telephony VoIP means where voice is not used for a simple Person A calls Person B phone call, but is somehow a feature of another application - inside a game, linked to FaceBook or some other type of mashup or corporate web service)

The other angle to recognise is that almost all of these VoIPo3G users will also still be using circuit switching for some of their voice traffic. There will be very few all-IP users - most will fall back to GSM or UMTS or CDMA 1x or another network, either when out of 3.5G coverage or for other reasons.

If you're interested in more details & pricing for the full report, please email:
information AT disruptive-analysis.com
A table of contents of the report is available here
I'll also be speaking at the upcoming IIR conference on VoIP & wVoIP in Madrid on the 26-28th Nov, and the Mobility World Congress in Hong Kong on Dec 2-5th

Operator VoIPo3G in Taiwan

My VoIPo3G Business Models report is launched today - I'll be making a separate post about it later.

But with impeccable timing, there's also another announcement (OK, yes I'm quoted in it) from Finnish IMS software vendor Movial, relating to a contract with Taiwanese operator FarEasTone for enabling its new VoIP service on both handsets and laptops. This includes the use of voice on its HSPA macro network, plus its in-home HSPA router with WiFi.

I reckon that this is the first 'official' operator-branded VoIPo3G service, except for some 3G-based IMS-PoC push-to-talk services like DoCoMo's, plus non-IMS partnerships like Skype/E-Plus.

Some interesting things to note

• firstly, FarEasTone pushes pretty hard on a whole host of technologies. It announced its IMS/HSPA deployment contract with Ericsson in September 2006.
• secondly, Skype has huge penetration in Taiwan, which is definitely a catalyst for operators' own VoIP launches, as people are looking for ways to mobilise it as well as using it on fixed broadband. This also seems to indicate that there's a substantial % of voice traffic for which 'best efforts' is perfectly acceptable.
• thirdly, FET is also a WiMAX licence-holder (it recently signed a deal with Alcatel-Lucent) for southern Taiwan and so is likely to benefit services that can ultimately bridge HSPA, WiMAX and WiFi.
• fourthly, Taiwan and FET have relatively low levels of prepay use compared with contract subscribers, which makes it easier to subsidise high-end devices, or for mobile operators to enter fixed-broadband markets.

All this means that FET has seemingly been able to launch VoIPo3G, before HSPA is fully voice-optimised. I suspect that some of the options in the network and handsets like RoHC (robust header control) and voice-friendly scheduling haven't been implemented yet - my understanding is that they're due to be included in most vendors' infrastructure components in 2008/9. I'm also curious about what's happening at the application level in the network, given that there's no specific 3GPP or OMA standard for 'ordinary mobile VoIP' yet.

This all suggests that VoIP on FET's HSPA network might not be as spectrally-efficient as circuit yet, although in this instance the unique characteristics of the Taiwanese market appear to mean that competitive gains offset this consideration.

Because of these fairly unique factors, I'm not expecting too many other HSPA operators to follow suit, at least in this specific way, before 2009. Apart from anything else, there aren't too many phones which have HSUPA as well as HSDPA, although that should change by H2 2008, with massmarket devices available in 2009.

What I see more likely is for an increasing number of operator VoIPo3G partnerships with the Skypes/Truphones/Frings of this world in the near term. Plus some more laptop-based VoIP services. But more on that later....

Voda data 'pipe' revenues up... and has content revenue fallen?

I'm quite impressed by Vodafone's results today - and even more impressed by the company's turnaround over the last 12-18 months into one which is embracing 'the real Internet' rather than persisting on trying to push its own content & multimedia services in preference.

Around London I see Voda advertising hoardings exhorting people to use Google on the go, something that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago.

I suspect much of its epiphany has sprung from the realisation that it's 'pipe' revenue that is making its data revenue figures look good. It has shown organic growth of 45% in non-messaging data revenue. Non-messaging revenue is now up to a level of half that of messaging (SMS+MMS, which is itself still growing quite well) in Europe.

I've posted before about how much of Voda's data revenue must be attributable to laptop data cards & BlackBerries. This time around the company is pretty upfront about it: "The organic growth in data revenue of 45.1% was particularly strong and can be attributed in part to increasing penetration of Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data cards and handheld
business devices." [I suspect that 'in part' is a polite way of saying 'mostly']

This is particularly interesting given that "Handheld business devices increased by 112.6% since September last year and Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data cards grew by 78.9%."

This means around 1.8m data cards in Sep 07, and probably about 1.4m handhelds (there doesn't appear to be a hard number for last year's published so I'm extrapolating from Mar 06). So basically an average during the 6-month period of 1.4m 3G cards and about 1.1m handhelds [mostly BlackBerries]. Looking at my estimates last year this means that the time-averaged subscriber base has grown 65% and 100% respectively. Both are certainly above 50%, whichever way you slice it.

Now given those figure, that puts the 45% revenue growth in a slightly different light. It seems to imply that non-datacard/BlackBerry data revenues (content, Live!, consumer Internet, M2M etc) have actually fallen. It also probably means that the average costs for business data users have fallen, which makes sense as recent BlackBerries have moved outside the boardroom.

Let's use a very conservative back-of-an-envelope estimate of £35 a month for 3G cards, and £25 for BlackBerries. Multiplying through for 6 months gives £294m for datacards and £165m for devices. That's £459m out of a European total of £843m non-messaging data.

In other words, I'm estimating that 'data pipe' revenues have increased from 46% to 54% of Vodafone's European data revenues over the last year.

(I'm also not sure where Voda classifies data roaming interconnect fees, so that might account account for another chunk as well)

Once again, this illustrates my belief that mobile content is really pretty unimportant, compared with communications or context. Sure, Voda is very business-focused (28% of revenues are corporate), but it's still an indicator for the rest of the industry.

My data roaming moratorium

I've been travelling quite a bit over the past month, including a couple of trips to both the US and Madrid for events like VON and the NMS Communications Connect events, where I've been moderating panel sessions.

I've tried an experiment - a complete ban on myself using data roaming on my normal email & web device (an HTC handheld courtesy of T-Mobile Web'n'Walk). While I like the T-Mo flatrate for use in the UK, the £7.50 per MB roaming charges are a joke. It's been costing me quite a bit of money over the past year - and it's even encouraged me to switch off images in my browser (back to 1996, eh? try advertising at me now....).

When I get a free day I'll churn to another more roaming-friendly network as the contract's now finished, but in the meantime I'm still using it. Or I may get the device unlocked & get hold of one of these Voda Germany pre-pay data SIMs I've heard about.

Instead, I've been relying on laptop+WiFi for my email everywhere - not too tricky as I've been mostly staying at hotels and at conferences which have had free or inexpensive WiFi.

Of course, this means I've been unable to do the traditional email-check in airport baggage halls while waiting for my bags, or in the cab on the way to the hotel.

And you know what? The extra 20 minutes I have to wait makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to my productivity, my responsiveness to clients or my life in general. If I'm in a different timezone, and I'm taking 8-hour flights, my email often has a long latency anyway. An extra few minutes is irrelevant - except for my personal sense of instant gratification ("Must have email NOW"). I'm not even wasting the 20 minutes - there's plenty of other stuff I have to read on paper anyway.

Now clearly this won't work for everyone. There are some people for whom email & data connectivity always needs to be as realtime as possible. But it does highlight how much money is wasted on an illusion: that full mobility is always necessary.

It isn't. For me, data roaming is a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.

With one exception. I cheated once - to Google the address of the hotel, because a cab driver was clueless. That's got a clear ROI - 100kb of data (the first page of results showed the address without even clicking on a link) vs. an extra few pounds for the cab driving in circles. Although now I think about it, it probably would have been cheaper to just phone someone I knew was in front of a PC....

Nokia Ovi..... how long before it includes voice-based services?

Interesting announcement from Nokia & Vodafone today - easier access to both Voda Live! and Ovi services from Voda-ised Nokia devices.

"Customers will get faster and easier access to all of Vodafone's Internet and entertainment services as well as all of Ovi from Nokia services on a wide range of handsets"

"Accessible from a computer or compatible Nokia device, Ovi includes the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps and N-Gage, with more services to follow"

This is clearly very significant, and goes a long way towards validating the Ovi strategy overall. But I'll let others comment on its impact on mobile gaming, music etc as these are not really areas I focus on that much.

Instead, I'll fly a slightly more disruptive kite about this model....

I wonder... will Nokia ever be really controversial with Ovi and start to include VoIP applications on the platform? Perhaps not 'plain vanilla' VoIP person-to-person telephony, but maybe what I'm calling non-telephony VoIP (eg voice mashups with social networking, in-game communications, remote dictaphone capabilities, conferencing etc...).

I'd say it makes more sense for Nokia to do this sort of voice-based application than the operators themselves, at least in the medium term until HSPA+ or LTE is rolled out (which should have properly integrated & optimised VoIP)

This would also fit extremely well with the sort of operator/3rd-party partnership model I'm envisaging for innovative VoIPo3G services - which I'm forecasting could reach 45m users by 2012 in my new report on VoIPo3G Business Models.

Google's phone platform... how large is its addressable market?

I posted a few early comments on the Open Handset Alliance yesterday.


One thing that isn't immediately obvious is whether how much of the total handset market is serviced by the strategy of new OS + Google Apps + advertising + openness + maybe a direct subsidy from Google.

In particular.... will the model work for the majority of the planet's mobile users who have prepay phones, often bought from non-operator channels? And who are often anonymous, and don't have data plans?

There seems to be lots of very US-centric rhetoric from the company & innumerable observers about how this will 'break the strangehold of the carriers'.... which conveniently ignores the fact that that's certainly not true for the overall handset market anyway. Globally, it's about 50/50 sold through operator vs. non-0perator channels.

It's very easy to be seduced by big numbers in mobile - 3bn users, 1bn phones shipped and so on. But generally most of the smartphone propositions I see actually have a theoretical addressable market that is, at most, 30% of that figure.

Now, 30% of 1bn is still a big number... but when you take out about 100m Symbian devices per year, plus a bunch of other platforms used by the licencees, I'll take a wild punt that G-phone shipments will struggle to top 20m by 2010.

Open Handset Alliance - Initial thoughts

I've been absolutely buried in work, so I haven't yet had a chance to think through the full significance of Google's Android handset software, and the instigation of the Open Handset Alliance today.

Various people have been talking up the 'gPhone' and similar stories over the past week, so it's hardly a total surprise. What is interesting is just how many members the initiative has from the start.

I've written before that I didn't believe that the handset OS marketplace would conveniently consolidate to two or three platforms anytime soon, and with this launch, plus Apple and the recent resurgence of UIQ, I stand by that assertion.

Remember when the IT industry used to sporadically develop partnerships that under scrutiny were really "anyone but Microsoft" associations? Well, this one seems to be "anyone but Nokia or Microsoft"....

Biggest surprise for me is the Asia-centric nature - especially having both DoCoMo & KDDI onboard.

Semiconductor partners are probably the group with the fewest obvious gaps - although STMicro seems to have decided against pinning its flag on the Alliance on the same day it concluded its 3G chipset deal with Nokia.

Esmertec & Aplix add some Java flavour - and make me wonder whether SonyEricsson may be next on the Alliance's list of potential suitors.

LG, Samsung and Motorola are all notoriously promiscuous when it comes to handset software platforms, so it's no surprise to see any of them adding another OS notch on their corporate bedposts. HTC is a bit of an eye-opener, though.

It's noticeable that Google's tried to keep its distance a little bit - including itself alphabetically among the software members, although the liberal sprinkling of YouTube videos through the site is a bit of a giveaway. The fact that it's not openphones.google.com seems to suggest that this might actually be a commercial venture for the big G rather than another 'in Beta' testlab thing....

Last quick thought - there's no obvious enterprise-centric players (IBM, Oracle, Cisco, other usual suspects) in the list, so I guess that MS and RIM can sleep easily for now.

DPI #2 - Pudding Media in-call voice recognition... and I thought I was joking

"You heard it here first".

There's quite a lot of hoo-ha about the concept that a firm called Pudding Media has come up with. Basically it does realtime voice recognition on your phone calls, and tries to serve you adverts relevant to your topic of conversation.

Now where have I heard that before?

Afterthought - you could have some real fun with this type of thing hooked up to a voice synthesiser. I wonder if you could set up some sort of computer-based game of Chinese Whispers where the computer makes a phone call, says a sentence, receives some adverts, then uses character recognition or image processing on the advert images & feeds the description back to the synthesiser.....

I wonder if Comcast will try something similar, and terminate your call if it hears the word 'Sandvine' or 'Traffic shaping' being mentioned.....

Deep packet inspection getting another kicking

The Comcast / Sandvine saga seems to have been the catalyst for consumer awareness of the potential for packet inspection misuse.

To recap:

- DPI used to protect fundamental network integrity (eg stopping DDoS attacks, stopping P2P crashing individual mobile cells, managing unanticipated bandwidth spikes etc) = GOOD
- DPI use to block / degrade traffic you just don't like very much in the hope of negotiating/extorting (pick your point of view) money from an Internet company = BAD
- DPI policies not made transparent to your customers = ACTIVE CUSTOMER DISLOYALTY (ie being so annoyed about a service provdier that you tell everyone very loudly)
- Lying to your customers about DPI = DESERVING BANKRUPTCY OR LEGAL ACTION

There are now rumours that Comcast is playing funnies with traffic going to Google.com as well. It's also been reported that its customer service staff are denying the existence of SandVine DPI gear in the network - although Comcast is known as a customer (see page 21 of SandVine's AIM admission document) and by coincidence, a very high % of SandVine's revenue comes from (a) North America, (b) Cable companies and (c) A single customer (see slides 4,6 & 7 here). Obviously, Customer A is anonymous......

Amusingly, the term 'sandvining' has been coined as a generic term for inept and intrusive misuse of DPI.

I've been saying for a while that heavy-handed use of DPI would backfire competitively on the culprits. I didn't expect it to to get escalated to the US Senate quite so quickly though. I can't imagine Viviane Reding at the European Commission, or assorted other regulatory & competition folk to be particularly impressed if the same thing happened here, either.

Of course, this is all in the fixed domain. Limitations on spectrum (especially at a per-cell and backhaul level) mean that some forms of traffic management are going to be mandatory in mobile. I don't want my 999 emergency call (or any call for that matter) blocked by some local kids using BitTorrent on their smartphones.

But if I pay for a mobile Internet pipe (and I'm quite happy to pay a fair price), I want it to work with the service I want to use. If my operator thinks differently, it needs to be very explicit about this upfront. And incidentally, this applies just as much to any monkeying around with the handset's IP stack or OS, as well DPI as in the network.

A lot of enterprise FMC vendors still don't get it

The final panel session I attended at VON yesterday was on enterprise FMC.


There's plenty of good stuff I heard from an interesting range of participants, but fundamentally I still don't think that many of the players understand all of:


- Enterprise preferences
- Carrier requirements
- Handset design complexity
- User interface & behaviour


I still see plenty of 2002-vintage "one device, one number" rhetoric. Sorry, but while that may have conceptual elegance it's totally unrealistic. Many business users will have a business laptop as well as a phone. Many (most?) will have a separate personal handset & number - and although it is possible to have this as a 'profile' on a work phone, most employers won't want to be giving employees a new cool phone every 6 months, or start providing them in pink.


The numbering thing is similarly unrealistic, especially outside North America, where there are issues around fixed-to-cellular termination costs and SMS, that make it desirable to have both fixed and mobile numbers, even if they are bridged in the PBX or operator network. (Note: Vodafone's FMC team have 2 numbers on their business cards, as do many of Ericsson's employees. They've thought this through.)


Linked to this, there is also lots of rhetoric about the enterprise 'owning the number'. This might work for organisations that can be really 'proscriptive' and force employees to use their business device for all voice calls under pain of dismissal, irrespective of how clunky the extra software client might be. But real-world companies have to recognise that most user will have access to multiple devices, and that as calling rates come down, the issue of reimbursement becomes less of an issue than user experience. If I have 2 mobile devices (1 work, 1 personal), both with essentially unlimited minutes, I'll tend to use the one with the best UI (fewer clicks, intuitive menus, neat little features in the call register etc) and which looks the coolest when I want to impress my clients. And I'll use the clunkier one for things like messaging if it's got a QWERTY.

Also lots of talk about enterprise VCC. I'm not convinced it's that important from the enterprise's point of view. Certainly, there's no point worrying about the cellular-WLAN handoff at the front door of the building, if all the (many more) WLAN-WLAN handoffs inside don't work first. After we get good coverage & internal handover of voice-optimised WLANs throughout the typical corporate site, we can worry about the 2% of calls that occasionally transit the entrance lobby. Otherwise it's just putting lipstick on a pig.


There's also (so far) no real rallying call for enterprises to buy unlocked, 'vanilla' (or custom-build) smartphones. Yes, there's a lot of offhand comment that this is generally a good thing, but I'd like to see the enterprise FMC community put something collective in place to raise awareness in the same way that Nokia is pitching US consumers with unlocked handsets as an alternative to the iPhone.


Then there's something that I'm risking sounding like a broken record on. SMS. There's still lousy support for good SMS experience within most vendors' enterprise FMC implementations. No, it's not easy, but from a user behaviour point of view it is table stakes. If it doesn't work within the enterprise FMC app on the phone, the user will use the native SMS client - which will then naturally reveal the 'underlying' mobile number rather than the so-called enterprise 'single number'. Or they'll send the SMS from their personal phone in their other pocket. And guess which number the salesman's client will enter into his phonebook when he gets an SMS saying "in the taxi, be there in 10 mins". And no, IM or email are not alternatives from the perspective of a typical mobile user's entrenched behaviour patterns and expectations. For instance, you never know if someone outside your company is capable of recieving IM, or has a BlackBerry switched on. You can be pretty certain they can get texts wherever/whenever, though.

To be fair, there was some comeback to my question to the panel about SMS. In particular, Comdasys, a German FMC firm, mentioned integrating SMS gateways, which are probably the best way to solve the problem, at least on the server side. It's less clear-cut on the client side - I've heard some solutions that essentially put in a 2nd SMS client inside the handset's corporate PBX-facing application.

And lastly, coming back to my theme of the month, there's not much awareness yet of the possibilities of VoIPo3G, extending the full power of VoIP/unified comms over the wide area, as well as while the user is in the office WiFi coverage.

Overall, I'd say the enterprise FMC industry has come a long way in 2007 - but there's still a gap between what's deliverable today, and the sort of solution that will please both CIO and fit with the typical user behaviour of a person with a mobile phone (or two...)

3 + SkypeIn or SkypeOut

Quick thought....

The 3/Skype phone doesn't support SkypeIn & SkypeOut - presumably a function of both integration complexity, and the fact that 3 doesn't want to lose the outbound traffic minutes, or more importantly the inbound interconnect fees.

How long before someone comes up with a Skype proxy server that enables this, either running in the network, or even on your own PC at home?

You have "My PC" as a Skype buddy on your mobile, make a Skype-Skype call for free.... but your PC has a 2nd Skype client running on it with a different login (plus SkypeIn/Out) and bridges them together.....

Or if Skype doesn't let two instantiations run on the same PC, you use GoogleTalk or something else instead.

UMB - not dead yet

Lots of people seem to be taking glee in hammering CDMA Rev C / UMB at the moment, prophesying that LTE and/or WiMAX are inevitable winners, and that the CDMA roadmap is looking a bit questionable.

My view is that reports of UMB's demise are over-exaggerated. I think that these things are cyclical, and that over time the weight of opinion will swing the other way again.

Absolutely, there are doubters at the moment. Lots of people seemed to have jumped on Verizon's professed intention to converge with Vodafone's preferred architecture over time. Sprint is deploying WiMAX, which some interpret as kick in the teeth for its parallel CDMA network. Qualcomm obviously hasn't had the easiest year.

....and yet....

LTE is still a long way off from commercial deployment. We might see massmarket services launched in 2011, optimistically. And while the RF bit of the radio part of the standard is progressing, the sister part of the radio access network, SAE, is still mired in politics. Conversely, UMB is pretty well nailed-down and should be deployable in 2009-10.

Secondly, UMB is VoIP-ready, with a roadmap for early mobile VoIP within Rev A/B. If Verizon doesn't get any 700MHz spectrum, it's going to want to husband its existing frequencies more effectively in the medium term. UMB offers the ability to squeeze more voice and/or data into existing spectrum allocations. LTE will do this too, but is further away as already mentioned. Add to this the difficulty of running 2 networks in the interim period, and I see a strong likelihood that Verizon will stop bluffing, go for UMB initially, and hope to finally converge on a single, 4G-based, UMB2/LTE2 hybrid around 2012/2013 instead.

Thirdly, I can't see Sprint being able to push WiMAX down to small, handset-type devices in the near future. Possibly it'll decide that Rev A or B are good enough for phones running on its parallel network. Or possibly it'll decide to upgrade too, especially for reasons like improved voice capacity.

Then there's KDDI, and a bunch of other possibles, including future networks in places like India.

Overall - I'd say UMB doesn't look like the famous Norwegian Blue parrot just yet.

Notes from VON Boston

I'll be adding more posts to this over the next few days, but just to kick off with a couple of observations:

- PCs are the new mobile phones, at least from a VoIP, IMS & unified comms perspective. Huge amount of interest in porting softphones & other clients to laptops, for both FMC operators and various previously-mobile-only Internet players. This fits in with my own belief that early VoIPo3G rollouts are being catalysed by PCs with flatrate data plans.

- Everyone and his dog has some sort of social-networking application / plug-in / enhancement to their products. Think FaceBook-to-mobile apps, uploads of pictures or speech or video from handsets and assorted other permutations.

- IMS handsets (or even standardised IMS clients) are still very thin on the ground. Quite a few people are talking about "IMS proxies" in the network, which ordinary handsets can communicate with. That means not terminating the IMS session on the device itself, but on a server and then essentially using a 'thin client' or browser on the phone to display the results.

- Quite impressed with some of the work that Ericsson's doing to encourage developers to create apps on IMS platforms. Definitely some of the right thinking - I heard the phrase "two men & a dog in a garage" which is a bit of a paradigm shift coming from the telecoms establishment. I do have a slight worry that any startup wanting to get exposure to the global audience via carriers ends up being 2 men + dog + 30-person legal team. Although that said there are supposedly some options for easier routes to market via catalogues and quick 'vetting' of new services without detailed contracts.

Hutchison 3 - SkypePhone: doesn't look like VoIPo3G

I'm in Boston today so couldn't make it to the totally non-secret 3/Skype launch announcement today.

As far as I can see, this is technically very similar to the earlier deal with Skype on the X-series products about 10 months ago. In other words, a software client on the phone acts as a 'dialler' for Skype, but doesn't actually use VoIP over the radio network. It uses a circuit call into a Skype gateway in 3's network. The earlier X-series one used iSkoot on the Symbian platform - whereas this one has an application built-in to Qualcomm's BREW framework.

I'm expecting quite a lot of this type of hybrid 'dial through' option before we move towards 'proper' mobile VoIP over the next 2-3 years. It's a lot easier to guarantee decent QoS using this approach in the short term - especially as this deal is on a cheap phone which I expect uses a basic WCDMA 3G chipset. 'Ordinary' 3G doesn't support VoIP very well - there's too much latency and things like header compression are absent.

I'm expecting operator-led VoIPo3G (probably with partners like Skype) to start to become more important from the point at which full HSPA-capable (HSDPA+HSUPA) devices become common. This is already realistic for laptop modems, and will start filtering into more high-end phones in 2008

EDIT

Yes, I was right about my guesses on this - just got conformation from the 3 PR folk. It's a low-cost WCDMA-only phone based on a relatively low-end Qualcomm 6245 'value platform' chipset.

Pre-publication alert: New report on VoIPo3G business models

I'm just putting the finishing touches to a new Disruptive Analysis report on VoIPo3G Business Models, due to be published in the next couple of weeks.

Regular readers will recognise this as a theme I've touched upon numerous times in the past year or so. This year has seen the emergence of disruptive companies like Fring and Yeigo enabling wide-area VoIP on smartphones, and the increasing use of Skype and other softphones on 3G-connected laptops. At the same time, operators and their suppliers have been talking up the future generations of all-IP technologies like UMB and LTE, which make true mobile VoIP inevitable in the longer term for the established carriers.

I'm not going to give away any conclusions yet - but suffice to say that any company with a VoWLAN strategy had better start looking very seriously at VoIPo3G as a complement to it, if they haven't already done so. The comparative forecasts are eye-catching.

I believe that this will be the first, dedicated, comprehensive report on VoIPo3G, covering:

- Both operators' and competing independent VoIP players' business models for VoIPo3G
- CDMA/UMB and HSPA/LTE suitability for VoIP, and the likely timelines for adoption
- Different flavours and usage cases for VoIPo3G - from PTT to Multimedia Telephony to Enterprise communications
- Scrutiny of the opportunity for 'non telephony' VoIP and Voice 2,0 services
- Prerequisites and enablers, such as suitable open handsets and data tariffs
- Inclusion of phone- and laptop-based VoIP
- Analysis of likely competitive tactics of incumbents responding to VoIP rivals' efforts
- VoIP partnership options for UMTS carriers while they're waiting for LTE
- Full quantitative forecasts, with extremely detailed treatment of assumptions & variables

More details will be available shortly. But if you'd like a sneak preview, I'm moderating a panel on VoIPo3G at VON in Boston next week.

And if you'd like to register your details, and express interest in obtaining the report as soon as it is published, please email information AT disruptive-analysis.com .

Many thanks for reading this unashamedly commercial post.

Dean

Comcast & DPI - Caveat Inspector

I've argued for some time that many of the principles of ISPs' traffic engineering and packet inspection were flawed. That heavy-handed application of DPI would either result in what the medical industry calls 'false positives' (ie erroneous detection of something benign as malicious) or would lead to an escalating arms race by applications developers.

Although they still seem to be denying it, the web is a-splutter with accusations against US broadband provider Comcast. It's apparently doing something to block uploaded files - a process intended to counter things like filesharing, especially via BitTorrent.

Well, there's a great lesson to be learnt here about false positives. Apparently, the allegedly-non-existent traffic-shaping minions at Comcast forgot to think through what else might be affected. Like IBM Lotus Notes for example. Not to mention anyone using BitTorrent for legal purposes. Or assorted internally-developed corporate applications that might stop working.

Apparently there's now some sort of fix for this, I'd guess done behind the scenes between IBM and Comcast. While IBM will have the clout (and contacts) to do this, I'll bet that corporate developers won't.

I can also envisage some fun conversations....

"Hello, is that Mr Comcast Corporate Account Manager?..... yes, this is Mr Smith from XYZ Investment Bank. Well, we've got this application we developed... it uses a modified version of BitTorrent.... it distributes equity derivative pricing formulae to our traders.... it seems to have stopped working..... we've isolated the problem to your network. You started blocking it with no warning..... Yes, it's causing us some trouble...... Yes, quite a bit. About $300m so far...... well, if you could just hang on for a minute, maybe you'd like to speak to Mr SueEm-to-Bits our chief counsel? And Messrs Sarbanes & Oxley would like a word with you afterwards".

Meanwhile, I've noticed a distinct upswing in people talking recently about putting broadband and mobile traffic inside VPNs, or encrypting it.

My view is that a lot of the more onerous terms-of-service for broadband (fixed or wireless), or heavy-handed traffic shaping, are going to evaporate under commercial & PR pressure over the next year or so. And I'm expecting quite a lot of Comcast-type attempts to be outed by people monitoring traffic flows and reverse-engineering what's causing problems.

As I've said before - I can't get especially exercised about Net Neutrality. Because anyone stupid enough to block benign traffic (even if they don't like it for commercial reasons) is going to heavily burnt. I think the market will understand providers wanting to stop network integrity being threatened - but it will show zero tolerance for vindictive or accidental 'collateral damage'.


Edit

Just remembered a little snippet I heard last week. Apparently, P2P traffic has actually been dropping as a % of the total on the Internet over the last year or so. Can't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like 50% a year ago, but only 35% now. Not because it's being throttled...

....but because something else has grown faster: social networking. Blame MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube et al.

And while certain elements are easily trackable in DPI (facebook.com's IP address etc), the proliferating 1000's of plug-in are not. Are you going to traffic shape bits of Little Johnny in Iowa's MySpace page, but not others? Who are you going to bill when you decide that the Vibrating Hamster widget on my FaceBook page is consuming too much bandwidth?

SMS marketing.... ugh

OK, I'm biased. I detest SMS spam - which I define as ANY unsolicited SMS, even from my operator telling me about new services. I go out of my way to ensure I never receive any - putting my fixed-line number on web forms unless they have a clear & unambiguous marketing opt-out. British Airways for example is very clear that it will only send SMS about things like flight time changes, never for marketing, and that's OK.

Personally I'd never opt in for SMS advertising, and I'd certainly never buy an product or service marketed in that way. I've even chased down culprits and informed them of my punitive fees for deleting future unwanted messages. I prefer any marketing, news updates etc to come through via email, where it's much easier to scan, filter & prioritise messages - and read them as & when I have time.

Posting to ForumOxford recently, I thought about what it would take to persuade me to change my mind on this. The answer was an upfront payment (in cash or credit to my mobile account) of £3-£5 per received message.

The other option would be to develop SMS clients that are similar to today's email clients, so that rather than getting a "You have mail!" alert each time a message come in, you can just look at your inbox. However the problem with this is that it would mix up texts I want to receive immediately and would allow to interrupt me (friends, work contacts), and ones which have no realtime importance (advertising). And I don't think I can be bothered to set up a filter for who I'm happy to be interrupted by, plus occasionally I get urgent texts from unknown numbers ("Running late, in a taxi, there in 15 mins").

The other thing is that SMS marketing is roughly now where email marketing was in 1996 - "you have mail!"... cool!! But once you get to 'You have 94 unread SMS' you need to be a bit harsher in your attitudes.

Hopefully handsets will soon ship with preloaded SMS antispam software, and your SMS client will have Inbox / Sent / Spam folders in the same fashion as today's webmail & desktop clients. Then you could just sift through the rubbish once a week to look for anything that's fallen through the gaps - and you could mark the updates from your bank / hairdresser / favourite bar as 'not spam' to whitelist them if you really wanted.

WiMAX misquotes.....

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Technology/WiMax-set-for-rollout-as-UN-telecoms-agency-approves-its-inclusion-in-3G-standard/2007/10/19/1192301034416.html

"Once certain interference problems have been resolved, WiMax could become as ubiquitous as mobile phones and conventional broadband, Bubley said. "The real kick comes between two and five years from now," he said, when consumers will start seeing the first mobile phone-style devices using WiMax come on the market"

Well no, that's not what I actually said, but I guess being quoted incorrectly is better than not being quoted at all.

For the record, what I actually meant about two-to-five years was that is when I expect to see large-scale WiMAX networks operational in a decent number of countries - ie after 2.5GHz spectrum auctions, network build-out and increasing device maturity.

I see WiMAX as important, yes, but I'm certainly not expecting it to scale to levels comparable with 3bn cellular subscribers or 500m DSL/cable homes.

I can't see WiMAX devices becoming as small/power-optimised as cellphones for a considerable time. I see WiMAX' main role in the next 5 years being for non-phone devices like laptops, media players, in-car systems, PDA-type products etc.

WiMAX is 3G

Apparently WiMAX passed the final hurdle last night, and is now a member of the ITU's IMT-2000 family of technologies. In others words... it is a type of 3G.

Can't say I'm overly surprised by this, especially given the recent ramp-up in announcements & perceived credibility that the technology has garnered. Cisco's reported sniffing around Navini was also a bit of a signal that it thinks WiMAX is about to get its mainstream credentials bolstered.

It'll be interesting to see if this means there will be some back-pedalling on the other parallel regulatory approach to getting WiMAX accepted - technology neutrality. Now that WiMAX is a member of the 3G club, perhaps it'll decide that exclusivity isn't so bad after all.....

DIfferent device, same service.... different price

So, get a WiFi-powered Nokia and pay $8 a month for worldwide Boingo WiFi access.

Get a PC with WiFi and pay $39 a month for the same thing.

Presumably they're assuming that PC users either (a) have more money or (b) use more data

Seems like a great way to ensure lots more people start using their phone as a modem, to connect their PCs....

Either way, it makes a bit of a mockery of Nokia's claim that an N-series 'multimedia computer' is a replacement for a full PC. Although to be fair, nobody believed that anyway.

If WiFi's going to be in so many phones... why not in Japan or Korea

I keep hearing people telling me how WiFi will inevitably make its way into an ever-greater proportion of the mobile marketplace, and how its attach-rate curve will start to mirror that of Bluetooth.

I'm unconvinced. E- and N-series Nokia and HTC excepted, plus a handful of UMA featurephones, it's really not a big deal at the moment. Even where it is being shipped in dualmode, it's not used that much - nobody buys (or is given) an N95 for the WiFi, it's all about the 5MP camera. The Thing in your pocket might by Many Things, but it's not really a WiFi Thing from a customer perspective. The iPhone might turn out to be a bit of standard bearer for WiFi but that's still not going to change the overall statistics that much.

More importantly, dualmode doesn't really seem to be happening in the two countries that are usually 'leading indicators' for any new mobile tech uptake - Japan & Korea. Sure, there's a handful of dual-mode phones in Japan like the NEC 902iL and Motorola M1000 and one or two from KDDI. Yes, Korea has a boatload of WiFi hotspots, but there doesn't seem to be much impetus to include the capability in the average handset - KTF has its NESPOT Swing dual-mode service, but it's very PDA-oriented.

So while I'm expecting to see a continued growth of Nokia & assorted Windows devices with WiFi, plus the iPhone, the odd UMA device and perhaps VCC feature phone (and yes, probably a handful of Motos & S-Es), I really don't see massmarket devices adopting WiFi - especially when aimed at the global marketplace where not that many people have broadband+WiFi at home.

I reckon a reasonable target for 'attach rate' of WiFi into the global mobile phone market is 10-15% by 2011 in terms of shipments, so probably <10% into the installed base for at least 5-6 years. And I'd punt at an active-usage rate of probably around 3-4% in the same timeframes.

At the Symbian show today

I was taking the pulse of the smartphone industry yesterday, at the Symbian Expo down in London's inconveniently-located ExCel centre.


Some observations


- I'm feeling smug about my longstanding predictions that mobile applications will become 'bearer aware' not 'bearer agnostic'. Symbian's new Freeway architecture is essentially a bearer-awareness layer in the IP networking part of the device

- I'm also feeling quite smug about my ongoing belief in motion (and other) sensors being integrated into handsets. Nokia's keynote presentation highlighted this, with some cool usage cases like sending a busy tone & diverting a call to voicemail by just flipping over the phone while it's lying on a table.

- Apparently there will be upcoming Symbian WiMAX devices - my bet is for Nokia to look at ones for Sprint as it's still hoping to make headway in the US. On the other hand, SonyEricsson may be looking at Japanese deployments. One to watch.

- The spec sheet for Symbian v9.5 mentions that it 'supports UMA', although I still haven't seen a UMA Symbian phone in the wild.

- Symbian still doesn't seem to identify prepay subscribers as a specific end-customer segment. Most of these users don't get subsidised phones, and don't have data plans suitable for regular low-cost (ie daily) usage of data services.

- S60 is still essentially a Nokia-only game, although Samsung now has a range of 4 new devices. Not much sign of LG, or any of the ODMs and other tier-2's.

- Less FMC and wVoIP than I'd been expecting, although there were a couple of interesting things hidden away, like an encrypted voice app from Atelier and Phil Zimmerman of PGP fame

- Apple was hanging over the event like a cloud, the word 'iPhone' unspoken but essentially meaning that everyone's scrabbling to divert game/multimedia graphics efforts over to the UI instead

My thought is that the smartphone community is slowly coming to uncomfortable realisations. Firstly, normal people don't download applications to handsets. No, it's not about 'educating ' them, they just don't/won't. Get used to it, and use the browser instead, or get vendors/operators/retailers to preload them if you're really, really good. And secondly, the ultimate addressable market for smartphones as a percentage of overall handsets is more limited than they'd hoped.

Separately - I met two people brandishing iPhones who've been using them (with European eyes) for a month or more. They both said that, against their initial expectations, the SMS user experience is surprisingly good - something I'd thought might be an impediment to its uptake. Apparently it's not.

Moto buying a stake in UIQ

This should put the cat among the pigeons at tomorrow's Symbian Expo in London. Motorola has trickled out a few UIQ-powered phones over the years, as has S-E. Neither has exactly shown much enthusiasm for pushing Symbian+UIQ much further down the range then the top couple of devices, though. Now both have decided to join forces to (presumably) combat the creeping Nokia S60-isation of the higher end of the consumer phone market.

Motorola's polyamorous relationship with most members of the mobile software ecosystem is pretty confusing. It's got its recently-renamed Motomagx Linux/Java platform with a new partnership with Trolltech, it's got the former TTPCom's Ajar featurephone platform, it's got various Windows Mobile devices (especially in its Q range and its enterprise-device division Symbol), plus various legacy proprietary RTOS platforms. It's got of Flash Lite here and there, and it's Linux platform is supposed to be pretty Web 2.0-friendly.....

This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical that mobile operators outside Japan will ever be able to restrict themselves to just a couple of supported OS's in a few years' time, despite their hopes. S60, UIQ, Windows Mobile, UIQ, Motomagx, Ajar, Nokia S40, BlackBerry OS, midrange S-E & LG & Samsung OS's, Apple OS and a bunch of lower-end platforms or proprietary/closed implementations of Linux.

I wonder what OS Motorola will put in its future WiMAX devices? Fortran, probably. Or a hamster on a wheel. Or it'll partner with Google for yet another handset software platform....

T-Mobile pay-per-day pitch sounds good

I haven't seen the full details yet, but in theory T-Mo's idea of £4 for a day of 3G (and I assume HSDPA) access from a laptop with a USB modem sounds pretty impressive.

That's finally crossed the threshold of usability / value versus a typical London Internet cafe's £2 per hour, and could therefore appeal to ad-hoc users who've got access to a laptop but are loathe to sign up for a monthly contract. It also makes a lot of the current pay-per-use WiFi services look very expensive - for example T-Mobile's own £5 / hour at UK branches of Starbucks.

The interesting question is whether this will be available to travelling business users as well, enabling them to just buy a suitable SIM card when they land at Heathrow, enabling a massive saving against 3G roaming fees.

As a side note, I'm definitely seeing HSDPA becoming a viable alternative to both WiFi in the UK at the moment - although this largely reflects stupidity among WiFi hotspot operators on reaching sensible pricing levels. They've squandered a 4-year lead on the cellular industry.

HSDPA is also making inroads into home broadband in some niches in the UK - I've had a couple of friends recently mention they're looking at it rather than ADSL or cable. It's especially attractive to young urban professionals, immigrant workers or students who have a high chance of moving home more than once a year, and who therefore don't want a 12-month broadband contract. In some cases they'd also have to pay £££ to have a BT line reactivated & reconnected at a new place, which definitely makes the process more drawn-out and expensive.

Google and Jaiku... no good for prepay subscribers?

Everyone seems to be all a-twitter with discussions about the Google/Jaiku acquisition. I have to say it's not an area I've watched too closely - I'm not convinced that the average person is really prepared to do status updates many times a day, which is why most Yahoo/Skype chat sessions start with "Hey, are you online?"

But anyway, I just had a look at the Jaiku FAQ.

20MB a month is quite a lot, especially for people who don't have flatrate data. Which, outside the US, Japan and Finland, is most people - particularly teenagers on prepay tariffs. Yes, you can sign up for the capped £1 / €1 per day deals, but I can't see the average student wearing a £30 a month extra bill for this. Not to mention the fact that Nokia S60 phones' penetration into the (largely unsubsidised) prepay market is fairly low. Last time I asked Symbian, they didn't even have a strategy for targeting prepay users, or identify it as a specific target segment with unique needs.

On the other hand, maybe Google just wants the core software engines and mobile-savviness of the founders to plug into its own future social networking and/or mobile platforms. We shall see....

Could you multiplex 2G connections over 3G with UMA?

Musing.....

...so UMA can work over any generic broadband IP connection..... DSL, cable, apparently WiMAX....

...so could you run multiple UMA connections over a good-enough mobile broadband connection? Especially HSUPA which has sufficient upstream bandwidth.

There must be some usage cases for, say, 4x GSM connections being multiplexed over a single (portable) HSPA pipe. Answers on a postcard, please.

LG Telecom's Home Zone service... how does it work?

I just stumbled upon Korea operator LG Telecom's HomeZone service, which is an FMS pitch offering cheap in-home calls.

"Home Zone Service: a mobile phone in home phone’s disguise Subscribe to Home Zone Service and you would not need traditional fixed-line phone service ever again. Home Zone Service offers the convineince of mobile phones at a rate comparable to fixed-line service, at home or in your office.
Home Zone Service combines the benefits of the convenience of mobile phones with the thriftiness of fixed-line service in a single mobile handset. Home Zone Service is as easy as installing Access Point, the Home Zone Service device, in a place of choice. Whenever Home Zone Service subscriber makes a call within 30m from the Access Point, the call automatically registers at a rate comparable to fixed-line service. Up to seven mobile handsets can be operated via a single Access Point."

What's not clear to me is exactly how this works. I haven't been able to find much via Google, and unfortunately I don't speak Korean, so I have no way to interpret the FAQ on the more-detailed domestic part of LG's website.

There's a mysterious access-point widget with a 30m range that plugs into a power socket.... but which doesn't seem to have any hookup to a fixed broadband line that you'd need for either WiFi or a femtocell. I'm guessing that it's either some sort of repeater that signals to the network to flip to a lower tariff when it's in use, or perhaps it's got a CDMA modem in plus a Bluetooth antenna with cordless telephony profile (CTP). It needs a dedicated phone (there's a range of 6 according to the website)

Anyone able to shed any light?

Social networks and business contacts.....

Interesting dilemma.

In the last few weeks, I've had several 'work' contacts add me as a friend on Facebook, either as individuals or in one case as a company. Some are people I've had a drink with after a conference, so they're not 100% 'professional' contacts I've met solely in a dry work context.

After thinking pretty hard about this, I've turned them down and directed them to LinkedIn.

Personally, I like to keep my social life & my work life pretty separate. I won't take business phone calls when I'm 'off duty', and often restrict my email access my business email/web device at home. I almost never talk mobile stuff with my friends (although my father is a huge Apple fan, so iPhone discussions are inevitable).

I'm trying to come up with a reasoned criterion for someone being 'Facebookable'. If you read this blog, you're probably on the wrong side of the line. Ditto if I met you when I was wearing a suit, or if you only have the email address on my business cards.

Once again, this comes back to my theme of multiplicity. I don't want to have one 'identity' or one message inbox. You might differ... but for me, divergence is much more important than convergence in maintaining my work-life balance.

EDIT I've realised that actually there is one place where I happily blend social & business contacts.... Skype, probably because you can keep everyone you know segregated. Maybe there's something in that for eBay to ponder....

Geeky phone + Cool name = Social acceptability

I was in the US last week, and one of the things that struck me was that there is much less social stigma attached to using awkward-looking 'geeky' devices like high-end HTC handhelds and Treos. I even saw people actually talking into the large-format BlackBerries. Qwerty thumb-pads seemed much more common, and of course there were plenty of people shamelessly using hip holsters for their mobile gadgets.

(For my US readers - that sort of fashion faux pas would probably get you turned away from a trendy bar in London or Milan.... it's the European style-mistake equivalent of what I'm told are called pocket protectors)

There are a few reasons I can think of for this. And despite the swarms of tourists in my part of London I'll refrain from commenting on any sweeping or offensive stereotypes.

• Firstly, the US embraced PDAs much more vigorously than Europe, so the idea of some sort of handheld computer is much more engrained and accepted.
• Secondly, the preference for email and IM, and the later/slower adoption of SMS has reduced the number of people mentally-tuned into writing with multitap vs. Qwerty
• Thirdly, the BlackBerry phenomenon has run much longer, and wider, than it has in Europe. I see many more non-corporate 'civilians' with them in the US.
• Fourthly, the US historically had quite a high adoption of pagers relative to Europe.

But perhaps most interestingly.... geeky devices in the US have cool names. Hiptop. Dash. Curve. Q. Mogul. Blackjack. iPhone.

....compare those with MDA Vario III, XDA Executive, HTC S620, iPaq hw6910, Nokia E61i, Samsung i320, M3000 and so on.

Can you imagine a stranger ever coming up to you in a bar and saying "Oh wow, is that really a v1605?".

Telefonica + Nokia services agreement

Fascinating announcement today from Nokia & Telefonica which is potentially game-changing, in that it recognises Nokia as a key partner for services as well as handsets:

"Nokia will customize the new Multimedia Menu to provide easy access to Telefónica services.. Similarly, Telefonica customers will be able to access all Nokia services through the Multimedia Menu"

I presume this opens the way for things like Ovi, and maybe Nokia-optimised versions of popular web apps like Flickr. Using Nokia as an intermediary could be a way around the current problem with the mobile/web collaboration model - web services companies really don't want to do 100 separate operator-specific optimisations, and 100 separate negotiations, to get their application deployed widely (and hopefully virally).

"Our customers can take advantage of Telefónica's high quality mobile broadband network to access both Telefónica and Nokia services, as well as other third-party applications"

What's not immediately obvious is whether this just applies to Nokia phones (and if so, whether it includes S40 featurephones), or if it relates to S60, in which case it could apply to Symbian-powered devices from Samsung, LG and others.

Also, looking out a couple of years & flying a kite here.... I wonder if we might eventually see a Nokia VoIP service as well, given how good Nokia is at integrating VoIP clients onto devices - especially if Nokia positioned it as a 'non-primary telephony' VoIP service (eg for voice-enhanced IM, conferencing, gaming etc etc) and enabled developers to access it via convenient APIs.

Redefining the mobility premium

I wonder what would happen if you conducted a survey of consumers, asking them to allot 100 points of 'value' between:

a) Having a mobile phone, with the convenience of an integral phonebook, camera etc
b) Having the ability to make & receive personal calls from wherever you are, send SMS and emails, browse the web etc
c) Having the ability to do (b) while you're actually moving - for example in a car or bus

I'll hazard a guess that the answer would reveal perhaps a 50/40/10 split of perceived value. Yes, there's probably better ways of phrasing the question, but you get my point. The actual 'moving about' part of mobility isn't that relevant unless you regularly make calls while driving - and ironically, the move towards data services exacerbates this.

This is all a bit of a problem, as mobile operators have traditionally priced calls on the basis of a premium which essentially blends all of the above. That customers value the handsets themselves as much as the service isn't news - it's at the core of the ongoing tug-of-war between phone manufacturers and operators, as to who 'owns' the customer relationship.

More relevant is the distinction between nomadicity and full mobility. The advent of VoWLAN in all its guises, cellular homezones and assorted other location-based mechanisms for differentiating call prices has been apparent for the last few years, in the guise of FMC.

But with moves like BT's tie-up with FON last week, as well as the nonsensical hype around metro-WiFi, it's clear that nomadicity (and cheap/free calls on mobile devices) is taking a step further to achieving 'B' above.

I wonder, though, if the push for geo-specific pricing is actually a special case of what should really be in place: velocity-specific pricing. Maybe we should be pricing mobile communications based on how mobile you are. A call when you're stationary is cheaper than a call when you're walking, which is cheaper than one made on the bus/in a car, and so on to trains & planes. If you're on a femtocell in your bedroom, or connected via WiFi/FON in your neighbours house, you shouldn't be subsidising the calls of the salesman in his Mercedes driving 80mph down the M4.

Now obviously there's a world of pain in communicating all this - especially as even though customers might only value high-speed mobility at 10%, they've grown up to expect it, on the odd occasions they need it. But with the onward march of GPS in handsets, motion sensors and so forth - even just working out a given customers' average number of cells-per-call - it ought to be possible to measure who's really deserving of paying the mobility premium, and who should be on the 'nomad' tariff.

What's the legal definition of browsing?

I see that O2 UK has just revamped its data 'bolt-on' tariffs, towards a pseudo-flatrate offer comparable with T-Mobile Web'n'Walk and others at £7.50 for 200MB per month. About time, although as it'll come as no surprise that they're retaining the usual 10000% over-pricing on roaming at £6/MB - or £15/MB on prepay. (Yes, OK, there is the rather laughable 'data abroad' bundle of 10MB/month roaming for a commitment of £10/month. Bargain.)

In common with most of these, it also has the usual backside-covering 'fair use' terms and conditions.

"Permitted Uses of theO2 Web Bolt On are uses of your SIM Card within a handheld mobile device for the purposes of Internet Browsing and email only. Any other use of the O2 Web Bolt On will not be a Permitted Use, including but not limited to:

Use with Data Cards or Modems;
Instant Messaging,
IP Telephony,
Point 2 Point file sharing and file transfer,
VoIP (e.g. Skype™),
Video and TV streaming,
Slingboxes; and
Use in conjunction with routers."

But tell me... what exactly is the legal definition of 'browsing'? If I visit a website that happens to have embedded Flash animation or video streaming - like http://blueroom.o2.co.uk/2007/the-o2/sugababes-gallery.jsp for example, am I falling foul of the T's and C's? What about the messaging functions on FaceBook? Are they 'instant' or does that mean where there's a separate pop-up IM window? Can I use an open chatroom but not a private message window? What happens if there are only 2 people in a private chatroom? What if it's embedded in JavaScript on some new Web 2.0 social networking website? What if Skype develops a plug-in app that appears on certain Facebook or eBay web pages?

And I fear that using the Internet without somehow being 'in conjunction with routers' may be a little tricky. Especially if O2 launches a femtocell / home gateway.

You get my point. 'Hard' definitions don't work very well with traditional Internet applications, and are even worse with AJAX, Widgets and Mashups. Yes, of course I know what the T's and C's mean in spirit, even if it is mean-spirited.

Put simply, I don't think any of this stacks up, apart from instilling 'fear, uncertainty and doubt'. I'm not picking on O2 specifically here, most of the other operators, with the notable exception of 3's X-series, do something pretty similar. Essentially they're writing themselves a 'get out of jail free' card.

"Fair" in 'fair use' seems to mean "uncompetitive with anything else we do already or might do in the future". "That is, if it is used by enough people that we decide to take some action." So "Unfair" = "Competing effectively".

The strange thing is that they haven't applied equivalent rules to ordinary voice calls. Surely, taking this to its logical conclusion, it's not 'fair use' of my O2 voice minutes if I use them to call Vodafone's sales department, or Orange's analyst relations team?

Personally, I don't think these onerous but vague and sometimes threatening data plan T's & C's will stand up for much longer - except in the case of really bandwidth-heavy or malicious apps which can threaten network integrity. I expect most operators to have quietly moved away from these positions by the end of 2008.

Nokia & Navteq... location services, or location products?

Let me try and join the dots.

.....Nokia N95 with GPS and 8GB of memory and a memory card slot..... Navteq's giant mapping databases.... Nokia developing its non-carrier channels to market.....

Look at TomTom or Garmin or maybe even Tracker: mobile location is mostly about standalone products. Services are mostly limited to incremental add-ons: updates, or critical realtime traffic info, plus a tiny and sexy but mostly non-revenue slice of geolocation-meets-social-networking mashups. Not only is downloading maps or directions OTA to a handset slow and expensive, it also consumes valuable power.

Bottom line: mapping on mobile doesn't need an operator or very much over-the-air location services. Maybe in the future as upsell, but not as a starting point. The pricing/performance curve on flash memory is much steeper than that for wireless broadband.

Interesting, this is totally different from things like Google Earth. For that, a Web 2.0-type model works fine. Mobility is less important, bandwidth is abundant always-on and essentially free, more granular data is becoming available continually and there are no power constraints.

Enterprise FMC - 1 vs 2 numbers and SMS

A regular discussion I get dragged into concerns enterprise FMC and numbering. As per usual, many of the 'convergence utopia' slides & pitches I see have the phrase 'one number' prominently displayed. But it's worth delving into this a lot further to assess whether the a single number is actually wanted.... and what other knock-on implifications it might have.

It's worth putting some constraints and background facts up first:

• In the US (where quite a high % of enterprise FMC vendors are based) there are no differences between fixed and mobile numbers


• Elsewhere, especially Europe, mobile numbers are visibly different to fixed numbers, eg 07xxx


• Most people prefer using mobile phones for many calls, especially outgoing calls where the phonebook is convenient. This varies a lot by function, country, age and individual preference, however. Call centre operators and receptionists don't use mobile devices for the most part, for example.


• A large and increasing proportion of users use SMS for business applications. This comes as a shock to many, especially those from the US. It's typically used for 'casual' messages like 'In taxi. There in 5 mins' or 'Delays on tube, will call you when nearby' or 'Your meeting this afternoon has moved from Booth#1321 to Booth#432'. While it's not mission-critical as such, it has high convenience factor, lots of user inertia, and is much more likely to be received in many cases than email (which of your clients/colleagues have BlackBerries? are you sure?) or IM or even voicemail. But most people won't SMS to a fixed number as fixed-SMS functionality isn't widely understood or 'expected'. In fact many phones' SMS client software won't even allow you to text to a fixed number.


• People almost never change the numbers in their handset's phonebook unless they absolutely have to.


• Some calls are made to people, others are made to places. I don't want/expect a mobile number for my pizza, my doctor's surgery, or the customer support & billing department at my mobile operator. Apart from anything else, in some markets it can be seen as 'rude' to expect your customers to dial into a mobile number from a fixed-line when it's not necessary, as it costs much more owing to larger termination charges.


• I think that not all countries have 'inclusive' cross-network minutes for mobile-to-mobile calls. Again, this increases the costs for your clients or suppliers to do business with you, rather than (say) an 0800 number or a fixed phone. Obviously if you're calling a field engineer or a salesperson or a plumber you expect them to be on their mobile - but many people (and their employers picking up the bill) will resent paying a 10x premium to call an 07xxx number for someone they know is at their desk or perhaps on shop floor.


• Many workers will have a separate mobile phone for personal use anyway. They may well get a bucket of cheap minutes & not worry about getting reimbursed by their employer. If the user experience & convenience is better, they'll use that device for preference unless there's a harsh proscriptive policy 'use a personal phone & you're fired'.

All this means there's no easy answer. Leaving aside the oddity of the US numbering scheme, all 3 alternatives for FMC numbering have both positives & negatives:

• One fixed number - allows the enterprise to 'own' the number, routes via the PBX with all its benefits... but has problems handling SMS and the fact that it's almost impossible to 'hide' the handset's real underlying mobile number - which of course will then be stored in their contacts' mobile phonebooks.
• One mobile number - works quite well for certain roles where employees can conduct all their calls from a mobile. Doesn't work so well in contexts where existing PBXs must be integrated, or where there are reasons for wanting geographic numbers for sites or departments rather than individuals. Issues with inbound call costs, plus issues with how easy number portability is to manage in reality during churn. More difficult to do least-cost routing for enterprises to minimise internation call charges.
• Mobile + fixed number - Solves the above problems, but possibly higher costs to administer, and makes 'reachability' more difficult. Made even trickier if the user also has a second mobile number for personal use or an email device.

Bottom line: there's no single right answer. It will vary according to geographic market, function(s) of the users concerned - and how proscriptive/flexible the employer is. What I think is the wrong answer is for any vendor to focus exclusively on any one of the above options, unless they have a very specific target niche in mind (eg small businesses in Scandinavia, perhaps).

As an interesting example, it's worth noting that Vodafone's enterprise FMC team have both fixed & mobile numbers on their business cards.

Bandwidth? There's never enough....

Network capacity appears to be the theme of the week.

First off, I spent a couple of days at IIR's conference on LTE - how will it fit against a background of WiMAX & UMB, when will it appear, what speeds can it deliver, what are the applications & services? Lots of slides mentioning 100Mbit/s and similar numbers, plus a tacit recognition that, give or take some IPR issues, LTE = WiMAX = UMB in terms of much of the underpinning technology.

There's still plenty of unanswered questions though - especially whether LTE has any real use if operators can't get hold of enough spectrum to run it in 2x10MHz or 2x20MHz channel widths, which is the only way to approach the peak bandwidths that are being mentioned. If they're stuck with the current UMTS networks' 2x5MHz channels, operators might just be better of sticking with HSPA.

Another theme which emerged was around applications - realistically, are there actually any mobile/handset applications that could exploit 100Mbit/s? Can screens or browsers actually exploit that much data? (I'll leave as a separate question whether anything running at 100Mbit/s without a fan could be held by hand without asbestos gloves).

So, what does need that much bandwidth?

...on mobile, anyway. But in terms of fixed networks, I've just heard a presentation that really raises the bar on bandwidth requirements and makes you realise just how many zeros we can use if we get the opportunity. I'm now at NetEvents in Malta, and the keynote speaker was the Network & Comms chief supremo from the CERN particle physics accelerator in Geneva. I was blown away to find out that the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), when it finally comes online, will generate peak 'raw data' outputs of about 1 Petabyte per second. Not MB, not GB, not TB, that's PB. He bemoaned the fact that this had to be filtered down in realtime electronics to 'a few hundred GBit/s' of the most useful data, with the rest just discarded as it couldn't all be networked or stored even by their state-of-the art private optical network. (As a sidenote about backhaul/transmission capacity, these guys also have dedicated 10Gbit/s links to international research labs). They'd love to upgrade to full speed if they get a chance & network technology catches up.

Now the awkwardness of carrying around 1000+ 30-ton superconducting magnets means that we won't all be detecting Higgs Bosons or leptoquarks on our phones any time soon. But it's also worth pointing out that when I asked him whether they any wireless tech anywhere at all at CERN, I got a shrug and a comment that there's a bit of WiFi in the labs and experimental chambers, but nothing in 'the critical data path'.

OK, this is probably the most extreme example.... but it's also an ultimate reality check for those that suggest we can ever get too much capacity - wireless or wireline.

Quick musings on Net Neutrality

A couple of quick Sunday morning ponderings:

- Sprint's new femtocell service is designed to work with any ISP/cable operator's broadband. It's a separate standalone box which plugs into a router, rather than a new integrated home gateway product & bundled broadband service. Now to be fair, Sprint appears to have a comparatively relaxed policy on open Internet access & Net Neutrality, especially given its WiMAX deployment plans. But I've got to wonder whether any fixed operators/ISPs will try & encourage it to pay for premium QoS for its femto traffic on 'their' broadband infrastructure.... Presumably it'll be pretty easy to spot as it'll be heading to a central network aggregation node. I can't imagine Verizon will be too chuffed at helping backhaul Sprint's CDMA traffic...

- I wonder how 'mission critical' Internet services like Google now are to large telecom companies. Presumably they use it to search for market information, track competitors, look for technical papers, screen new employees and so on. Also presumably it's fairly easy to spot searches emanating from main HQ or R&D sites by IP address. How much leverage would Google or Yahoo have if they threatened to block (or start charging) for searches emanating from, say, a major carrier's employees?

Commercial launch of CDMA femtocell service

OK, this has come a little out of left-field. Sprint has launched a CDMA-based femto, manufactured by Samsung. I was expecting Sprint to push for WiMAX femtos when it launches (especially as 2.5GHz will have a hard time penetrating in-building), but I hadn't reckoned on them pursuing a similar approach for the mainstream CDMA cellular network.

Initially I though it might just be a repeater (widely used in Korea), but no, it's a proper broadband-connected femto. It was actually announced back in March & called UbiCell by Samsung - although at that point is wasn't obvious that it was so close to real, large-scale deployment rather than just going into operator testing like most of the UMTS/HSDPA ones.

One interesting feature is that it ships 'open' by default so any Sprint customer can use it - a sort of cellular FON model, I guess.

I'm guessing that RF management might be a bit easier in CDMA than UMTS.... but if anyone else has theories on how CDMA femtos have pulled out what I guess is a 18-24 month lead in largescale commercial shipments, I'd be fascinated to hear them.

Interesting Telco 2.0 Broadband survey & upcoming conference

Regular readers will know I've helped out at STL Partners' Telco 2.0 Brainstorm conferences in the past. Martin, Simon & co. have some cool strategic visions on how telecom operators & partners can sensibly position themselves in an Internet / IP / Web 2.0 world, without commoditising absolutely everything into dust.

They're currently running a detailed Telco 2.0 survey on the future of broadband. I filled it in yesterday, and it's one of the few times I've actually had to really stop & think about my answers while filling in a questionnaire. The survey takes around 20 minutes to complete, and asks some challenging questions about industry business models. The link is here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=AIE7Zsl2ndRRF1k0cFyzCg_3d_3d

Everyone who completes the survey gets a free summary of the results.

The findings of the survey will be presented at the next Telco 2.0 event in London on 16-18 October. They are also offering a 25% entry discount to Disruptive Wireless readers (they clearly want the right people to come) -- contact me for details via information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com

Mobile data roaming continued

...I'm still trying to work out the best option for data roaming for my business device. I've come to the conclusion that I'll have to make sure I do nothing more than download 2kb email headers except in extreme circumstances, and wait till I get WiFi coverage.

The thing I find most astonishing is the discrepancy (hypocrisy?) between roaming charges on a phone, vs. on a laptop. Vodafone's €12-a-day HSDPA laptop tariff gives fair use up to 50MB - ie about 20p per MB. Others are roughly similar... and thus perhaps 30x cheaper than handset rates. Shame it's not easy to use an always-on laptop as a sort of 'reverse modem' for a cellphone via Bluetooth, really.

There seem to be 2 exceptions to all of this:

- 3 is to be congratulated on having no roaming premium at all on either X-series or its USB 3G modem services... as long as you're on a 3 Network, which restricts you to Ireland, Italy, HK, Australia and a few others. Elsewhere it won't work at all.

- Mysteriously, my local Vodafone shop insists that if I get a BlackBerry, then email roaming is free on all European partner networks (but not web browsing). Unfortunately, nothing in the brochures they gave me, nor the Voda website, seems to spell this out clearly & unequivocally. There's still the 'up to £10 a MB' line for roaming. The shop doesn't have any printed price plan, so if I go for it, I'll have to video/record the staff telling it to me verbally, I guess.

I actually contacted the UK's Office of Fair Trading alleging anti-competitive behaviour about data roaming last week, but got a negative response directing me to Ofcom or the telecom ombudsman (?). When I get a chance I think I'll pursue both options as this whole thing is completely galling.

Going back to my multiplicity theme.... if anyone else out there wants to suggest to me that you can run your entire communications life on a single mobile device, I'll gladly bet them a year's data roaming costs that they're wrong.....

Congrats to the OMTP on the USB recommendation

This came out a couple of days ago, but doesn't appear to have got that much exposure. Standardisation on micro-USB ports for phones. About time.

Maybe... finally.... we might be able to end the ever-growing mountain of proprietary charging bricks & power cables for handsets and accessories. I've got at least 10 cluttering up my house.

This could also have beneficial environmental side-effects, in terms of production of the power components and also waste disposal. Also, many lazy users leave their power cables plugged in & switched on even when not charging phones. Hopefully the OMTP will also push for standardised 'power down when no phone connected' mechanisms.

This also fixes one of the downsides of 'multiplicity' in mobile devices. I don't mind carrying 2+ phones, digital camera and a laptop if I've got a bag... but if any longer trip involves also lugging another 3kg of transformers & plugs then it's a bit more of a pain.

Nokia-Siemens femto deal with Airvana

Interesting one, this.

Before the merger, Nokia and Siemens both had relationships with picocell suppliers RadioFrame and ip.access respectively. When I spoke to NSN in February in Barcelona, they said they were likely to continue dual-sourcing picos for existing customers, but were still working on their strategy for building/buying femtos.

Given that both their existing partners are also active in the femto area, I hadn't expected them to bring a 3rd option into play - although in retrospect I guess they'd probably have cast their net as wide as possible.

Airvana's femto product stems from its acquisition of UK-based 3Way Networks earlier this year. I'd imagine that, at the time it was up for sale, someone from Nokia might have dropped in to 3Way to see what was happening (given Nokia was presumably on the VC's potential acquirer list), so they may have been pretty familiar as well.

Couple of things - in both the press release & the website, it only mentions UMTS femtos rather than specifically saying HSDPA/HSPA - although I'd imagine that must be on the roadmap. I'm not 100% certain what backhaul mechanism Airvana uses for femtocells - although its architecture diagram mentions IPsec, and I seem to recall its UAG gateway can handle UMA among other options.

Multiplicity in action - 1.6 phones per person in the UK

One of my current research & consulting themes is around what I call 'multiplicity' - the notion that future mobile users will have multiple devices and/or numbers, service providers, messaging inboxes, broadband connections, bills, social networks and so on.

I still regularly see presentation slides titled "The Power of One" or something similar - dispensing the 'obvious' wisdom that the future involves one device, one number and so forth.

This is marketing wishful-thinking that flies in the face of human nature, Moore's Law, competition & differentiation and assorted other factors. For every two things that converge, another three will diverge. If phones are both cheap & highly differentiated, why would you just want one? It doesn't mean you have to carry all of them, all the time.

Same with operator services - if they're commoditised, then sure, one is enough. But the paradox of competition is that if there is real differentiation in coverage, pricing plans, available devices, content/application partnerships.... then it's not surprising that customers will be promiscuous and want multiple suppliers, dividing their spending between them.

Sure, some people will be both loyal and adamant they want such a degree of simplicity that they'll happily confine themselves to a single 'thing'. But others - especially today's multitasking/multichannel youth - don't have a problem with managing complexity. If you're already happily juggling multiple groups of friends on MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Facebook, MySpace & Bebo... adding another phone number ain't exactly difficult.

Some great evidence of this trend comes from this survey, apparently conducted by ICM for bank HSBC (I have no idea why & can't find the original press release). 45m adults, 70m SIMs, 71m phones - and 9% have 4 or more devices. My only question is whether the data assumes that only 'adults' have phones - I see plenty of 10-year olds with handsets, which might skew the analysis.

This correlates somewhat with other estimates I'd seen before, but if accurate seems to indicate an acceleration - previous estimates seemed to be in the range 1.2 - 1.4 per person, if memory serves me right.

The continued evolution of multiplicity is inevitable, in my view. Vendors and operators should take their heads out of the sand. As well as selling convergence products & services (which will certainly continue), they should also look to exploit and support divergence in parallel. Multi-SIM, Multi-Handset, Multi-Number services - and maybe even work with their peers to do cross-operator phonebook syncs and other services.

People evidently want lots of phones, numbers, operators, email addresses, whatever.... so make it easier, not harder.

Mobile data roaming - still ridiculously expensive

I'm about to renew / churn both my business and personal phone contracts, and so I'm wading through all the current tariff plans and options.

Looking over my bills from the last year, the largest variable monthly cost tends to be international data roaming - picking up email from abroad, using the web on my phones, and so on. I don't tend to make many international voice roaming calls - anything lengthy is usually prearranged, so I can use SkypeOut from my laptop via WiFi or ethernet.

But although there's been a lot of movement in laptop data pricing over the last 6 months, with some (comparatively) sensible roaming fees, that's still not true for handset plans.

I really resent paying £7.50 per MB to roam on T-Mobile - even to Germany or to other on-net T-Mo subsidiaries. And don't get me started on the £3 / MB costs for even domestic data on my personal O2 phone.

Unfortunately, these prices have hardly shifted in the last 18 months. If you can actually find the tariffs cunningly hidden on the operators' websites, you find that (prices including VAT):

O2 - £7.05 / MB
Orange - £6.50 / MB
Vodafone - £5.00 a day or "up to £10.28 per MB"
T-Mobile - £7.50 / MB
BT doesn't seem to give any details at all of data roaming costs.
3 doesn't seem to allow data roaming in most countries unless it has its own local network for X-Series, although then it's free if you're a subscriber (if I'm reading it correctly)

Frankly, these prices are ridiculous. I'd say they are overpriced by at least 2 orders of magnitude, or arguably 4. Putting traffic on the Internet costs well under £1 per GB.

These prices are more than some tariffs using data via satellite with an Inmarsat BGAN or similar.

I posted a while back that the EU is keeping an eye on data roaming. Well, Ms Reding if you're reading, now might be a good time to start waving a very large stick. Come to think of it, Ofcom might want to have a look as well.

EDIT A brainwave....

I wonder if you could write a Symbian / Windows / Java app that emulates an old-world 56k modem over a cellular voice connection? 56kbit/s = 7 kBytes/s = 420kBytes / min.

So 2.5 Mins = 1 MB....

So in Europe with the new EU capped roaming rates, if you could squeeze 56kbit/s into the voice channel, you'd be paying about €1.14 per MB... or about £0.80p. Which just goes to illustrate how much of a ripoff the whole thing is. You could even use a much less demanding audio modem @ 9.6kbit/s and still pay less. And if you did some sort of callback function so you receive the call inbound whilst roaming, the rates are half that sum.

Forget VoIP, this is IPoV......

This must be feasible - someone needs to do this NOW.

Multi-operator services - eg Mobile PBXs

I was at an event yesterday, run by Aepona, speaking about service-layer architectures and business models for mobile operators - IMS, SDPs, capability exposure, web services and so on.

Part of the discussion related to hosted and managed mobility services for business customers, and there was some talk about the long-heralded mobile PBX concept. Bin your PBX and deskphones, give all your employees a single mobile number/device, and host everything in the operator's network, get shortcodes & cheap calls between employees.....

Hmmm. I've been a skeptic of this concept for ages, on numerous grounds - the fact that not all employees are mobile, how do you integrate call centres, how do you integrate with legacy PBXs or non-hosted IT systems like CRM and ERP, how do you migrate over time, how do you deal with multiple geographies, what's the channel.... and so on. Put simply, my view is that it's OK for an 11-person software firm in Helsinki, but it won't fly with large enterprises except possibly for small isolated teams of sales or field-service personnel.

But the event yesterday catalysed my thoughts about another issue. At the moment, there are very few network-resident services that can easily work across multiple operators simultaneously. If you're in procurement for a large enterprise, you almost certainly won't want to lock yourself into a 5-year contract with a single mobile operator. You'll want to dual-source. You'll want to be able to churn. You'll want to be able to have a group of employees with another operator if they get an exclusive & desirable device (eg your CEO wants an iPhone.....).

Yet most of the services like Mobile PBX assume that one operator wins the entire account. This is unrealistic, I think.

So what would be the architecture that would enable a big firm to say "Yes, I want all my staff on mobiles, and a hosted mobile PBX service? But I want to pick & choose between Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange for any given employee, with the option to have CDMA operators for staff in the US and Japan as well".

Tricky. But necessary.

Do operator UIs harm handset brands?

Did an interesting comparison yesterday:

- my SonyEricsson K800i, bought a year ago from O2 via Carphone Warehouse, which has minimal customisation vs. the 'vanilla' device - an O2 menu & link through to its portal
- my friend's SonyErisson K810i bought direct from Orange 3 weeks ago & heavily customised with a new idle-screen menu, different icons etc

The UI on mine is rocketship fast, clicking a button has near-zero latency, and it has crashed once in a year. I like it.

The UI on my friend's is like wading through treacle. Much of the time, the idle-screen menu has 3-sec latency to do anything, and the rest of the phone also much less useable. He hates it and is about to take it back, or may try to have it reflashed to vanilla settings.

I suspect the fault lies with the custom UI, which I think is rendered in Java (some S-E phones have multitasking Java but no smartphone OS). I know that some Orange subsidiaries use SurfKitchen's software on certain 'Orange Signature' devices & it works OK on Symbian devices I've played with, but I'm not sure if that's the culprit here.

Either way - it's a horrible user experience and reflects negatively on both operator and handset vendor. Will it increase his spending on new & wonderful multimedia services or improve loyalty? Yeah right.

Perhaps phones are like cars.... the people who design them best are the original designers, especially non-smart featurephones. I don't add on nasty bits of plastic from Halfords to modify my car, and I don't want nasty bits of software modifying my phone.

Reconnect

Back from my holiday, and slowly getting back to the world of what we think of as 'normal' communications.

How often do you switch your phone fully off? (ie not just to silent or flight-mode)

As I promised myself before I went away, I left my mobile switched off virtually the whole time, checking it once or twice daily. I left a fairly terse voicemail message suggesting that email was a better way to reach me. I charged the phone once in 3 weeks. No work calls, no mobile Internet connection, no ridiculous roaming charges - just a handful of texts with a couple of friends I wanted to meet up with. I totally recommend that everyone disconnects like this once in a while - it's hugely therapeutic.

Although I certainly wasn't looking out for them specifically, a few mobile/wireless observations caught my eye during my time in the Balkans.....

- Croatia is probably the most developed mobile market in the region at first glance, in terms of 'visible usage', retail sophistication - and I guess influence from the hordes of Italian & northern European tourist mobilistas. Serbian capital Belgrade had adverts for 3G services.
- Lots of 'hand-me-down' highish-end phones from 2005-6 pressed into service for basic prepaid: either 'remaindered' stock, or perhaps recycled second-hand ones (eg unloved Nokia 6670s)
- I saw a total of 3 BlackBerries being used while I was away, 2 of which were held by tourists in Dubrovnik
- Mostly small independent shops selling every current phone (including up-to-the-minute N-series Nokias and the latest S-Es)
- 3G phones even in places with no 3G network (eg Macedonia). Nokia even has streetside adverts specifically for the N-Series in Skopje.
- Nowhere near as many people taking photos with cameraphones as I see in the UK (eg not many 'night out with friends' snaps)
- Absolutely no sign of the oft-repeated myth that 'the new generation will first start using the Internet on mobile phones'. Total rubbish & wishful thinking, as always. Internet cafes everywhere, broadband ads everywhere, no signs of data use on low-end prepay mobiles. I don't believe there's a single individual on the planet, outside maybe Japan, whose 'first experience of the Internet has been on a mobile'.
- Lots of local networks seem to use the cell-location field, with the name of the cell/part of town you're in appearing on your cellphone screen. Not sure what this achieves, really - I generally know where I am, and if I'm lost I need something a bit more specific. Only exception I found was falling asleep in a bus/train in a foreign country & waking to be uncertain of how close you are to your destination.
- Macedonia allegedly has a countrywide WiFi network, although I suspect this is a bit of an exaggeration. I saw a grand total of 2 laptop users, both in a cafe with its own (free) WiFi. No WiFi handsets on sale in the shops either - although bizarrely one retailer did have a couple of ISDN (!) videoconferencing terminals (!!) on display. Rather than wasting money on metro-WiFi, I suspect a better investment for the country would be in the roads in the capital city, which are in shocking condition.
- typical Internet cafe price - about $3-4 an hour, more in Croatia, less in Bosnia & Serbia.

Also, just before I went away, I bought a new digital camera (a really small handset-sized Ricoh Caplio R6, which has 7x zoom & 1-sec startup time). I'd just gone past the 1000th pic I'd taken with my SonyEricsson K800i, which I'd been using as my main digicam for a year & generally rave about. But I've found that I've taken 700 great pics in just 3 weeks on the Ricoh - the mobile industry is still some way behind state-of-the-art in imaging.