I've just been reading this post from SMS Text News about remote-wipe capabilities for handsets. This has been something that's been discussed for years, especially in the context of enterprise-issued devices like BlackBerries or other smartphones.
But while I agree in principle with the idea, I don't agree with the notion that this would best be provided as a service for (say) two pounds per user per month.
Why? Because I perceive this as a sort of insurance policy. And insurance to me is not something that is "worth" a monthly fee, because on a monthly basis nothing is done by the provider. I have an annual car insurance policy, and annual home insurance policy, and (because I travel frequently) an annual travel insurance policy. Each year the premium and the fine-print conditions are renegotiated, and I expect to be able to shop around between competing providers.
... and if and when I actually need to make a claim, I accept that there may be an extra "per event" charge (the excess) involved. And in the case of car insurance, a whole range of extra factors are taken into account to determine my risk level (garage, where I live, job, traffic offences etc) and price the premium accordingly. And for each year that I don't claim, I get a discount on the next year's premium (which is transferrable to a competing provider too).
Now, I understand why mobile operators are focused on monthly billables. They are measured on monthly ARPU by their management and investors. And typical mobile contracts are of variable lengths, 12/18/24 months, so an annual insurance / remote-wipe policy doesn't fit so well.
But some of the work I've been doing recently for a billing & OSS client (Highdeal) has made me think about the lessons that could be learnt, and practices adopted, across industries. In this instance, I think the mobile industry could learn quite a bit about charging for insurance policies. Annual fees make sense, as does some form of recognition of relative risk for individual users. The mix of fixed and per-event fees makes the customer perceive value - even if they don't have their phone stolen and wiped.
It should also be possible to have 3rd-parties providing the insurance, to ensure competition in terms of both price and features. The operator could even act as "insurance broker" in this regard, representing many different device-management providers, and still take a commission and conduct the billing. This would also act as an advantage for those handsets sold through the operator's own channel, as they could be pre-configured correctly. But equally, it needs to be (easily) possible for me to select a totally independent provider (or self-manage the devices if I'm an enterprise) if that makes more sense.
There are plenty of other examples of mobile services for which the current bi-polar choice of "per event" or "per month" are both poor fits with user preferences. To be fair, we are moving to a few "per day" or "per week" options for things like data plans, and some promotional tariffs and linked prices. But there's still a heavy monthly billing-cycle cloud overhanging even innovative pricing methods.
I had an interesting recent example of this: I renewed my main personal mobile contract with O2 via Carphone Warehouse, which had actually been running for a year longer than the original 12-month term. I negotiated an upgraded handset, and a different tariff plan, including a new flatrate data allowance. But could it start immediately? No, not even for a longstanding customer. I had to wait until the next month for it to kick in, before which data was still charged at the prior ridiculous levels. So naturally when I got my shiny new phone, I switched off the 3G to stop myself accidentally racking up huge charges, and made sure not to use the new operator services on it until next month's cycle comes into force. Now, I'm pretty sure that most users' behaviour with a new phone's capabilities is set in concrete by their first week's experience with it. Counterproductive for operators wanting uptake of new services, eh?
So.... I think in general there needs to be much greater flexibility in how mobile services are priced and billed, rather than just using the current lazy catch-all monthly rating mechanisms. There needs to be flexibility on matters like annual billing. And some things need to take effect immediately, not sometime next month.
Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Latency in mobile - more needs to be done
When most people refer to latency in mobile networks, they are talking about the inherent lag in traffic going through the network, which includes aspects like buffering of traffic in the various nodes like base stations and controllers, as well as any processing in the network core and the handset itself.
There will always be a trade-off between latency and spectral efficiency, because the best compression algorithms have to wait for enough inbound data to arrive before processing it and crunching it down in size. Error correction also plays a part here.
All this is well-known, and the subject of focus in the industry. Recent generations of technology like HSPA have improved latency considerably.
However, there is a second class of latency which often gets overlooked. It is initial call-setup time, or initial data connection time. I'm old enough to remember when the PSTN network was digitalised - and how miraculous it seemed that a call recipient's phone started ringing as soon as you pressed the last digit on your own handset. Yet in mobile, we're still stuck with the type-in-numbers-then-hit-send mentality. We still have to wait for 5, 10, even 20 seconds before the call connects.
And it's the same for data too. What's called the "wake-from-idle" time on the current generation of HSDPA phones and modems is frequently dreadful (although this is also down to how the network is configured). The "idle mode" is used to conserve power, but it's a trade-off against good user experience. The first time I use the browser on a phone during a day (or worse, after I emerge from a tube station) it takes an age to connect, then display a downloaded page. Same thing after the network drops into idle mode during occasional use - it's a noticeable lag compared with a PC. Both connection time to WiFi/broadband, and response time when you go to a web page, are much faster in most circumstances.
HSPA Evolved (aka HSPA+) should help with the data wake-from-idle. But in the meantime, referring to HSPA as always-on is a misnomer. I also suspect that the whole idle/active state thing probably fits very poorly with always-on apps like many background services, presence, AJAX web pages and the like. As usual, there's been a disconnect between the network side of mobile innovation and application/user-behaviour aspects.
Yes, it's only a few seconds, but it's this type of thing that will lead to niggling customer dissatisfaction with mobile broadband compared to fixed connections. If you're used to instantaneous DSL or cable - or better still, ethernet in a school or workplace - then that extra bit of initial latency could have a disproportionate effect on overall quality of experience.
On the voice call set-up time, I'm not sure what the answer is, because I suspect that much of the problem is in the telephony application and signalling, rather than the network. It strikes me that this could well be a killer differentiator for VoIP in mobile - either operator-based or independent. It seems strange now, but I remember well just how different and better phone calls became with instant connection. Never mind price, or fancy voice mashups - maybe wVoIP companies should think about a really obvious and tangible benefit to end users - not wasting 10 seconds of your life every time you make a call.
"Instantaneous" has a lot of value. The mobile industry should focus on it more.
There will always be a trade-off between latency and spectral efficiency, because the best compression algorithms have to wait for enough inbound data to arrive before processing it and crunching it down in size. Error correction also plays a part here.
All this is well-known, and the subject of focus in the industry. Recent generations of technology like HSPA have improved latency considerably.
However, there is a second class of latency which often gets overlooked. It is initial call-setup time, or initial data connection time. I'm old enough to remember when the PSTN network was digitalised - and how miraculous it seemed that a call recipient's phone started ringing as soon as you pressed the last digit on your own handset. Yet in mobile, we're still stuck with the type-in-numbers-then-hit-send mentality. We still have to wait for 5, 10, even 20 seconds before the call connects.
And it's the same for data too. What's called the "wake-from-idle" time on the current generation of HSDPA phones and modems is frequently dreadful (although this is also down to how the network is configured). The "idle mode" is used to conserve power, but it's a trade-off against good user experience. The first time I use the browser on a phone during a day (or worse, after I emerge from a tube station) it takes an age to connect, then display a downloaded page. Same thing after the network drops into idle mode during occasional use - it's a noticeable lag compared with a PC. Both connection time to WiFi/broadband, and response time when you go to a web page, are much faster in most circumstances.
HSPA Evolved (aka HSPA+) should help with the data wake-from-idle. But in the meantime, referring to HSPA as always-on is a misnomer. I also suspect that the whole idle/active state thing probably fits very poorly with always-on apps like many background services, presence, AJAX web pages and the like. As usual, there's been a disconnect between the network side of mobile innovation and application/user-behaviour aspects.
Yes, it's only a few seconds, but it's this type of thing that will lead to niggling customer dissatisfaction with mobile broadband compared to fixed connections. If you're used to instantaneous DSL or cable - or better still, ethernet in a school or workplace - then that extra bit of initial latency could have a disproportionate effect on overall quality of experience.
On the voice call set-up time, I'm not sure what the answer is, because I suspect that much of the problem is in the telephony application and signalling, rather than the network. It strikes me that this could well be a killer differentiator for VoIP in mobile - either operator-based or independent. It seems strange now, but I remember well just how different and better phone calls became with instant connection. Never mind price, or fancy voice mashups - maybe wVoIP companies should think about a really obvious and tangible benefit to end users - not wasting 10 seconds of your life every time you make a call.
"Instantaneous" has a lot of value. The mobile industry should focus on it more.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Mobile widgets - who wants them?
Maybe I'm missing the point, but I'm starting to think that the fascination that the mobile apps industry has with "widgets" (small Internet-connected applications) is misplaced. I'll happily confess that I haven't looked at the sector in huge depth yet, but on first sight there seem to be several weak logical connections in the whole premise. The argument seems to be go something like:
1) Phones are small with small screens
2) Therefore small applications are good, especially if they only take up a small amount of screen space
3) Phones don't have much memory, but are getting better browsers & faster/cheaper data connections
4) Therefore using some sort of central widget "engine" and UI framework makes it easier to have lots of widgets on one phone rather than lots of native applications
5) We want to sell lots of mobile advertising in future
6) Therefore having some sort of closed widget environment (but based on reasonably open standards) with built-in advertising functions gives us a great channel to the mobile user
7) Most "normal" people don't like installing native apps on phones. And developers don't like the fragmentation of platforms.
8) Therefore make a 'library' of mini-applications to enable people to search for and "discover" widgets and download them, working across lots of handsets.
But frankly, based on recent experiences, I can't see where the customer demand lies. I can see why the industry would like widgets to be adopted. But I fail to see why end users are going to be bothered.
In particular, there's a whole range of issues that are unsolved:
1) I still see no evidence that "normal" people want to "discover" stuff to download to a handset. Yes I know that umpty-million people are using iPhone app store, but they're not "normal" in a 3-billion-mobile-users sense of the word.
2) Always-on widgets are battery-killers. And given that different phones (and different networks) have different optimal methods for power-management, the whole abstraction / single-platform notion falls flat on its face. I could fry an egg on my Nokia E71 if I leave some widget stuff running in the background.
3) Based on my (admittedly limited) experience playing around with things like Widsets and Yahoo Go!, widgets are slow, clunky, and make a big song-and-dance (hey! rotating icons! wooo!) about doing basic stuff that could work perfectly well on a normal browser web page.
4) Browsers are getting *much* better. Many of the current widget tasks can be adequately performed with a decent set of bookmarks and RSS functionality, or using server-side aggregation of web services onto a single home screen.
5) Is there actually any evidence that widgets are popular on PCs? I can't remember seeing any newspaper articles about how cool they are. They're certainly not in what I'd call "the popular consciousness" in the same way that (say) Skype is, or even mobile broadband / 3G dongles. Vista's low uptake rate won't have helped either.
6) Wearing my "end user" hat, widgets appear to offer the same stuff that could be done in the browser, but with less flexibility (how do I delete that Yahoo! Entertainment default widget?) but with greater amounts of intrusive advertising. Hmm, let me think about this.
7) Widgets are at the mercy of the handset network connection manager, in dealing with intermittent coverage, use of 2G vs 3G vs WiFi, policy about data access while roaming and so on.
8) Typically there's lousy integration of widgets with the native functions of the phone - especially the dialler, the phonebook & SMS. This might get fixed with initiatives like OMTP's BONDI in the medium term.
As I said upfront, maybe I'm missing the point. I haven't really followed this area in great depth, but that also means I haven't absorbed the hype & groupthink. Or maybe this whole mobile widget thing is just another self-delusional ruse, dreamt up by the mobile apps industry to convince itself that massmarket end-users are actually interested in putting 101 bits of random software on the phones.
1) Phones are small with small screens
2) Therefore small applications are good, especially if they only take up a small amount of screen space
3) Phones don't have much memory, but are getting better browsers & faster/cheaper data connections
4) Therefore using some sort of central widget "engine" and UI framework makes it easier to have lots of widgets on one phone rather than lots of native applications
5) We want to sell lots of mobile advertising in future
6) Therefore having some sort of closed widget environment (but based on reasonably open standards) with built-in advertising functions gives us a great channel to the mobile user
7) Most "normal" people don't like installing native apps on phones. And developers don't like the fragmentation of platforms.
8) Therefore make a 'library' of mini-applications to enable people to search for and "discover" widgets and download them, working across lots of handsets.
But frankly, based on recent experiences, I can't see where the customer demand lies. I can see why the industry would like widgets to be adopted. But I fail to see why end users are going to be bothered.
In particular, there's a whole range of issues that are unsolved:
1) I still see no evidence that "normal" people want to "discover" stuff to download to a handset. Yes I know that umpty-million people are using iPhone app store, but they're not "normal" in a 3-billion-mobile-users sense of the word.
2) Always-on widgets are battery-killers. And given that different phones (and different networks) have different optimal methods for power-management, the whole abstraction / single-platform notion falls flat on its face. I could fry an egg on my Nokia E71 if I leave some widget stuff running in the background.
3) Based on my (admittedly limited) experience playing around with things like Widsets and Yahoo Go!, widgets are slow, clunky, and make a big song-and-dance (hey! rotating icons! wooo!) about doing basic stuff that could work perfectly well on a normal browser web page.
4) Browsers are getting *much* better. Many of the current widget tasks can be adequately performed with a decent set of bookmarks and RSS functionality, or using server-side aggregation of web services onto a single home screen.
5) Is there actually any evidence that widgets are popular on PCs? I can't remember seeing any newspaper articles about how cool they are. They're certainly not in what I'd call "the popular consciousness" in the same way that (say) Skype is, or even mobile broadband / 3G dongles. Vista's low uptake rate won't have helped either.
6) Wearing my "end user" hat, widgets appear to offer the same stuff that could be done in the browser, but with less flexibility (how do I delete that Yahoo! Entertainment default widget?) but with greater amounts of intrusive advertising. Hmm, let me think about this.
7) Widgets are at the mercy of the handset network connection manager, in dealing with intermittent coverage, use of 2G vs 3G vs WiFi, policy about data access while roaming and so on.
8) Typically there's lousy integration of widgets with the native functions of the phone - especially the dialler, the phonebook & SMS. This might get fixed with initiatives like OMTP's BONDI in the medium term.
As I said upfront, maybe I'm missing the point. I haven't really followed this area in great depth, but that also means I haven't absorbed the hype & groupthink. Or maybe this whole mobile widget thing is just another self-delusional ruse, dreamt up by the mobile apps industry to convince itself that massmarket end-users are actually interested in putting 101 bits of random software on the phones.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Femto provisioning - what else is needed?
Interesting to see the Femto Forum look to standardise on a protocol called TR-069 for remote provisioning and management of femtos last week. This doesn't come as a huge surprise to me on a number of grounds, especially as the same approach is used for management of many existing broadband home gateways and modems.
A discussion I had in the past with a remote-management vendor highlighted the possibility of being able to "daisy chain" a number of devices using TR-069. Given that most femtos over the next few years will be standalone, and need to be plugged into the ethernet port of a separate router or gateway (possibly provided by a separate service provider), that is a very important consideration.
It also raises the possibility of outsourced management/provisioning. For example, I have a BT Home Hub gateway attached to my BT ADSL line - given that I'm unlikely to churn to a triple/quadplay provider just to get a femto, I could quite imagine BT offering wholesale "pass-through" device management services to Vodafone or O2 or another licenced-spectrum operator.
However, one aspect is left unclear - and is perhaps for "future development". I believe that it will be important to manage (and reconfigure / download in some cases) software on the handset to enable it to work better with the femto. This is especially the case if the operator wants to enable any new "connected home" services on the phone. While such changes could be done "over the air" or using approaches like OMA DM, it may also make sense to tie these in with the femto provisioning itself.
A discussion I had in the past with a remote-management vendor highlighted the possibility of being able to "daisy chain" a number of devices using TR-069. Given that most femtos over the next few years will be standalone, and need to be plugged into the ethernet port of a separate router or gateway (possibly provided by a separate service provider), that is a very important consideration.
It also raises the possibility of outsourced management/provisioning. For example, I have a BT Home Hub gateway attached to my BT ADSL line - given that I'm unlikely to churn to a triple/quadplay provider just to get a femto, I could quite imagine BT offering wholesale "pass-through" device management services to Vodafone or O2 or another licenced-spectrum operator.
However, one aspect is left unclear - and is perhaps for "future development". I believe that it will be important to manage (and reconfigure / download in some cases) software on the handset to enable it to work better with the femto. This is especially the case if the operator wants to enable any new "connected home" services on the phone. While such changes could be done "over the air" or using approaches like OMA DM, it may also make sense to tie these in with the femto provisioning itself.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Embedded 3G laptop hype
OK, hands up which of you have got a laptop with an embedded 3G modem?
Right, now you can put your hands down again. Yes, both of you.
There are plenty of mobile technology areas that are getting hype at the moment, but the one which seems to represent the greatest triumph of marketing over reality is that of laptops with built-in 3G modules. It's probably the area where an onslaught of PR by Ericsson, the GSMA and assorted mobile operators has been most successful in skewing the industry's view of supposed inevitability. And of course, it's an amusing shot across the bows of the WiMAX fleet, which is only expecting a handful of Intel "Echo Peak" embedded PCs at the end of the year in the US only.
The laptop manufacturers have been partly complicit in this, but only because they're being bribed with the promise of subsidies, or possible cold hard cash in terms of "activation bounties" when customers sign up.
I've written extensively before about why the Embedded Emperor has no clothes. It's also something that regularly crops up in client meetings with operators and others. When I asked to explain why there's such as gap between promise and reality, I typically get as far as saying something like "....and seventeenthly...." before the penny drops.
One of the biggest issues is consumer ignorance and apathy. Compared with 3G dongles, embedded laptops don't even register on the radar screens of Mr Average Customer (especially in the UK, which is awash with dongle advertising). My perception is that the whole idea of "connectivity on a USB stick" is a nice easy concept for retailer and customer alike, especially given the ubiquity of USB memory these days.
A dongle is simply "broadband on a stick", with a cute & memorable name.
Just in case I was missing something though, I thought I'd do a quick check on the current retail marketplace.
First stop, Dell's UK website. Nothing obvious on the main consumer laptop page - no mention of mobile in the bullet points for the key Inspiron & other brands. No mobile filter in the "narrow your selection" filter. But right at the bottom of the page is a Vodafone "partner" link (as well as two Tiscali fixed-broadband ones). That goes through to a dedicated Voda page with 18 and 24 month contracts described. And a sidebar with "To see the full range of Dell products with built-in mobile broadband, click here". Which doesn't have a live link, but just a note to the webmaster saying "needs link". Clicking through to a couple of the PCs, I could add in the (Voda-only) 3.6Mbit/s HSDPA card for £89 (personal user) or £120 (business user, with some fiddly rebate offer). Alternatively, I could go to the Vodafone site & get the same dataplans, but get a dongle for free - including a 7.2Mbit/s stick if you take a 24-month contract.
So, £90 for embedded, or £zero for a faster external dongle. Same Voda data plans. Hmm, tricky decision, that.
Next stop, Carphone Warehouse. The "Home of Free Laptops" - subsidies all round! And about 6 or 7 different sorts of PC, on all sorts of fixed & mobile broadband contracts, including Orange, 3 and T-Mobile. Toshiba, Acer, Fujitsu-Siemens. All of them based on dongles.
And it's Dongle City on T-Mobile's UK website as well. Not an embedded PC to be seen - until I clicked down through 3 layers of the site and eventually found Internet-Ready Laptops on a sidebar. The page looks like it hasn't been updated for a year, citing 1.8MBit/s speed and roaming available in "18 countries in July 2007". The Toshiba PC on the page was introduced in Nov 2006.
Even on T-Mobile's German website I couldn't find a laptop - and they've probably been Europe's most enthusiastic operator about the whole concept. Although it has got a very cool dongle with HSUPA, HSDPA and DVB-T digital terrestrial TV as well. That's really innovative and certainly differentiated from the embedded 3G modules... guess I'll be getting to "eighteenthly" next time I'm discussing this in a meeting.....
Right, now you can put your hands down again. Yes, both of you.
There are plenty of mobile technology areas that are getting hype at the moment, but the one which seems to represent the greatest triumph of marketing over reality is that of laptops with built-in 3G modules. It's probably the area where an onslaught of PR by Ericsson, the GSMA and assorted mobile operators has been most successful in skewing the industry's view of supposed inevitability. And of course, it's an amusing shot across the bows of the WiMAX fleet, which is only expecting a handful of Intel "Echo Peak" embedded PCs at the end of the year in the US only.
The laptop manufacturers have been partly complicit in this, but only because they're being bribed with the promise of subsidies, or possible cold hard cash in terms of "activation bounties" when customers sign up.
I've written extensively before about why the Embedded Emperor has no clothes. It's also something that regularly crops up in client meetings with operators and others. When I asked to explain why there's such as gap between promise and reality, I typically get as far as saying something like "....and seventeenthly...." before the penny drops.
One of the biggest issues is consumer ignorance and apathy. Compared with 3G dongles, embedded laptops don't even register on the radar screens of Mr Average Customer (especially in the UK, which is awash with dongle advertising). My perception is that the whole idea of "connectivity on a USB stick" is a nice easy concept for retailer and customer alike, especially given the ubiquity of USB memory these days.
A dongle is simply "broadband on a stick", with a cute & memorable name.
Just in case I was missing something though, I thought I'd do a quick check on the current retail marketplace.
First stop, Dell's UK website. Nothing obvious on the main consumer laptop page - no mention of mobile in the bullet points for the key Inspiron & other brands. No mobile filter in the "narrow your selection" filter. But right at the bottom of the page is a Vodafone "partner" link (as well as two Tiscali fixed-broadband ones). That goes through to a dedicated Voda page with 18 and 24 month contracts described. And a sidebar with "To see the full range of Dell products with built-in mobile broadband, click here". Which doesn't have a live link, but just a note to the webmaster saying "needs link". Clicking through to a couple of the PCs, I could add in the (Voda-only) 3.6Mbit/s HSDPA card for £89 (personal user) or £120 (business user, with some fiddly rebate offer). Alternatively, I could go to the Vodafone site & get the same dataplans, but get a dongle for free - including a 7.2Mbit/s stick if you take a 24-month contract.
So, £90 for embedded, or £zero for a faster external dongle. Same Voda data plans. Hmm, tricky decision, that.
Next stop, Carphone Warehouse. The "Home of Free Laptops" - subsidies all round! And about 6 or 7 different sorts of PC, on all sorts of fixed & mobile broadband contracts, including Orange, 3 and T-Mobile. Toshiba, Acer, Fujitsu-Siemens. All of them based on dongles.
And it's Dongle City on T-Mobile's UK website as well. Not an embedded PC to be seen - until I clicked down through 3 layers of the site and eventually found Internet-Ready Laptops on a sidebar. The page looks like it hasn't been updated for a year, citing 1.8MBit/s speed and roaming available in "18 countries in July 2007". The Toshiba PC on the page was introduced in Nov 2006.
Even on T-Mobile's German website I couldn't find a laptop - and they've probably been Europe's most enthusiastic operator about the whole concept. Although it has got a very cool dongle with HSUPA, HSDPA and DVB-T digital terrestrial TV as well. That's really innovative and certainly differentiated from the embedded 3G modules... guess I'll be getting to "eighteenthly" next time I'm discussing this in a meeting.....
Thoughts on smartphone usage - Nokia E71
This is a personal post, based on my own recent experiences, as I've been playing around with a Nokia E71 for the last month or so. (Disclosure: the device was a freebie given away at a press conference, but the timing was spot-on as I needed a new data-type phone anyway).
As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm not hugely enthusiastic about smartphones as a personal user of mobile devices. I'm not especially interested in "discovering" things, I don't think that "content" is particularly important, and I'm certainly not bothered about wasting my life finding & downloading software to use on my phone. That said, from time to time I need to use various apps from a work perspective - trying out VoIP clients and a few other bits & pieces, for example. I'm also trying to force myself to use some of the more Web 2.0 things, but frankly it's still 95% professional interest to see if they work, rather than actually personally wanting them.
On the other hand, I do browse the web & email on mobile devices quite a lot, so having a convenient & fast mobile Internet device of some description is definitely a must, at least during "working hours". And I do mean browse, not "find" or do "local" stuff - I want to occasionally use Google, check up on a couple of web forums, download & read my normal RSS feeds, visit restaurant websites and so on. But when I'm "off duty" at evenings/weekends, having something with a decent camera, phonebook & SMS user experience is much more important than Internet access.
So for various reasons, I tend to prefer having 2 devices - one phone-type thing (I also have a new SonyEricsson C902) which is my main voice+personal device, and one web-type thing for times when I might actually need mobile Internet access & am not sitting with my laptop.
So - the E71. Physically, it looks & feels like a quality device - slim, quite weighty, metal rather than plastic, decent form factor with a QWERTY but not too brick-like. I'd say it's much cooler than most Blackberries & Windows devices and comments from other "business gadget" users tend to concur. Conversely, most "normobs" still look at it as a bland corporate device, at least in the UK, where any mobile with a QWERTY marks you out as a middle-aged boring worker-bee drone.
One side-effect of the metal casing is that it gets noticeably warm when using apps that use the radio a lot - which gives a good tactile warning of impending battery exhaustion.
Some thoughts on various of the features, apps (and the OS) that are native on the device or that I've subsequently installed:
- Browser (Webkit) is good, if a little slow at times (I think this is the software but could also be the network, especially the wake-up time from idle mode on HSDPA). Renders most normal web pages quite well, plus some Ajax-type things too. It's certainly useable for "the real web", although it's frustrating enough at times that I certainly wouldn't want it as my primary means to get online. At home, I'll still tend to fire up my laptop instead.
- Email client - not great. Doesn't handle HTML emails or attachments in a particularly intuitive way, and it's a bit annoying the way it displays headers & the like. That said, my experience is rather stifled by the difficulty I've had in setting up outbound email via 3's network - I can't get them to send via with a disruptive-analysis.com email address because of some POP3 config weirdness.
- Connection Manager - pretty awful. I can't seem to get it to have complex default rules - in particular I'd like to set it to "Use my home WiFi if it's available, otherwise use the 3 mobile APN". I suspect something like a DeviceScape or other 3rd-party CM client would fix this, but I haven't wanted to take the time to download & try and set it up yet.
- WiFi - This has improved immensely compared with my previous experiences of dual-mode phones. Very very quick to identify WiFi APs and authenticate, and doesn't seem to chew up battery anywhere near as much as it used to a year or so back. This goes to show what optimisations can do when handset & chipset companies put their minds to it. Let's hope the same happens with Femtocell-optimised phones, although I still seem to be the only person shouting about that particular issue!
- Widsets (Nokia's Widget platform). I'm using this as a sort of RSS reader at the moment. It's OK, but a bit frustrating. It's obviously intended as some sort of future advertising platform, but that gets in the way of the stuff I want to read. It's also very slow to download stuff, even over HSDPA (text appears in chunks slower than I can read them, so I find myself waiting), doesn't seem to include embedded links in the blogs I typically use, and turns the phone in to a portable toaster if I leave it running in the background. I have to say that I'm really not a great believer on widgets on either PC or phone, and this does nothing to dispell the view. If I wasn't such as lazy user of devices I'd go & "discover" a better way to get RSS feeds, but I can't be bothered & will just put up with the pain for now.
- Voice & SMS. Don't know, haven't used them at all
- Camera - pretty dreadful to be honest, despite being billed as a 3MP device. I suspect I may have a pre-release version of the software, because it does some really weird things to colours, especially in dim light. I know that Nokia has some excellent cameras on its N-series phones, so I'm guessing this is an anomaly.
- Fring & Truphone. Unfortunately, neither of these had E71-optimised VoIP clients when I looked a couple of weeks ago. I'll check back at another point.
- Yahoo Go! Almost exactly a year ago, I gave the big Y! a hard kicking over its mobile capabilities. The good news is that the current version of Y! Go is a bit better. The bad news is that it's still pretty awful. There's this awful rotating-carousel of icons/services/widgets, most of which are useless & non-deletable (how can I get rid of the Sports & Entertainment widgets? And I don't want Flickr. And I can't add Y! Messenger or My Yahoo). At least the email inbox actually refreshes itself, unlike my experience from a year ago. Although reading a mail on the device doesn't change the read/unread status on my PC. Overall it's far too much of an attempt to be an all-round on device portal, which I don't want or need.
- Nokia Maps - OK but a bit fiddly, and keeps trying to sell me add on services. Scrolls too slowly too - needs some work on the user interface. So instead, I use...
- Google Maps - I'm fast moving to the view that G Maps is the one application I'd be prepared to swallow my pride about downloads, and put on any device, work or personal, as long as I had a flatrate data plan. It just works, even without GPS switched on. It gives me a great map of where I am by using Cell ID - I don't need turn by turn directions, just an electronic equivalent of an A-Z atlas. (Note: I'm almost always walking when I need directions, not driving - I don't need SatNav in the car given my travel patterns).
One question which I'm sure will crop up is "Why don't you use an Apple iPhone or a BlackBerry instead?". The main reason is this: The Nokia is a "vanilla" device. It's not provided with an operator subscription at all, nor any customisations or lock-downs. While this has proved a bit of a negative because of my email hassles, it's completely outweighed by the fact that I'm free to choose whichever service provider & method of billing I like.
In my case, I'm using a prepay SIM from 3, which enables me to get flatrate data for £5 per month. I don't use the thing for voice or SMS, so that's all I'm paying. $10 / Euro7 per month for full HSDPA mobile web browsing & the ability to mess around with assorted other applications. No blocking of VoIP or anything else, just a pure pipe. Bargain. None of the other UK operators (I think) permit a similar deal - certainly not on an iPhone or BlackBerry.
Overall - it's very useful as a mobile Web device, but I'm still left cold by most mobile applications, with the honourable exception of Google Maps. And for a QWERTY device, it's aesthetically pleasing. Yes, an iPhone would be better, but it's certainly not worth the extra cash & carrier lock-in. For the growing % of users who want to disaggregate device purchase from access subscription, Nokia "gets it" more than most of its peers.
That said, I'm still not sure I'd really want to pay the £355 that it retails at - I'd much rather lose some of the "smartness" and just have a simpler £100-150 data-only tablet-type device made up of HSPA chipset + screen + browser + battery. There's so much unnecessary software in the thing that must add to the bill of materials & time/cost of testing and integration.
As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm not hugely enthusiastic about smartphones as a personal user of mobile devices. I'm not especially interested in "discovering" things, I don't think that "content" is particularly important, and I'm certainly not bothered about wasting my life finding & downloading software to use on my phone. That said, from time to time I need to use various apps from a work perspective - trying out VoIP clients and a few other bits & pieces, for example. I'm also trying to force myself to use some of the more Web 2.0 things, but frankly it's still 95% professional interest to see if they work, rather than actually personally wanting them.
On the other hand, I do browse the web & email on mobile devices quite a lot, so having a convenient & fast mobile Internet device of some description is definitely a must, at least during "working hours". And I do mean browse, not "find" or do "local" stuff - I want to occasionally use Google, check up on a couple of web forums, download & read my normal RSS feeds, visit restaurant websites and so on. But when I'm "off duty" at evenings/weekends, having something with a decent camera, phonebook & SMS user experience is much more important than Internet access.
So for various reasons, I tend to prefer having 2 devices - one phone-type thing (I also have a new SonyEricsson C902) which is my main voice+personal device, and one web-type thing for times when I might actually need mobile Internet access & am not sitting with my laptop.
So - the E71. Physically, it looks & feels like a quality device - slim, quite weighty, metal rather than plastic, decent form factor with a QWERTY but not too brick-like. I'd say it's much cooler than most Blackberries & Windows devices and comments from other "business gadget" users tend to concur. Conversely, most "normobs" still look at it as a bland corporate device, at least in the UK, where any mobile with a QWERTY marks you out as a middle-aged boring worker-bee drone.
One side-effect of the metal casing is that it gets noticeably warm when using apps that use the radio a lot - which gives a good tactile warning of impending battery exhaustion.
Some thoughts on various of the features, apps (and the OS) that are native on the device or that I've subsequently installed:
- Browser (Webkit) is good, if a little slow at times (I think this is the software but could also be the network, especially the wake-up time from idle mode on HSDPA). Renders most normal web pages quite well, plus some Ajax-type things too. It's certainly useable for "the real web", although it's frustrating enough at times that I certainly wouldn't want it as my primary means to get online. At home, I'll still tend to fire up my laptop instead.
- Email client - not great. Doesn't handle HTML emails or attachments in a particularly intuitive way, and it's a bit annoying the way it displays headers & the like. That said, my experience is rather stifled by the difficulty I've had in setting up outbound email via 3's network - I can't get them to send via with a disruptive-analysis.com email address because of some POP3 config weirdness.
- Connection Manager - pretty awful. I can't seem to get it to have complex default rules - in particular I'd like to set it to "Use my home WiFi if it's available, otherwise use the 3 mobile APN". I suspect something like a DeviceScape or other 3rd-party CM client would fix this, but I haven't wanted to take the time to download & try and set it up yet.
- WiFi - This has improved immensely compared with my previous experiences of dual-mode phones. Very very quick to identify WiFi APs and authenticate, and doesn't seem to chew up battery anywhere near as much as it used to a year or so back. This goes to show what optimisations can do when handset & chipset companies put their minds to it. Let's hope the same happens with Femtocell-optimised phones, although I still seem to be the only person shouting about that particular issue!
- Widsets (Nokia's Widget platform). I'm using this as a sort of RSS reader at the moment. It's OK, but a bit frustrating. It's obviously intended as some sort of future advertising platform, but that gets in the way of the stuff I want to read. It's also very slow to download stuff, even over HSDPA (text appears in chunks slower than I can read them, so I find myself waiting), doesn't seem to include embedded links in the blogs I typically use, and turns the phone in to a portable toaster if I leave it running in the background. I have to say that I'm really not a great believer on widgets on either PC or phone, and this does nothing to dispell the view. If I wasn't such as lazy user of devices I'd go & "discover" a better way to get RSS feeds, but I can't be bothered & will just put up with the pain for now.
- Voice & SMS. Don't know, haven't used them at all
- Camera - pretty dreadful to be honest, despite being billed as a 3MP device. I suspect I may have a pre-release version of the software, because it does some really weird things to colours, especially in dim light. I know that Nokia has some excellent cameras on its N-series phones, so I'm guessing this is an anomaly.
- Fring & Truphone. Unfortunately, neither of these had E71-optimised VoIP clients when I looked a couple of weeks ago. I'll check back at another point.
- Yahoo Go! Almost exactly a year ago, I gave the big Y! a hard kicking over its mobile capabilities. The good news is that the current version of Y! Go is a bit better. The bad news is that it's still pretty awful. There's this awful rotating-carousel of icons/services/widgets, most of which are useless & non-deletable (how can I get rid of the Sports & Entertainment widgets? And I don't want Flickr. And I can't add Y! Messenger or My Yahoo). At least the email inbox actually refreshes itself, unlike my experience from a year ago. Although reading a mail on the device doesn't change the read/unread status on my PC. Overall it's far too much of an attempt to be an all-round on device portal, which I don't want or need.
- Nokia Maps - OK but a bit fiddly, and keeps trying to sell me add on services. Scrolls too slowly too - needs some work on the user interface. So instead, I use...
- Google Maps - I'm fast moving to the view that G Maps is the one application I'd be prepared to swallow my pride about downloads, and put on any device, work or personal, as long as I had a flatrate data plan. It just works, even without GPS switched on. It gives me a great map of where I am by using Cell ID - I don't need turn by turn directions, just an electronic equivalent of an A-Z atlas. (Note: I'm almost always walking when I need directions, not driving - I don't need SatNav in the car given my travel patterns).
One question which I'm sure will crop up is "Why don't you use an Apple iPhone or a BlackBerry instead?". The main reason is this: The Nokia is a "vanilla" device. It's not provided with an operator subscription at all, nor any customisations or lock-downs. While this has proved a bit of a negative because of my email hassles, it's completely outweighed by the fact that I'm free to choose whichever service provider & method of billing I like.
In my case, I'm using a prepay SIM from 3, which enables me to get flatrate data for £5 per month. I don't use the thing for voice or SMS, so that's all I'm paying. $10 / Euro7 per month for full HSDPA mobile web browsing & the ability to mess around with assorted other applications. No blocking of VoIP or anything else, just a pure pipe. Bargain. None of the other UK operators (I think) permit a similar deal - certainly not on an iPhone or BlackBerry.
Overall - it's very useful as a mobile Web device, but I'm still left cold by most mobile applications, with the honourable exception of Google Maps. And for a QWERTY device, it's aesthetically pleasing. Yes, an iPhone would be better, but it's certainly not worth the extra cash & carrier lock-in. For the growing % of users who want to disaggregate device purchase from access subscription, Nokia "gets it" more than most of its peers.
That said, I'm still not sure I'd really want to pay the £355 that it retails at - I'd much rather lose some of the "smartness" and just have a simpler £100-150 data-only tablet-type device made up of HSPA chipset + screen + browser + battery. There's so much unnecessary software in the thing that must add to the bill of materials & time/cost of testing and integration.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Double-counting and half-counting mobile broadband
I'm up into my neck in a spreadsheet model of mobile broadband adoption & device usage at the moment.
An interesting paradox is currently bending my mind:
- some mobile broadband subscriptions will be "double-counted". One subscription might cover multiple devices, particularly for non-SIM technologies like Mobile WiMAX. So one individual user might have a single WiMAX "account", but have 2 or 3 separate devices permitted to use it (eg laptop + personal media player + in-car system) . A similar scenario might be people who SIM-swap between multiple devices, or share a 3G USB modem or mobile-backhauled local router.
- some other mobile broadband subscriptions will be "half-counted". One device might have access to multiple network accounts or technologies. So a laptop might have embedded WiMAX, plus an HSPA modem. Or a single operator may operate multiple network technologies, and use 802.21 in the connection software, to attach the device to whichever is available at a given location.
The easy option is to design the model to ignore these effects, and assume they're just minor or will cancel each other out. But the current roughly 30% mismatch between cellular user & subscriber data suggests that's an oversimplification too far.
Edit: The more I think about this, the more complex it gets. One of the other issues is going to be the possibility to get "ad hoc" access to WiMAX, and maybe even HSPA/LTE in the future, in the same sort of way that you can get one-off access to WiFi hotspots. If I go on a trip to 5 countries with a mobile-enabled laptop, and sign up for 2 days' WiMAX with local providers in each place - or buy a local prepay data SIM for HSPA - does that count as 5 "subscriptions"?
One thing's for sure... we're all going to have to be very wary of reported statistics on mobile broadband. I've just realised I've already got 4 subs myself - a 3 HSDPA dongle, a 3 prepay SIM in a smartphone, a new HSDPA featurephone with flatrate data on O2, and a T-Mobile 3G SIM which is actually in a 2G device.
Edit 2: No, I've got 5 subs. I forgot I'd been given another temporary week-long HSDPA modem & SIM in February by the GSMA in Barcelona. Although that one may no longer be counted as "active" depending on Telefonica's definition of churn.... See what I mean about the stats?
An interesting paradox is currently bending my mind:
- some mobile broadband subscriptions will be "double-counted". One subscription might cover multiple devices, particularly for non-SIM technologies like Mobile WiMAX. So one individual user might have a single WiMAX "account", but have 2 or 3 separate devices permitted to use it (eg laptop + personal media player + in-car system) . A similar scenario might be people who SIM-swap between multiple devices, or share a 3G USB modem or mobile-backhauled local router.
- some other mobile broadband subscriptions will be "half-counted". One device might have access to multiple network accounts or technologies. So a laptop might have embedded WiMAX, plus an HSPA modem. Or a single operator may operate multiple network technologies, and use 802.21 in the connection software, to attach the device to whichever is available at a given location.
The easy option is to design the model to ignore these effects, and assume they're just minor or will cancel each other out. But the current roughly 30% mismatch between cellular user & subscriber data suggests that's an oversimplification too far.
Edit: The more I think about this, the more complex it gets. One of the other issues is going to be the possibility to get "ad hoc" access to WiMAX, and maybe even HSPA/LTE in the future, in the same sort of way that you can get one-off access to WiFi hotspots. If I go on a trip to 5 countries with a mobile-enabled laptop, and sign up for 2 days' WiMAX with local providers in each place - or buy a local prepay data SIM for HSPA - does that count as 5 "subscriptions"?
One thing's for sure... we're all going to have to be very wary of reported statistics on mobile broadband. I've just realised I've already got 4 subs myself - a 3 HSDPA dongle, a 3 prepay SIM in a smartphone, a new HSDPA featurephone with flatrate data on O2, and a T-Mobile 3G SIM which is actually in a 2G device.
Edit 2: No, I've got 5 subs. I forgot I'd been given another temporary week-long HSDPA modem & SIM in February by the GSMA in Barcelona. Although that one may no longer be counted as "active" depending on Telefonica's definition of churn.... See what I mean about the stats?
Mobile Wallet? Whose money is it?
My brother works for a large investment bank & spends a lot of time thinking about the finer details of various financial instruments.
He raised an interesting issue, specifically about London's Oyster card (stored-value card for Tube & Bus travel), but I'm wondering if it applies generically to mobile payments as well.
It's a simple question which is surprisingly difficult to answer: Does the money on a stored-value card belong to the user, or the provider? If Transport for London (in the Oyster example) or a mobile operator (for a mobile wallet or even prepay credit) goes bust, can you get the money back? Or are you at the back of a long list of other creditors? Related to this is what happens if the phone or card breaks.
Given the huge % of the world that uses prepay accounts for mobile - and presumably given that operators will want to avoid credit risk for postpaid users with mobile wallets in future - this is far from an academic question. I've seen some estimates recently that suggest $10's of billions may get spent annually on mobile payments with NFC.
At that level, it's certainly relevant to ask who it belongs to, and what happens when things go wrong. Let's face it, given recent events it seems that normal banks aren't as safe as we used to think - so would you trust a mobile operator to give you better protection for your cash deposits?
(Incidentally - my brother tried to get an answer about Oyster credit, but eventually gave up. He couldn't even find someone who understood the question).
He raised an interesting issue, specifically about London's Oyster card (stored-value card for Tube & Bus travel), but I'm wondering if it applies generically to mobile payments as well.
It's a simple question which is surprisingly difficult to answer: Does the money on a stored-value card belong to the user, or the provider? If Transport for London (in the Oyster example) or a mobile operator (for a mobile wallet or even prepay credit) goes bust, can you get the money back? Or are you at the back of a long list of other creditors? Related to this is what happens if the phone or card breaks.
Given the huge % of the world that uses prepay accounts for mobile - and presumably given that operators will want to avoid credit risk for postpaid users with mobile wallets in future - this is far from an academic question. I've seen some estimates recently that suggest $10's of billions may get spent annually on mobile payments with NFC.
At that level, it's certainly relevant to ask who it belongs to, and what happens when things go wrong. Let's face it, given recent events it seems that normal banks aren't as safe as we used to think - so would you trust a mobile operator to give you better protection for your cash deposits?
(Incidentally - my brother tried to get an answer about Oyster credit, but eventually gave up. He couldn't even find someone who understood the question).
Great article on Web vs. Native mobile apps
I'd heartily recommend reading this post by David Wood (of Symbian, so not exactly unbiased, but very even-handed on this topic). It looks at the very hot topic of whether mobile app development will avoid the headaches of fragmentation and operator lock-downs, and just migrate to the Web and cool AJAX-type tools instead.
My view is similar to David's - for many applications, Mobile Web will be the way to go, for ease of development, cross-platform support, rapid update and so on.
But for some the most important and demanding applications, there will still be a need for native development, even if it comes with a dose of pain.
The same is true on the PC - most things work fine in the browser. But for Skype or anti-virus or serious corporate applications, there's advantages to being able to write the most efficient, powerful, complex code to the native platform if you're capable of doing so.
I'm sure the balance between outright optimisation and convenience will shift over time, and across different application categories and networks. But there isn't "one answer", and developers and service providers will need to work out ways to blend the two paradigms.
My view is similar to David's - for many applications, Mobile Web will be the way to go, for ease of development, cross-platform support, rapid update and so on.
But for some the most important and demanding applications, there will still be a need for native development, even if it comes with a dose of pain.
The same is true on the PC - most things work fine in the browser. But for Skype or anti-virus or serious corporate applications, there's advantages to being able to write the most efficient, powerful, complex code to the native platform if you're capable of doing so.
I'm sure the balance between outright optimisation and convenience will shift over time, and across different application categories and networks. But there isn't "one answer", and developers and service providers will need to work out ways to blend the two paradigms.
A mischievous suggestion - how about a WiMAX/UMB hybrid?
I see that Sprint has left the NGMN (Next Gen Mobile Networks) consortium in something of a huff, after that organisation endorsed LTE as "the answer" for 4G, leaving WiMAX on the table despite scrutinising it for a long time.
To be honest, NGMN's "inclusive" policy of other networks always struck me as a thinly veiled stick with which to prod Ericsson, NSN et al into a more benign IPR and interoperability direction.
So, in the spirit of end-of-the week "What if......?" thinking, I'm speculating about a possible next step. NGMN's other jilted lover is Qualcomm's CDMA-UMB, which is now looking almost completely friendless.
So.... how about a WiMAX / LTE hybrid? Could Intel and Qualcomm bury the hatchet and play nicely together?
What if... Sprint got together with KDDI in Japan (also a CDMA / WiMAX operator) , and locked the 2 silicon companies in a room together with representatives from CDG and the WiMAX Forum, and told them to turn UMB into WiMAX's FDD profile? And make it all neatly backward-compatible & roam-able with EVDO? It might even tempt the Koreans back to the CDMA camp.....
Yes, I know it's probably not practical on technological, commercial or political grounds. But it's fun to speculate anyway.......
To be honest, NGMN's "inclusive" policy of other networks always struck me as a thinly veiled stick with which to prod Ericsson, NSN et al into a more benign IPR and interoperability direction.
So, in the spirit of end-of-the week "What if......?" thinking, I'm speculating about a possible next step. NGMN's other jilted lover is Qualcomm's CDMA-UMB, which is now looking almost completely friendless.
So.... how about a WiMAX / LTE hybrid? Could Intel and Qualcomm bury the hatchet and play nicely together?
What if... Sprint got together with KDDI in Japan (also a CDMA / WiMAX operator) , and locked the 2 silicon companies in a room together with representatives from CDG and the WiMAX Forum, and told them to turn UMB into WiMAX's FDD profile? And make it all neatly backward-compatible & roam-able with EVDO? It might even tempt the Koreans back to the CDMA camp.....
Yes, I know it's probably not practical on technological, commercial or political grounds. But it's fun to speculate anyway.......
Thursday, July 17, 2008
HSUPA stalling?
I've been looking at some of the data on HSUPA deployments, and frankly it's a bit disappointing. There was a news article yesterday quoting Qualcomm saying "This is the year for HSUPA" and "it's now being included as standard for chipsets aimed at 'mid range' devices and by the end of the year will appear as standard on low end phones as well".
To me, that last comment rang alarm bells - it sounds like a marketing pitch "Hey, everyone! HSUPA's the next must-have! Get involved! No, really, everyone's gonna be doing it! Honest....."
Normally that sort of pitch is made when something isn't happening. "Standard on low end phones"...er, well given that WCDMA still isn't standard on low-end devices, I'd be pretty surprised if the world's $30 handsets suddenly skipped straight over HSDPA and went all the way to full HSUPA from GSM.
In fact, there's still a real dearth of HSUPA phones. Although there are 60-odd devices in total, most are modems, dongles, modules & other non-phone products. There's a handful of Toshiba phones in Japan, and some high-end Windows devices from HTC, I-Mate and a couple of other vendors. There are no high-end Nokias with high-speed uplink yet (including the new N96), the iPhone is HSDPA not HSUPA and so on.
So clearly, there's some level of desperate hyperbole.... but the question is how much? Looking at the GSA's statistics for deployments and "commitments", it seems that the wheels have come off the "Uplink" bandwagon a bit. While 51 HSUPA networks have launched, there's only another 17 known to be "committed". Yes, the number of live networks has almost doubled in 6 months, but the future rollout schedule hasn't kept pace. Looking back at some statistics for HSDPA from 2006, when it reached 50 deployments, there was a pipeline of 60+ on the way.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of HSUPA. It's one of the things that makes VoIPo3G much more practical. But I suspect that it's that, coupled with the risks of P2P traffic or people running PC's as web servers over the mobile network, that are leading operators to avoid specifying UPA as a must-have. They'd rather have faster generations of HSDPA, or support for different frequency bands like 900MHz. Despite some of the blather about social networking, there isn't really a killer revenue-generating app for HSUPA services outside of a few road warriors and photographers needing to upload big image & presentation files from PCs. I'm not convinced operators really want to host billions of uncompressed 5MP cameraphone images on their networks, even if the radio network can support it.
I have a suspicion that most operators will probably wait for HSPA+ / HSPA-Evolved before upgrading their uplink, particular for handset users. There will be a slow creep of HSUPA into 3G dongle modems for those markets where shipments have exploded, and you'll start see smartphones gradually coming into the market at end-2008, but you can forget about truly massmarket HSUPA phones until late 2009 or early 2010.
To me, that last comment rang alarm bells - it sounds like a marketing pitch "Hey, everyone! HSUPA's the next must-have! Get involved! No, really, everyone's gonna be doing it! Honest....."
Normally that sort of pitch is made when something isn't happening. "Standard on low end phones"...er, well given that WCDMA still isn't standard on low-end devices, I'd be pretty surprised if the world's $30 handsets suddenly skipped straight over HSDPA and went all the way to full HSUPA from GSM.
In fact, there's still a real dearth of HSUPA phones. Although there are 60-odd devices in total, most are modems, dongles, modules & other non-phone products. There's a handful of Toshiba phones in Japan, and some high-end Windows devices from HTC, I-Mate and a couple of other vendors. There are no high-end Nokias with high-speed uplink yet (including the new N96), the iPhone is HSDPA not HSUPA and so on.
So clearly, there's some level of desperate hyperbole.... but the question is how much? Looking at the GSA's statistics for deployments and "commitments", it seems that the wheels have come off the "Uplink" bandwagon a bit. While 51 HSUPA networks have launched, there's only another 17 known to be "committed". Yes, the number of live networks has almost doubled in 6 months, but the future rollout schedule hasn't kept pace. Looking back at some statistics for HSDPA from 2006, when it reached 50 deployments, there was a pipeline of 60+ on the way.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of HSUPA. It's one of the things that makes VoIPo3G much more practical. But I suspect that it's that, coupled with the risks of P2P traffic or people running PC's as web servers over the mobile network, that are leading operators to avoid specifying UPA as a must-have. They'd rather have faster generations of HSDPA, or support for different frequency bands like 900MHz. Despite some of the blather about social networking, there isn't really a killer revenue-generating app for HSUPA services outside of a few road warriors and photographers needing to upload big image & presentation files from PCs. I'm not convinced operators really want to host billions of uncompressed 5MP cameraphone images on their networks, even if the radio network can support it.
I have a suspicion that most operators will probably wait for HSPA+ / HSPA-Evolved before upgrading their uplink, particular for handset users. There will be a slow creep of HSUPA into 3G dongle modems for those markets where shipments have exploded, and you'll start see smartphones gradually coming into the market at end-2008, but you can forget about truly massmarket HSUPA phones until late 2009 or early 2010.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
BT's Fibre announcement - initial thoughts on impact on mobile
BT has this morning announced a £1.5bn ($3bn) planned rollout of fibre in the UK, principally in urban areas. It is targetting "as many as 10m homes" by 2012 (out of a total of about 25m households, so 40%). The plan is for a mix of fibre running to street-side cabinets (FTTC), plus some fibre-to-the-premise for new-build homes and I'd imagine also some businesses or apartment blocks (FTTP).
There's going to be a lot of discussion about the general proposition and some of the regulatory impact elsewhere, so I thought I'd focus & have a few initial thoughts on the possible impact on the UK mobile industry.
There's going to be a lot of discussion about the general proposition and some of the regulatory impact elsewhere, so I thought I'd focus & have a few initial thoughts on the possible impact on the UK mobile industry.
- Fibre announcements like this put the claims of a narrowing gap between fixed vs. mobile broadband into context. The figures in BT's announcement suggest a range of initial speeds from40Mbit/s for FTTC and 100Mbit/s for FTTP, with roadmaps to 60Mbit/s and 1000Mbit/s respectively. Unlike the "headline" numbers for HSPA and LTE, these are not "shared" capacity or the theoretical speed achieved by a sole user in a cell sitting next to the base station.
- Related to this point, BT also talks about upgrading its other ADSL customers to ADSL2+. In reference to the current discussion about real vs. advertised speeds, it says that the "majority of customers should enjoy speeds of 10Mbit/s or above".
- Coupled with moves by competitors in local loop unbundling, and the UK cable operators, this suggests to me that real-world sustainable average broadband speeds for fixed services should remain 2-5x that of mobile broadband. Yes, there will be specific locations & services where it's occasionally possible to get 10MBit/s+ via a dongle with HSPA or WiMAX or early LTE rollouts, but they'll be offset by other areas of weaker signal strength, congestion from density of users, & limited backhaul capacity.
- On the topic of backhaul, although BT doesn't mention it, presumably they'll be putting fibre to (or near) almost every cell site in the country in the expectation of continued growth in demand for wholesale capacity (or outright dark fibre rental).
- Depending on what happens in the UK's delayed 2.6GHz auction, it seems reasonable to assume that any future BT deployment of WiMAX will also be supported by fibre.
- The statement this morning has some interesting comments about the regulatory changes that BT would hope to see from Ofcom. Although much of its comment initially seems to be aimed at getting the cable & other fixed NGN networks opened up for wholesale, the line "BT’s firm belief is that all next generation networks in the UK should be open as this approach will boost competition and consumers and businesses will benefit." suggests to me that it has its sights set on mandatory wireless wholesale / MVNO access too. It will be extremely interesting to see if this ends up going in the direction of structural separation (NetCo vs ServiceCo) for mobile operators.
- ... on the other hand, if open mobile networks are mandated in the UK, will it make sense for some/all of the MNOs to club together and build a big shared network, rather than competing overlapping ones? That has some interesting implications for spectrum policy too
- FTTH & ADSL2+ should make it possible to run LTE femtos at decent speeds in (some) UK households. Should be interesting to see whether this catalyses a view that UK deployments of LTE could be based initially around a large in-home radio build out.
Friday, July 11, 2008
The upside-down pyramid of mobile broadband
I've been seeing an awful lot of PR spin recently about the numbers of supposed "mobile broadband" subscribers, and how this will likely "overtake" fixed broadband.
While I'm a big believer in 3G dongles, and also in using devices like high-end smartphones (Nokia, iPhone et al) with decent browsers & flatrate data, there's a huge amount of hype here.
A key thing to remember if you're scrutinising numbers is this:
- Pretty much anyone with a 3G modem for a PC & a data subscription will actually use it regularly (unless it's embedded) & probably generate a huge amount of traffic
- Pretty much anyone with fixed broadband will use it very regularly, and so will 1-3 other members of their family too.
- Quite a lot of people with an HSPA or EVDO Rev A handset will never use data at all, or will use it for very occasional downloads or web browsing. Plenty of Nokia N95 or Samsung Soul owners bought the device because it's got a 5MP camera. (I'd expect most iPhone 3G users to be pretty active with their data connection though).
The idea that there is 100m+ active users of "mobile broadband" in any meaningful sense is doubtful. The fact that someone can download the 50kb front page of their operator's WAP portal at 7.2Mbit/s is not exactly what "broadband" means to most casual observers.
I'm currently working on a model of mobile data users & devices & traffic & applications, but as a rule of thumb some averages might be
PC+dongle = 1GB / month
iPhone-type device with decent data plan =100MB / month
Blackberry-type device or smartphone with limited data plan = 10MB / month
Everything else = 1MB / month or less
In other words, there is what Boris Johnson might refer to as an "inverted pyramid of piffle" when it comes to discussion about mobile broadband. A few % of the users generate a huge % of the traffic, while a large chunk of supposed users (ie people with suitable phones & networks) generate none at all. This will change only slowly, as PC-based mobile broadband is still early in its growth cycle, while 3G is being pushed into handsets of people who still don't care about anything more than voice & SMS.
Bottom line - you'll be seeing a lot more press hyperbole about the numbers of "mobile broadband" users. They might be fruit, but they're not all Apples. But don't compare them with Oranges. (Puns intended, sorry, it's Friday afternoon).
While I'm a big believer in 3G dongles, and also in using devices like high-end smartphones (Nokia, iPhone et al) with decent browsers & flatrate data, there's a huge amount of hype here.
A key thing to remember if you're scrutinising numbers is this:
- Pretty much anyone with a 3G modem for a PC & a data subscription will actually use it regularly (unless it's embedded) & probably generate a huge amount of traffic
- Pretty much anyone with fixed broadband will use it very regularly, and so will 1-3 other members of their family too.
- Quite a lot of people with an HSPA or EVDO Rev A handset will never use data at all, or will use it for very occasional downloads or web browsing. Plenty of Nokia N95 or Samsung Soul owners bought the device because it's got a 5MP camera. (I'd expect most iPhone 3G users to be pretty active with their data connection though).
The idea that there is 100m+ active users of "mobile broadband" in any meaningful sense is doubtful. The fact that someone can download the 50kb front page of their operator's WAP portal at 7.2Mbit/s is not exactly what "broadband" means to most casual observers.
I'm currently working on a model of mobile data users & devices & traffic & applications, but as a rule of thumb some averages might be
PC+dongle = 1GB / month
iPhone-type device with decent data plan =100MB / month
Blackberry-type device or smartphone with limited data plan = 10MB / month
Everything else = 1MB / month or less
In other words, there is what Boris Johnson might refer to as an "inverted pyramid of piffle" when it comes to discussion about mobile broadband. A few % of the users generate a huge % of the traffic, while a large chunk of supposed users (ie people with suitable phones & networks) generate none at all. This will change only slowly, as PC-based mobile broadband is still early in its growth cycle, while 3G is being pushed into handsets of people who still don't care about anything more than voice & SMS.
Bottom line - you'll be seeing a lot more press hyperbole about the numbers of "mobile broadband" users. They might be fruit, but they're not all Apples. But don't compare them with Oranges. (Puns intended, sorry, it's Friday afternoon).
Monday, July 07, 2008
Nokia Series 40 6th Edition - featurephone market direction
In my focus on femtocells and spectrum recently, I haven't had as much time to talk about handset software as I would normally. (I know that I'm "owing" a comment on the Symbian Foundation thing as well).
However, another announcement did catch my eye, as it's a bit less glamorous - but arguably more important. Although it's Nokia's high-end devices that get all the limelight, it's the more-basic Series 40 featurephone platform which dominates sales volumes - and which pretty much sets the scene for all low-to-midrange phones globally. Given that it accounts for 30%+ of all worldwide phone shipments - and probably 40%+ or 50%+ in certain markets - any developments in the platform pretty much determine the viability of future next-gen business models.
It's very easy to get hung up on Feature X or Application Y that is supported by S60 / Windows / Android / iPhone / whatever.... but if it ain't in S40, it ain't going to be that important in the really big, wide world.
There's a good general blog article on changes in S40 6th edition here, and the official page for developers is on Forum Nokia here
But I want to dig into this more deeply. Reading through the specs, one thing leaps out at me:
Nokia is turning S40 into a mobile web platform.
There has been a certain amount of speculation that Nokia would push Symbian and S60 down further into the featurephone space, perhaps even getting rid of S40. That's clearly nonsense - S40 has to sell at price points right down to the bottom end of the GSM market, and up to some pretty decently-featured higher-end 3G devices. Symbian won't scale down that low. S40 is still a proprietary OS, which doesn't allow developers to write "native" code.
Other rumours that Nokia is going to revamp S40 with an underlying Linux kernel are obviously wrong too - at least for another year or two.
Critically, there's also no Java multi-tasking capability. S40 remains a resolutely single-task platform. This has a number of side-effects - many of the "converged" concepts of mobile applications implicitly need to run background applications or have multiple 'live" services or windows. IMS really needs multitasking phones to be usable. WiFi in phones really needs multitasking to be useful for anything apart from basic UMA connectivity. Presence, push email, background downloads and a variety of other capabilities all benefit from proper multitasking, even if it possible to kludge workarounds.
There's no JSR281 Java API for IMS in the basic platform, nor JSR180 "Naked SIP". Although in the FAQ it mentions that specific phones might support extra APIs on a case-by-case basis, it singles out NFC support rather than other examples.
(Given that the S40 FAQ only mentions WiFi in the context of UMA, I think we can be fairly confident that notions of putting WiFi "into every handset" are total nonsense. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of S40 phones ever ship with WiFi).
On the other hand, there's lots of Web stuff in S40:
However, another announcement did catch my eye, as it's a bit less glamorous - but arguably more important. Although it's Nokia's high-end devices that get all the limelight, it's the more-basic Series 40 featurephone platform which dominates sales volumes - and which pretty much sets the scene for all low-to-midrange phones globally. Given that it accounts for 30%+ of all worldwide phone shipments - and probably 40%+ or 50%+ in certain markets - any developments in the platform pretty much determine the viability of future next-gen business models.
It's very easy to get hung up on Feature X or Application Y that is supported by S60 / Windows / Android / iPhone / whatever.... but if it ain't in S40, it ain't going to be that important in the really big, wide world.
There's a good general blog article on changes in S40 6th edition here, and the official page for developers is on Forum Nokia here
But I want to dig into this more deeply. Reading through the specs, one thing leaps out at me:
Nokia is turning S40 into a mobile web platform.
There has been a certain amount of speculation that Nokia would push Symbian and S60 down further into the featurephone space, perhaps even getting rid of S40. That's clearly nonsense - S40 has to sell at price points right down to the bottom end of the GSM market, and up to some pretty decently-featured higher-end 3G devices. Symbian won't scale down that low. S40 is still a proprietary OS, which doesn't allow developers to write "native" code.
Other rumours that Nokia is going to revamp S40 with an underlying Linux kernel are obviously wrong too - at least for another year or two.
Critically, there's also no Java multi-tasking capability. S40 remains a resolutely single-task platform. This has a number of side-effects - many of the "converged" concepts of mobile applications implicitly need to run background applications or have multiple 'live" services or windows. IMS really needs multitasking phones to be usable. WiFi in phones really needs multitasking to be useful for anything apart from basic UMA connectivity. Presence, push email, background downloads and a variety of other capabilities all benefit from proper multitasking, even if it possible to kludge workarounds.
There's no JSR281 Java API for IMS in the basic platform, nor JSR180 "Naked SIP". Although in the FAQ it mentions that specific phones might support extra APIs on a case-by-case basis, it singles out NFC support rather than other examples.
(Given that the S40 FAQ only mentions WiFi in the context of UMA, I think we can be fairly confident that notions of putting WiFi "into every handset" are total nonsense. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of S40 phones ever ship with WiFi).
On the other hand, there's lots of Web stuff in S40:
- Webkit-based browser capable of rendering "the real Internet"
- Support for Adobe Flash Lite 3.0
- Suport for Javascript & Ajax
- Developer support for Nokia's Widsets widget platform applies to S40 too
This fits with a lot of the painful truths I've been telling my network infrastructure advisory clients recently - web protocols like HTTP and AJAX are going to create more value for mobile than communications protocols like SIP. Given that architectures like IMS seem to assume that session-based SIP services are the be-all-and-end-all dominant future revenue generators, this poses some very awkward questions indeed. It also makes Ovi look much more important.
On the other hand, all this web goodness in S40 will be totally wasted without decent data plans - especially for the mass of global prepay users which I suspect account for the bulk of S40 phone buyers.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
A thought: HSPA/LTE in unlicenced spectrum? Ideal for femtos?
There's about a zillion frequency bands for 3GPP technologies these days - 700MHz, 850, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600, AWS, various Japanese ones, upcoming UHF bands and so on.
But there's some notable absences - unlicenced 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. The ones that WiFi and Bluetooth and a million other gadgets use.
Sure, its unmanaged, congested, interference-prone.... but for short ranges, who cares? Like, for example, if you had a 2.4GHz HSPA femto at home which you could "roam" onto? (I'm assuming you wouldn't have your own SIM card & HLR).
Why would you want to do this? Different business models - lots of them. And a complete end to the need to put WiFi into phones as well, if you could have a single multi-band chip that supported private cellular as well as operator cellular.
Yes, I know it would have some horrible problems, and I certainly couldn't see the stuffy standards bodies daring to support something so lacking in QoS and control and operator involvement. But if cellular ever wants to stand a chance of competing in homes or enterprise networks, it needs to have an "owned" profile as well as a "service" profile.
But there's some notable absences - unlicenced 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. The ones that WiFi and Bluetooth and a million other gadgets use.
Sure, its unmanaged, congested, interference-prone.... but for short ranges, who cares? Like, for example, if you had a 2.4GHz HSPA femto at home which you could "roam" onto? (I'm assuming you wouldn't have your own SIM card & HLR).
Why would you want to do this? Different business models - lots of them. And a complete end to the need to put WiFi into phones as well, if you could have a single multi-band chip that supported private cellular as well as operator cellular.
Yes, I know it would have some horrible problems, and I certainly couldn't see the stuffy standards bodies daring to support something so lacking in QoS and control and operator involvement. But if cellular ever wants to stand a chance of competing in homes or enterprise networks, it needs to have an "owned" profile as well as a "service" profile.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Mobile Web 2.0 and Power Management
I've been playing around with some Web 2.0 services (Widsets, Yahoo Go etc) on a Nokia E71, and one thing I've noticed is that they kill the battery, as they keep going online looking for new stuff to pull down. Given that the device has a huge 1500MAh battery, the fact it can be depleted in a day (and gets pretty warm to the touch too) indicates to me that we've got a problem here.
Anyone else experienced this? Obviously the simple answer is to turn off "push" and "background apps" but that sort of misses the point.
The other option is to have something clever in the network, like BlackBerry or the new notifications server bit in the Apple system, which wakes up the phone when necessary, without needing it to keep "polling" the network.
I've also heard stories that power issues can completely derail the "mobile presence" model - particularly if you have a "live" address book with hundreds of contacts.
I haven't had a chance to look in detail at yesterday's announcement by OMTP of their BONDI platform for Web 2.0 on phones (I have a meeting with them scheduled for next week), but hopefully there's something in there which could help solve the problem.
Anyone else experienced this? Obviously the simple answer is to turn off "push" and "background apps" but that sort of misses the point.
The other option is to have something clever in the network, like BlackBerry or the new notifications server bit in the Apple system, which wakes up the phone when necessary, without needing it to keep "polling" the network.
I've also heard stories that power issues can completely derail the "mobile presence" model - particularly if you have a "live" address book with hundreds of contacts.
I haven't had a chance to look in detail at yesterday's announcement by OMTP of their BONDI platform for Web 2.0 on phones (I have a meeting with them scheduled for next week), but hopefully there's something in there which could help solve the problem.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Is Internet offload the next bottleneck for mobile broadband?
This article about H3G Austria implementing a "direct tunnel" for data caught my eye today. It fits into an emerging theme I've been seeing about the need to offload mobile data traffic from transiting core network elements unnecessarily. Given that some stats suggest that 95% of all 3G data is going to/from the Internet, it makes sense to "dump" as much of it straight onto a connection to the web rather than routing it through expensive (and capacity-limited) core nodes like SGSNs that add no value.
I heard much the same story about femtocells last week, and I've also heard it mentioned about UMA-type WiFi services, sometimes called "Split tunnel architecture". It makes particular sense for roaming data traffic from PCs, for which there is zero value in backhauling via the home network (and especially for H3G, which doesn't charge data roaming fees to on-net customers).
Now in theory, much of this capability to provide a "flattened" IP network architecture should arrive with LTE, and more specifically its counterpart the Evolved Packet Core (EPC, formerly SAE, System Architecture Evolution). But given the timelines, it makes sense for the more data-centric operators to move ahead sooner.
I have a strong suspicion that offload / direct or split tunnel / (assorted other similar terms) will become the next "big thing" after the current backhaul bottleneck is fixed for mobile broadband operators. There will probably be a few different architectures, which I guess will dovetail with specific operator instances of local (femto/WiFi) radio offload, and macro transport connectivity (owned / 3rd-party).
I heard much the same story about femtocells last week, and I've also heard it mentioned about UMA-type WiFi services, sometimes called "Split tunnel architecture". It makes particular sense for roaming data traffic from PCs, for which there is zero value in backhauling via the home network (and especially for H3G, which doesn't charge data roaming fees to on-net customers).
Now in theory, much of this capability to provide a "flattened" IP network architecture should arrive with LTE, and more specifically its counterpart the Evolved Packet Core (EPC, formerly SAE, System Architecture Evolution). But given the timelines, it makes sense for the more data-centric operators to move ahead sooner.
I have a strong suspicion that offload / direct or split tunnel / (assorted other similar terms) will become the next "big thing" after the current backhaul bottleneck is fixed for mobile broadband operators. There will probably be a few different architectures, which I guess will dovetail with specific operator instances of local (femto/WiFi) radio offload, and macro transport connectivity (owned / 3rd-party).
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Operator-specific vs. Vanilla handsets
I just had an interesting chat with the sales guys in my local branch of Carphone Warehouse. I was inquiring about the new SonyEricsson C902 phone, and so asked them which networks it was available on. They replied that it was supplied in with either O2 or Orange contracts. (Interestingly, the CPW website also mentions T-Mobile, and it should be noted that the company no longer resells Vodafone).
Now, I'd recently tried out another phone which had a horribly slow and clunky operator-specific UI on top of the usual slick midrange SonyEricsson menu and app software. So I asked the CPW staff "Which version of the phone [Orange or O2] has the better software?". The reply surprised me "They're the same, we supply the phone with the generic software".
Now the reason for this can't be logistics (ie desire to avoid stocking separate versions of each phone) as I'll bet that each one still has physical modifications like operator logos. So I'm wondering instead if there has been some push-back from customers about operator-specific differences between phones. I've thought for a while that the handset review magazines and sites really ought to compare between operator variants of the same phone. And anecdotally, I'm certainly aware that some UK consumers are certainly aware that devices' capabilities and useability differ.
Obviously in instances where operators have exclusive rights to given handsets - or more-material customisations - such comparisons can't be done. And in markets like the US and Japan, it's quite common for many devices to be very-tightly specified by a single carrier.
But for popular devices like many Nokias and S-Es and Samsungs, do the mobile operators really want to compete on whose version of a given device is best? Obviously the quick answer is "Oh no, we'll compete on the services available on our version of the phones". While there may well be specific custom client software (to access custom services), this ignores the more in-your-face changes to top-level menus and UI that some carriers insist upon. It's minor things like populating the home screen with unchangeable links to stuff you don't want, or locking the browser's home page, that customers will be irked by.
There's also another question here - will the generic versions of phones supplied by CPW work well with all of each operator's existing service portfolios?
Now, I'd recently tried out another phone which had a horribly slow and clunky operator-specific UI on top of the usual slick midrange SonyEricsson menu and app software. So I asked the CPW staff "Which version of the phone [Orange or O2] has the better software?". The reply surprised me "They're the same, we supply the phone with the generic software".
Now the reason for this can't be logistics (ie desire to avoid stocking separate versions of each phone) as I'll bet that each one still has physical modifications like operator logos. So I'm wondering instead if there has been some push-back from customers about operator-specific differences between phones. I've thought for a while that the handset review magazines and sites really ought to compare between operator variants of the same phone. And anecdotally, I'm certainly aware that some UK consumers are certainly aware that devices' capabilities and useability differ.
Obviously in instances where operators have exclusive rights to given handsets - or more-material customisations - such comparisons can't be done. And in markets like the US and Japan, it's quite common for many devices to be very-tightly specified by a single carrier.
But for popular devices like many Nokias and S-Es and Samsungs, do the mobile operators really want to compete on whose version of a given device is best? Obviously the quick answer is "Oh no, we'll compete on the services available on our version of the phones". While there may well be specific custom client software (to access custom services), this ignores the more in-your-face changes to top-level menus and UI that some carriers insist upon. It's minor things like populating the home screen with unchangeable links to stuff you don't want, or locking the browser's home page, that customers will be irked by.
There's also another question here - will the generic versions of phones supplied by CPW work well with all of each operator's existing service portfolios?
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Carnival of Mobilists on LBS
While I'm turning into a big believer about location-based capabilities in mobile phones (GPS, maps etc), I'm much less convinced by the argument for monetisable location services.
I can quite imagine buying a Nokia device which comes with 4GB of global maps built in, plus GPS. I can quite imagine continuing to use Google Maps on mobile, with its clever autolocation capability.
But I can't imagine ever wanting "local search", or paying for "where is my nearest X", or trusting any "local" restaurant reviews where the venue has had to pay to be included in a directory. Possibly there may be some geo-specific advertising (step forward Google again), but in terms of actually getting money out of my own pocket for a billable service? No.
Nevertheless, there's a number of very good articles and different opinions courtest of this week's Carnival of the Mobilists, edited this week by Rudy de Waele. (It also references my post from last week about applications on smartphones).
I can quite imagine buying a Nokia device which comes with 4GB of global maps built in, plus GPS. I can quite imagine continuing to use Google Maps on mobile, with its clever autolocation capability.
But I can't imagine ever wanting "local search", or paying for "where is my nearest X", or trusting any "local" restaurant reviews where the venue has had to pay to be included in a directory. Possibly there may be some geo-specific advertising (step forward Google again), but in terms of actually getting money out of my own pocket for a billable service? No.
Nevertheless, there's a number of very good articles and different opinions courtest of this week's Carnival of the Mobilists, edited this week by Rudy de Waele. (It also references my post from last week about applications on smartphones).
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Will broadband providers throttle femto backhaul traffic?
I've heard a couple of suggestions at the Avren Femtocell conference in London over the last 2 days that a key part of the business model is that "the customer pays for their own backhaul". I've also heard various suggestions that laptop 3G traffic (dongle or embedded) might be offloaded onto the femtocell & fixed broadband.
Where this falls down is in situations where the broadband provider and the femtocell provider are different companies. So perhaps Orange femtos linked to BT ADSL, or AT&T femtos on Comcast cable.
There are two issues here:
The competitive argument is a trickier one, and will vary according to markets. In countries where all the main operators have both fixed and mobile arms, any attempt by one to unilaterally block (or charge for) another's femto traffic could lead to a nuclear-style "mutually assured destruction" scenario.
But in other markets where there are dominant ADSL or cable providers that don't have mobile arms, I'd expect some to become pretty aggressive about their femto traffic-management policies. It's not as if it's hard to spot femto backhaul traffic on the network, as it goes to a fixed IP address of the gateway & will have a recognisable profile.
We may see some broadband ISPs attempt to negotiate with mobile operators to guarantee QoS on their lines, for a a price. Some may even return some proportion of cash to the end user, so they don't end up "paying the operator's backhaul costs".
Where this falls down is in situations where the broadband provider and the femtocell provider are different companies. So perhaps Orange femtos linked to BT ADSL, or AT&T femtos on Comcast cable.
There are two issues here:
- Extra traffic load for the ISP
- Competitive or net-neutrality arguments about value transiting "my pipes".
(a third issue - how the mobile operator gets QoS on 3rd-party broadband, is also involved).
Now if the femto traffic is just "best efforts" mobile voice being offloaded, I wouldn't expect most of the broadband providers to worry about the incremental traffic load. But if it's 3GB a month of "dongle" traffic from a PC, going to a mobile broadband provider, that's a different issue. In that case, I'd expect to see traffic-shaping being used, perhaps throttling femto traffic to 100kbit/s or whatever level is applied to other bandwidth-hogging services like BitTorrent.The competitive argument is a trickier one, and will vary according to markets. In countries where all the main operators have both fixed and mobile arms, any attempt by one to unilaterally block (or charge for) another's femto traffic could lead to a nuclear-style "mutually assured destruction" scenario.
But in other markets where there are dominant ADSL or cable providers that don't have mobile arms, I'd expect some to become pretty aggressive about their femto traffic-management policies. It's not as if it's hard to spot femto backhaul traffic on the network, as it goes to a fixed IP address of the gateway & will have a recognisable profile.
We may see some broadband ISPs attempt to negotiate with mobile operators to guarantee QoS on their lines, for a a price. Some may even return some proportion of cash to the end user, so they don't end up "paying the operator's backhaul costs".
Less than 1% 3G traffic from smartphones
A month back we got the stats from Finland that showed that 92% of 3G data traffic was generated by PCs, 4% from Symbian smartphones and 4% from all other sources.
I've got some more anecdotal data today from another advanced cellular operator (from someone who manages the 3G radio network). He said that his traffic was made up of:
- c70% HSDPA / HSUPA cards & USB dongles in PCs
- c20% older WCDMA 3G cards in PCs
- 8% from fixed-wireless 3G terminals (routers & wireless backup etc)
<1% from all handsets
Now presumably this excludes a bit of 2G data from Blackberries & unlocked iPhones and ordinary WAP phones, but it still points to the fact that from a radio network (and therefore capex investment & spectrum & dimensioning point of view), operators should care about 2 main things:
- Circuit voice & SMS traffic from phones
- Packet data traffic from PCs
I had an argument with vendor yesterday about whether this picture will change as people adopt more smartphones, but I really can't see it migrating much for several years, especially given that 3G dongles are still just at an early phase of growth. I reckon that a small number of PCs & iPhone-type devices generate enough traffic to absolutely swamp everything else for some considerable time.
I'll draw a graphic when I get a chance, but basically there's an inverted pyramid with 10% of devices generating 90% of the traffic - and I think that the skew is likely to get worse, before it maybe evens out in a few years' time with the adoption of more iPhone-grade devices.
I've got some more anecdotal data today from another advanced cellular operator (from someone who manages the 3G radio network). He said that his traffic was made up of:
- c70% HSDPA / HSUPA cards & USB dongles in PCs
- c20% older WCDMA 3G cards in PCs
- 8% from fixed-wireless 3G terminals (routers & wireless backup etc)
<1% from all handsets
Now presumably this excludes a bit of 2G data from Blackberries & unlocked iPhones and ordinary WAP phones, but it still points to the fact that from a radio network (and therefore capex investment & spectrum & dimensioning point of view), operators should care about 2 main things:
- Circuit voice & SMS traffic from phones
- Packet data traffic from PCs
I had an argument with vendor yesterday about whether this picture will change as people adopt more smartphones, but I really can't see it migrating much for several years, especially given that 3G dongles are still just at an early phase of growth. I reckon that a small number of PCs & iPhone-type devices generate enough traffic to absolutely swamp everything else for some considerable time.
I'll draw a graphic when I get a chance, but basically there's an inverted pyramid with 10% of devices generating 90% of the traffic - and I think that the skew is likely to get worse, before it maybe evens out in a few years' time with the adoption of more iPhone-grade devices.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Airvana touting Femto-aware devices
Just saw an interesting presentation from Airvana, which was talking about "hybrid networks", whereby both devices and macro networks are "aware" of femtocells and collaborate to maximise capacity and minimise interference.
It's the first public conference presentation I've seen (apart from my own) which has used the term "Femto-Aware Handset". The speaker was suggesting that these should become important after 2010.
However, while I'm impressed with Airvana's forethought about devices, I was conscious that the debate around femto-aware "phones" may get mired in discussions about interference management and 3GPP R8 tweaks to the interfaces involved.
But following on from my last post, I'm now convinced that the majority of data traffic on femtos will come from devices which also have WiFi. 3G dongles, iPhones, top-end smartphones, MIDs and so on.
Although the Airvana representative thought the balance would shift to non-WiFi devices, I disagree. While I don't think that more than a small fraction (maybe 10-20%) of mobile devices will have WiFi in them, I expect those to be the devices that will generate vastly disproportionate amounts of traffic - almost certainly above 80% of total 3G usage, and in many cases 90%+.
This will mean that simple changes to the handset chipset and protocol stack will not be enough. There will need to be higher-level software adaptations to manage "policy" - when to use femtos, when to use WiFi, when to use macro networks and so on. This will need to reside in the handset OS, probably in the Connection Manager. Some applications (eg operator, QoS-managed services) will work best on the femto, while others (eg straight-to-Internet vanilla access) will work better on WiFi. Both sorts might need to be run simultaneously on the same device.
This sort of issue needs to be considered now. I cover it in depth in my new report, and it's also something I've been discussing with advisory clients of mine. Please contact me on firstname.lastname AT disruptive-analysis.com if this area is of interest.
It's the first public conference presentation I've seen (apart from my own) which has used the term "Femto-Aware Handset". The speaker was suggesting that these should become important after 2010.
However, while I'm impressed with Airvana's forethought about devices, I was conscious that the debate around femto-aware "phones" may get mired in discussions about interference management and 3GPP R8 tweaks to the interfaces involved.
But following on from my last post, I'm now convinced that the majority of data traffic on femtos will come from devices which also have WiFi. 3G dongles, iPhones, top-end smartphones, MIDs and so on.
Although the Airvana representative thought the balance would shift to non-WiFi devices, I disagree. While I don't think that more than a small fraction (maybe 10-20%) of mobile devices will have WiFi in them, I expect those to be the devices that will generate vastly disproportionate amounts of traffic - almost certainly above 80% of total 3G usage, and in many cases 90%+.
This will mean that simple changes to the handset chipset and protocol stack will not be enough. There will need to be higher-level software adaptations to manage "policy" - when to use femtos, when to use WiFi, when to use macro networks and so on. This will need to reside in the handset OS, probably in the Connection Manager. Some applications (eg operator, QoS-managed services) will work best on the femto, while others (eg straight-to-Internet vanilla access) will work better on WiFi. Both sorts might need to be run simultaneously on the same device.
This sort of issue needs to be considered now. I cover it in depth in my new report, and it's also something I've been discussing with advisory clients of mine. Please contact me on firstname.lastname AT disruptive-analysis.com if this area is of interest.
Femtocells and 3G dongles - a paradox?
I'm at the big Femto conference in London this morning. I'll write up more during the event, but a thought just struck me.
We now know that the largest amount of data on 3G networks emanates from PCs, not phones. Dongles are causing the macro load, plus a few high-end devices like iPhones. So it therefore follows that if femtos are being used for offloading data traffic from the (expensive & congested) macro network, then the majority of that offload data should also be PC/dongle-related.
But if the mobile broadband hype-merchants are to be believed, then 3G (or LTE or WiMAX) broadband will substitute for fixed broadband in the home. In which case, exactly what is the femto going to be attached to?
Or if someone does have ADSL or cable at home... what's the justification for the extra cost of a femto to connect the PC, rather than using cheap and simple (and faster) WiFi, integrated into the router or even wired ethernet? The devices generating all the data traffic in the home home - PCs, iPhones, top-end Windows Mobile or Symbian devices - all now have evolved & usable WiFi.
We now know that the largest amount of data on 3G networks emanates from PCs, not phones. Dongles are causing the macro load, plus a few high-end devices like iPhones. So it therefore follows that if femtos are being used for offloading data traffic from the (expensive & congested) macro network, then the majority of that offload data should also be PC/dongle-related.
But if the mobile broadband hype-merchants are to be believed, then 3G (or LTE or WiMAX) broadband will substitute for fixed broadband in the home. In which case, exactly what is the femto going to be attached to?
Or if someone does have ADSL or cable at home... what's the justification for the extra cost of a femto to connect the PC, rather than using cheap and simple (and faster) WiFi, integrated into the router or even wired ethernet? The devices generating all the data traffic in the home home - PCs, iPhones, top-end Windows Mobile or Symbian devices - all now have evolved & usable WiFi.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
HSDPA on the fringes of coverage
There's a lot of talk about whether 3G dongles with flatrate data represent direct like-for-like competition against home DSL or cable broadband. My view is that at some levels this is true - especially for people unable or unwilling to take out long contracts for fixed-line connections, eg students or people moving home regularly. There are also segments of the market that want both fixed & mobile connections for different reasons, and a zillion sub-segments with unique requirements of their own.
That's all well and good, but discussion recently about fixed-line broadband (in the UK at least), has highlighted a lot of unhappiness about headline advertised data rates ("8MB Broadband!", "Superfast 20MB cable"), where the figures quoted (usually with "up to" in small print) don't match the reality. In those cases, it's usually a limitation imposed by the length/quality of the copper, so that if you're living 4km from the local exchange, you get a lousy speed. Although obviously there's a lot more to it around contention rates, backhaul and so on, there is at least a chance that you could be given a "guaranteed" data rate rather than a hypothetical one.
My experience with HSDPA recently has been a little patchy. In particular, I'm becoming increasingly aware of one of the limitations of the technology - the way it dishes out much more capacity to those people in the best radio conditions. It's not just that the signal degrades with distance / indoor penetration (ie the equivalent of DSL line length), but the fact that the system deliberately biases itself towards people with better radio reception.
This exacerbates the difference between the best and worst grades of service - to a greater degree than happens in the fixed world. On ADSL, you'd have to be pretty unlucky not to get 2-3Mbit/s on a supposed 8M service (ie maybe 70% less than headline rate). But on HSDPA, it's quite possible to get a 90% or more reduction in speed when you're on the fringes of coverage, versus when you have 5 bars on the signal meter.
I notice this regularly - I have 2 branches of Starbucks near me on Baker St in London, perhaps only 200-300 metres apart. One has seating in the basement, the other at ground level. Sitting in one of them, I'll regularly get 1Mbit/s+ with high reliability & low latency (this is on Hutchison 3, and I haven't got above 2Mbit/s at all). But in the other, I'm often lucky to get 100kbit/s, and often the network will just seem to 'hang' for 20-30 seconds. I'm not sure if they're both in the same cell, but the difference between 1-bar signal and 5-bars is at least a 10x change in throughput.
Does anyone else experience something similar? Or is this an issue that's going to cause customer service issues, or perhaps drive the need for femtos, or 900MHz 3G? In either case, it strikes me that any regulatory approach to selling "What you pay for is what you get" broadband is really going to struggle with mobile.
That's all well and good, but discussion recently about fixed-line broadband (in the UK at least), has highlighted a lot of unhappiness about headline advertised data rates ("8MB Broadband!", "Superfast 20MB cable"), where the figures quoted (usually with "up to" in small print) don't match the reality. In those cases, it's usually a limitation imposed by the length/quality of the copper, so that if you're living 4km from the local exchange, you get a lousy speed. Although obviously there's a lot more to it around contention rates, backhaul and so on, there is at least a chance that you could be given a "guaranteed" data rate rather than a hypothetical one.
My experience with HSDPA recently has been a little patchy. In particular, I'm becoming increasingly aware of one of the limitations of the technology - the way it dishes out much more capacity to those people in the best radio conditions. It's not just that the signal degrades with distance / indoor penetration (ie the equivalent of DSL line length), but the fact that the system deliberately biases itself towards people with better radio reception.
This exacerbates the difference between the best and worst grades of service - to a greater degree than happens in the fixed world. On ADSL, you'd have to be pretty unlucky not to get 2-3Mbit/s on a supposed 8M service (ie maybe 70% less than headline rate). But on HSDPA, it's quite possible to get a 90% or more reduction in speed when you're on the fringes of coverage, versus when you have 5 bars on the signal meter.
I notice this regularly - I have 2 branches of Starbucks near me on Baker St in London, perhaps only 200-300 metres apart. One has seating in the basement, the other at ground level. Sitting in one of them, I'll regularly get 1Mbit/s+ with high reliability & low latency (this is on Hutchison 3, and I haven't got above 2Mbit/s at all). But in the other, I'm often lucky to get 100kbit/s, and often the network will just seem to 'hang' for 20-30 seconds. I'm not sure if they're both in the same cell, but the difference between 1-bar signal and 5-bars is at least a 10x change in throughput.
Does anyone else experience something similar? Or is this an issue that's going to cause customer service issues, or perhaps drive the need for femtos, or 900MHz 3G? In either case, it strikes me that any regulatory approach to selling "What you pay for is what you get" broadband is really going to struggle with mobile.
Friday, June 20, 2008
2 events next week: Femtocells & Billing/Pricing
I'm going to be participating in a couple of interesting industry events next week.
The first is the industry conference for Femtocells, run by Avren Events. I went to the one last year and it was literally standing room only. It's colocated with the Femto Forum Plenary so all the great & the good should be there.
I'm around on Tuesday & Wed, and will be taking part in a panel on low-cost femtocells. If you're there, I'll be easy to spot, as I'll be the one wearing body armour in case anyone violently disagrees with my stance on the need for femto-optimised handsets. Or indeed, if anyone takes exception to the fact my femto market forecasts are a lot less bullish than other analysts - I'm expecting a baseline of 8m shipments in 2012, with the chance of a bigger ramp-up thereafter if all goes well.
The other event is totally different, but also should be very interesting. Run by billing vendor Highdeal & moderated by myself, it's a roundtable on the evening of Weds 25th. It will be comparing Billing & Pricing strategies across multiple different industries - telecoms (especially mobile), finance, and transportation. Although these industries all overlap, there are some interesting parallels to be drawn, and lessons to be understood.
The event is mostly aimed at journalists & other analysts but others may attend as well. The invitation form & info is here.
The first is the industry conference for Femtocells, run by Avren Events. I went to the one last year and it was literally standing room only. It's colocated with the Femto Forum Plenary so all the great & the good should be there.
I'm around on Tuesday & Wed, and will be taking part in a panel on low-cost femtocells. If you're there, I'll be easy to spot, as I'll be the one wearing body armour in case anyone violently disagrees with my stance on the need for femto-optimised handsets. Or indeed, if anyone takes exception to the fact my femto market forecasts are a lot less bullish than other analysts - I'm expecting a baseline of 8m shipments in 2012, with the chance of a bigger ramp-up thereafter if all goes well.
The other event is totally different, but also should be very interesting. Run by billing vendor Highdeal & moderated by myself, it's a roundtable on the evening of Weds 25th. It will be comparing Billing & Pricing strategies across multiple different industries - telecoms (especially mobile), finance, and transportation. Although these industries all overlap, there are some interesting parallels to be drawn, and lessons to be understood.
The event is mostly aimed at journalists & other analysts but others may attend as well. The invitation form & info is here.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Blending UnNP and femtocells
Interesting video demo of some femto applications here, courtesy of ip.access. They use a couple of different devices (Nokia N95 and a Samsung Windows Mobile smartphone) via the femto to control either a home media server, or a SlingBox.
One of the interesting aspects is the adaptation of UPnP to work over 3G (Universal Plug'n'Play, as specified as part of the DLNA standard for home networks). Having asked about some more details, I found it interesting that getting the UPnP demo working over 3G is not currently possible on the N95, as the client software in that phone assumes it can only work over WiFi.
Now, wouldn't it be useful to have a handset OS connection manager that could tell the application about the availability of a UPnP-suitable 3G connection (ie via the femto when the user is at home)? And wouldn't it be good to get UPnP support in non-WiFi handsets?
(Of course, if the phone has both WiFi and 3G, the "policy management" of in-home networking gets a bit more complicated as well).
These are some other types of subtle "femto optimisation" approaches to mobile phones. DLNA and full-featured connection managers are both covered in the "Femtocell-Aware Handsets Report", published yesterday by Disruptive Analysis. More details & contents pages are now available here.
One of the interesting aspects is the adaptation of UPnP to work over 3G (Universal Plug'n'Play, as specified as part of the DLNA standard for home networks). Having asked about some more details, I found it interesting that getting the UPnP demo working over 3G is not currently possible on the N95, as the client software in that phone assumes it can only work over WiFi.
Now, wouldn't it be useful to have a handset OS connection manager that could tell the application about the availability of a UPnP-suitable 3G connection (ie via the femto when the user is at home)? And wouldn't it be good to get UPnP support in non-WiFi handsets?
(Of course, if the phone has both WiFi and 3G, the "policy management" of in-home networking gets a bit more complicated as well).
These are some other types of subtle "femto optimisation" approaches to mobile phones. DLNA and full-featured connection managers are both covered in the "Femtocell-Aware Handsets Report", published yesterday by Disruptive Analysis. More details & contents pages are now available here.
Received party pays for mobile in Europe?
Some interesting comments being reported by various media this morning, suggesting that the European Commission might be open to the idea of some mobile operators moving to a "receiver-pays" model - perhaps akin to the US.
This would get around some of the complexities emerging around interconnect & call termination fees, as we move towards FMC and various hybrid technologies like femtocells & dual-mode WiFi.
Put simply, in the past in Europe there has been a fairly reasonable justification for higher fees charged by mobile operators to terminate inbound calls - the extra costs of spectrum and radio network. This has been reflected in separate number ranges for mobile, and regulator-specified termination charges that can be 10x that charged by fixed operators.
But now, the gap in termination *costs* to the operators is narrowing. As fixed calls move to mobile, the underlying expense in running the network is shared between fewer minutes of use, while the opposite is true in mobile. Further, some supposedly "mobile-terminated" calls actually terminate (via a mobile number) on WiFi, femtocells, fixed-VoIP softphones, or voicemail boxes. There is no reason for the termination fees in these cases to be the same as that terminated on the expensive cellular macro network.
Unsurprisingly, the mobile operators are a bit unhappy about this, with various comments about how this might "distort the market" or "confuse consumers".
But by a strange twist of irony, I've been presented this morning by the most egregious "distortion" of the current caller-pays/mobile-termination fee model. I am participating in a 7-way conference call tomorrow, hosted by a mobile operator. There's only one participant from the operator involved, and some of the other participants will probably be outside the UK. Yet the dial-in number is a UK mobile number (obviously, one of the operator's own). Not a freephone number, not a fixed number that can be called at fractions of a penny per minute, not even a list of international mobile dial-in numbers. So 6 people will each be paying extortionate amounts against one mobile-terminated leg of the call. Cost-based? Yeah, right.
That sort of abuse of mobile numbering has got to be the best single argument for receiving-party-pays I've come across yet. Maybe the European Commission's got this one right. Or maybe I should get myself an 09xxx premium-rate number and insist that any future briefing calls from mobile operators have to use that.
Edit: apparently the mobile dial-in conference call service is being positioned as a value-add service, along the lines of the fixed-line "free to set up" conference services that use semi-premium number ranges like 0870 in the UK. That's sort of fair enough for occasional ad-hoc confcalls among friends or small businesses, but I would have thought that a large company (especially a telecom company!) would be able to have a cheaper & more efficient platform based either "in the cloud" or (shhh!) on a PBX. And even the 0870 conference guys have options for international dial-ins or even Skype access.
This would get around some of the complexities emerging around interconnect & call termination fees, as we move towards FMC and various hybrid technologies like femtocells & dual-mode WiFi.
Put simply, in the past in Europe there has been a fairly reasonable justification for higher fees charged by mobile operators to terminate inbound calls - the extra costs of spectrum and radio network. This has been reflected in separate number ranges for mobile, and regulator-specified termination charges that can be 10x that charged by fixed operators.
But now, the gap in termination *costs* to the operators is narrowing. As fixed calls move to mobile, the underlying expense in running the network is shared between fewer minutes of use, while the opposite is true in mobile. Further, some supposedly "mobile-terminated" calls actually terminate (via a mobile number) on WiFi, femtocells, fixed-VoIP softphones, or voicemail boxes. There is no reason for the termination fees in these cases to be the same as that terminated on the expensive cellular macro network.
Unsurprisingly, the mobile operators are a bit unhappy about this, with various comments about how this might "distort the market" or "confuse consumers".
But by a strange twist of irony, I've been presented this morning by the most egregious "distortion" of the current caller-pays/mobile-termination fee model. I am participating in a 7-way conference call tomorrow, hosted by a mobile operator. There's only one participant from the operator involved, and some of the other participants will probably be outside the UK. Yet the dial-in number is a UK mobile number (obviously, one of the operator's own). Not a freephone number, not a fixed number that can be called at fractions of a penny per minute, not even a list of international mobile dial-in numbers. So 6 people will each be paying extortionate amounts against one mobile-terminated leg of the call. Cost-based? Yeah, right.
That sort of abuse of mobile numbering has got to be the best single argument for receiving-party-pays I've come across yet. Maybe the European Commission's got this one right. Or maybe I should get myself an 09xxx premium-rate number and insist that any future briefing calls from mobile operators have to use that.
Edit: apparently the mobile dial-in conference call service is being positioned as a value-add service, along the lines of the fixed-line "free to set up" conference services that use semi-premium number ranges like 0870 in the UK. That's sort of fair enough for occasional ad-hoc confcalls among friends or small businesses, but I would have thought that a large company (especially a telecom company!) would be able to have a cheaper & more efficient platform based either "in the cloud" or (shhh!) on a PBX. And even the 0870 conference guys have options for international dial-ins or even Skype access.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
New Report: The Case For Femtocell-Aware Handsets
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was working on a report assessing whether or not femtocells might, in fact, require the use of revised mobile phones.
The full research report is now available from Disruptive Analysis, titled "Femtocell-aware Mobile Handsets: Will cellphones need to be optimised to support future massmarket femtocell business models?"
The report is an in-depth analysis of what should be changed in handsets, to make them perform better with femtos. Please contact: information AT@ disruptive-analysis.com for more details. (Journalist enquiries are also welcome). A table of contents is here.
Before I get a hitman from the Femto Forum knocking on my door, I should be clear upfront that for early, basic deployments of femtos, handset upgrades shouldn't be needed (as long as the user's existing 'legacy' phones are 3G-capable).
My view is that the femtocell industry is currently focusing on the short term – getting initial trials in place, developing standards, and securing commitments for early commercial deployment. These are all critical to validate the market, raise the profile of the femto concept, and stimulate finance and investment. One of the central marketing propositions is that femtocells can work with normal 3G handsets.
But while focus is good – and the industry does not want unnecessary distractions – there is a risk of medium-term disappointment if certain future problems are not addressed early enough, even if this muddies the waters of the short-term marketing message. Handset development cycles are so long that works needs to start now. Already, femto proponents are talking up massmarket business models that go beyond simple indoor coverage and macro-network offload. They are talking about 10’s of millions of subscribers, and new “in-home” services for users, that exploit fast and cheap local mobile connectivity.
(Disruptive Analysis' forecasts in the report are less bullish than some - an installed base of around 30m femtos at end-2013)
As the market gets beyond "Femto 1.0" business models, handset innovations become more important. In part, this relates to complexities in managing the radio environment and mobility between femtocell and macrocell networks. Various optimisations are desirable, especially when dense deployments of femtos occurs. These drive changes in areas such as the way the phone “selects” cells on which to register. There may also need to be ways to offer provisioning and “guest access” on femtocells. Some of these changes to handsets are being enshrined in 3GPP's Release 8 specifications for what it calls "Home NodeB's".
But the medium-term hopes of the industry are also that people will use their cellphones differently when in range of femtos. There will be different applications and different behavioural patterns when people are at home – perhaps content backups, podcasts or even advertiser-sponsored TV programming. The mobile phone may need to linked to TV, PC, HiFi or other items of domestic technology.
This report argues that if the phone will be used differently, it needs to be designed differently as well. Standard phones can work with femtocells, but they are not optimised. Certain applications may only work when the phone is within femto range – but they need to know when that is. Yes, some services can be notified by the core network that the user is “at home”, but that approach doesn’t scale to a wide base of operators, application developers and handset/OS vendors. The phone needs to be “aware” of the femtocell, ideally both in the radio and the application platform. Elements like the IP networking "connection manager" in the phone are key. Other aspects like memory allocation and power management may need to be revisited too - even perhaps the phsyical design of the device.
Changing such elements is not quick. The handset industry is much more complex and slow-moving than many in the wider wireless business understand. The mobile industry habitually trips up on these issues. Phones - both hardware and software - are extremely difficult, time-consuming and expensive to get right. It often takes 2-3 years for changes in handset architecture to reach commercially-sold handsets, and another 2-3 years to reach a broad range of devices and reasonable penetration within the user base. And there are huge challenges in getting the user-facing applications and useability right - the network interfaces are much easier to standardise and develop than the user interface.
In recent years, other mobile network innovations such as UMA and IMS have faced delay & lack of market acceptance, in part because of a lack of early focus on the practicalities of getting handsets ready. The fact that the network protocols are in place does not mean the whole proposition works in the hands of the user. I remember talking to an IMS advocate a couple of years ago - and pointing out that many of his suggested use cases for IMS implied a multitasking OS on the phone - something that even today is far from ubiquitous.
Disruptive Analysis believes that the femtocell industry needs to be much more open-minded about the need for modifying and optimising handsets – and to be alert to the huge time and effort it will take to achieve. It is necessary to look at everything from physical design, to network protocols, to testing, to the phone OS, to femto-specific applications. Although many femto advocates fear distractions could delay immediate market acceptance, early consideration of these “2nd order” problems is necessary for longer-term success.
The report predicts a demand for at least 50m femto-optimised phones by 2013. And that number could be much higher still (100m+) if there is widespread use of "shared" femtocells, or if some of the more optimistic observers' baseline femto shipment forecasts hold true.
The "Femtocell-Aware Mobile Handsets" report is about 85 pages in length, and is priced starting from £1500 / US$3000 / €1950 for a 1-5 user licence. For sales and additional details, please contact: information AT disruptive-analysis.com
The full research report is now available from Disruptive Analysis, titled "Femtocell-aware Mobile Handsets: Will cellphones need to be optimised to support future massmarket femtocell business models?"
The report is an in-depth analysis of what should be changed in handsets, to make them perform better with femtos. Please contact: information AT@ disruptive-analysis.com for more details. (Journalist enquiries are also welcome). A table of contents is here.
Before I get a hitman from the Femto Forum knocking on my door, I should be clear upfront that for early, basic deployments of femtos, handset upgrades shouldn't be needed (as long as the user's existing 'legacy' phones are 3G-capable).
My view is that the femtocell industry is currently focusing on the short term – getting initial trials in place, developing standards, and securing commitments for early commercial deployment. These are all critical to validate the market, raise the profile of the femto concept, and stimulate finance and investment. One of the central marketing propositions is that femtocells can work with normal 3G handsets.
But while focus is good – and the industry does not want unnecessary distractions – there is a risk of medium-term disappointment if certain future problems are not addressed early enough, even if this muddies the waters of the short-term marketing message. Handset development cycles are so long that works needs to start now. Already, femto proponents are talking up massmarket business models that go beyond simple indoor coverage and macro-network offload. They are talking about 10’s of millions of subscribers, and new “in-home” services for users, that exploit fast and cheap local mobile connectivity.
(Disruptive Analysis' forecasts in the report are less bullish than some - an installed base of around 30m femtos at end-2013)
As the market gets beyond "Femto 1.0" business models, handset innovations become more important. In part, this relates to complexities in managing the radio environment and mobility between femtocell and macrocell networks. Various optimisations are desirable, especially when dense deployments of femtos occurs. These drive changes in areas such as the way the phone “selects” cells on which to register. There may also need to be ways to offer provisioning and “guest access” on femtocells. Some of these changes to handsets are being enshrined in 3GPP's Release 8 specifications for what it calls "Home NodeB's".
But the medium-term hopes of the industry are also that people will use their cellphones differently when in range of femtos. There will be different applications and different behavioural patterns when people are at home – perhaps content backups, podcasts or even advertiser-sponsored TV programming. The mobile phone may need to linked to TV, PC, HiFi or other items of domestic technology.
This report argues that if the phone will be used differently, it needs to be designed differently as well. Standard phones can work with femtocells, but they are not optimised. Certain applications may only work when the phone is within femto range – but they need to know when that is. Yes, some services can be notified by the core network that the user is “at home”, but that approach doesn’t scale to a wide base of operators, application developers and handset/OS vendors. The phone needs to be “aware” of the femtocell, ideally both in the radio and the application platform. Elements like the IP networking "connection manager" in the phone are key. Other aspects like memory allocation and power management may need to be revisited too - even perhaps the phsyical design of the device.
Changing such elements is not quick. The handset industry is much more complex and slow-moving than many in the wider wireless business understand. The mobile industry habitually trips up on these issues. Phones - both hardware and software - are extremely difficult, time-consuming and expensive to get right. It often takes 2-3 years for changes in handset architecture to reach commercially-sold handsets, and another 2-3 years to reach a broad range of devices and reasonable penetration within the user base. And there are huge challenges in getting the user-facing applications and useability right - the network interfaces are much easier to standardise and develop than the user interface.
In recent years, other mobile network innovations such as UMA and IMS have faced delay & lack of market acceptance, in part because of a lack of early focus on the practicalities of getting handsets ready. The fact that the network protocols are in place does not mean the whole proposition works in the hands of the user. I remember talking to an IMS advocate a couple of years ago - and pointing out that many of his suggested use cases for IMS implied a multitasking OS on the phone - something that even today is far from ubiquitous.
Disruptive Analysis believes that the femtocell industry needs to be much more open-minded about the need for modifying and optimising handsets – and to be alert to the huge time and effort it will take to achieve. It is necessary to look at everything from physical design, to network protocols, to testing, to the phone OS, to femto-specific applications. Although many femto advocates fear distractions could delay immediate market acceptance, early consideration of these “2nd order” problems is necessary for longer-term success.
The report predicts a demand for at least 50m femto-optimised phones by 2013. And that number could be much higher still (100m+) if there is widespread use of "shared" femtocells, or if some of the more optimistic observers' baseline femto shipment forecasts hold true.
The "Femtocell-Aware Mobile Handsets" report is about 85 pages in length, and is priced starting from £1500 / US$3000 / €1950 for a 1-5 user licence. For sales and additional details, please contact: information AT disruptive-analysis.com
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Hotel WiFi - a tale of two conferences
I was at two conferences last week - the Informa Handset World event in Berlin, and the Osney Media Mobile Web 2.0 show in London. I'll comment on the two events' outcomes in separate posts, but one quick observation:
- The Berlin event was held at the Berlin Palace Hotel. There was no delegate WiFi, and Swisscom charged a hideous €22 per day for its supposed "business grade" service. It was slow and unreliable - lots of "404" errors on normal website like Yahoo & the BBC - (I think the DNS server was based on an abacus). It needed me to reboot my PC after I moved between conference rooms. and access points. As a joke, a slightly cheaper €17 "economy" 256kbit/s version was available, although without signing up it wasn't clear exactly what it blocked - eg Skype, IM, email attachements etc. Unsurprisingly, given it was Swisscom, there wasn't an economic option for Informa to have provided delegate access for free.
- The London event was run at the very impressive Mayfair Hotel - which is part of the Radisson chain. And which provides free WiFi at all its European properties. It worked flawlessly.
I pity hoteliers who decided, maybe 4-5 years ago, and before the growth of WiFi, to sign up for long exclusive contracts - especially with Swisscom, which I think I'd single out as the greatest villain of the European WiFi industry. It's experiences like mine that will make people stop using WiFi in favour of 3G modems, as roaming prices come down.
I'd exhort hotel chains to look at renegotiating their WiFi contracts, as otherwise it will start to cost them lucrative conference business. And I'd recommend to the cellular operators that they start renting out 3G-backhauled WiFi AP's to conference organisers and hotels.
I'd recommend that conference organisers specifically try to avoid venues with "legacy" WiFi providers that have locked in the hapless site owners to 10-year contracts.
And lastly I'd recommend to enterprises that they watch out for 3G modem tariff plans that give free or flatrate roaming (Voda has one, and 3's dongles are totally free on its partner networks). A recent trip to Stockholm cost me the princely sum of £zero for 2 day's fast access - and has earned 3 UK a boatload of referrals from me for new customers.
It's a shame really, as WiFi when done right is excellent for laptop connectivity. But €22 per day for a lousy service makes a mockery of the whole industry, and makes some recent predictions of its demise as a public service (which I generally disagree with) more likely to become reality.
Apps on smartphones = Geek. Apps on Facebook = Fun. Why?
I'm listened to a panel session at Handsets World last week about device personalisation. One of the panellists was convinced that it's all about adding applications to make the phone "your own".
However this runs completely counter to most "Normobs"' worldview. Normal people think that downloading anything to a phone (except a ringtone or Java game) is utterly geeky. Yes, among small groups of people this has changed somewhat - perhaps iPhone owners (although many of those are geeks anyway), or teenagers using a Java messaging app to avoid paying for SMS. But mainstream users? No way.
But another speaker made the very insightful point that many people who would recoil in horror at installing smartphone apps are entirely happy to stuff their FaceBook pages with all sorts of random plug-ins.
It made me think a bit about what the differences are behind this divergent attitudes.
The most obvious is platform. People have grown up installing applications on PCs, from the minute they take them out the box, through to the familiarity of the Installshield process and frequent updates to OS and various client applications. Conversely, people have grown up using phones, as, well, phones, or maybe MP3 players or cameras. It takes a long time for attitudes to change - and especially when people don't think of things as "programmable". There's no reason you couldn't install aps on a camera, or a car, or even a toaster, but it would feel weird. People don't think of these items as using software at all. I remember the weird looks I got when I told people that my car's electric windows had a software bug that meant it had to go back to the dealer.
The second difference is in virality. On mobile, you can't really recommend installable apps to friends or acquaintances. You don't know what phone they have, if there are any operator customisations to the UI, or even whether their networks' policies permit the app's use. It's no use saying "everyone with an iPhone / Symbian / Java MIDP3 device can get it" - most people neither know nor care what devices & contracts their friends have. On FaceBook, or on a PC generally, you can be pretty sure that everyone you forward a recommendation to can benefit from it. Until there's a reliable "vector" for viral adoption of mobile apps, it'll remain a minority sport for enthusiasts only.
Thirdly - and specifically with regard to FaceBook - it's a web service, not a downloaded app. Yes, you have to agree to assorted permissions and access privileges. But there's no "are you sure you want to install this?" trauma. It's interesting to see the push towards browser-based web services and platforms like Nokia Ovi, which should take the pain out of driving handset usage by avoiding the need to install device-side software.
My question to the Personalisation panel was about the realities that I see in the marketplace, rather than wishful thinking. To my mind personalisation is still about exterior of the device (shape, colour, style) and also the combinations of multiple devices. Having a red BlackBerry as well as a black N95 says more about you than any amount of software installed on an iPhone.
Amusingly, as I got off the plane on the way back from Berlin, I saw a girl in the row behind me - she had two (inexpensive) pink phones - a Moto KRZR and a small Samsung, I think. And a pink portable CD player. Now that's personalised.
However this runs completely counter to most "Normobs"' worldview. Normal people think that downloading anything to a phone (except a ringtone or Java game) is utterly geeky. Yes, among small groups of people this has changed somewhat - perhaps iPhone owners (although many of those are geeks anyway), or teenagers using a Java messaging app to avoid paying for SMS. But mainstream users? No way.
But another speaker made the very insightful point that many people who would recoil in horror at installing smartphone apps are entirely happy to stuff their FaceBook pages with all sorts of random plug-ins.
It made me think a bit about what the differences are behind this divergent attitudes.
The most obvious is platform. People have grown up installing applications on PCs, from the minute they take them out the box, through to the familiarity of the Installshield process and frequent updates to OS and various client applications. Conversely, people have grown up using phones, as, well, phones, or maybe MP3 players or cameras. It takes a long time for attitudes to change - and especially when people don't think of things as "programmable". There's no reason you couldn't install aps on a camera, or a car, or even a toaster, but it would feel weird. People don't think of these items as using software at all. I remember the weird looks I got when I told people that my car's electric windows had a software bug that meant it had to go back to the dealer.
The second difference is in virality. On mobile, you can't really recommend installable apps to friends or acquaintances. You don't know what phone they have, if there are any operator customisations to the UI, or even whether their networks' policies permit the app's use. It's no use saying "everyone with an iPhone / Symbian / Java MIDP3 device can get it" - most people neither know nor care what devices & contracts their friends have. On FaceBook, or on a PC generally, you can be pretty sure that everyone you forward a recommendation to can benefit from it. Until there's a reliable "vector" for viral adoption of mobile apps, it'll remain a minority sport for enthusiasts only.
Thirdly - and specifically with regard to FaceBook - it's a web service, not a downloaded app. Yes, you have to agree to assorted permissions and access privileges. But there's no "are you sure you want to install this?" trauma. It's interesting to see the push towards browser-based web services and platforms like Nokia Ovi, which should take the pain out of driving handset usage by avoiding the need to install device-side software.
My question to the Personalisation panel was about the realities that I see in the marketplace, rather than wishful thinking. To my mind personalisation is still about exterior of the device (shape, colour, style) and also the combinations of multiple devices. Having a red BlackBerry as well as a black N95 says more about you than any amount of software installed on an iPhone.
Amusingly, as I got off the plane on the way back from Berlin, I saw a girl in the row behind me - she had two (inexpensive) pink phones - a Moto KRZR and a small Samsung, I think. And a pink portable CD player. Now that's personalised.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Tip of the hat to Carnival of the Mobilists
Thanks to Bena Roberts for linking through to my 900MHz refarming article from last week.
Some other interesting posts on the list too. This one is good on sources of mobile stats.
Although I vehemently disagree with the "local search" concept reheated on this post. No, I don't ever foresee asking my phone "what pizza restaurants are nearby?". As I've said before, mobile search is a red herring. Search on mobile, yes, but local search or this fatuous notion that "mobile users want to find, not search". Please. It's just wishful thinking from people jealous of Google.
Some other interesting posts on the list too. This one is good on sources of mobile stats.
Although I vehemently disagree with the "local search" concept reheated on this post. No, I don't ever foresee asking my phone "what pizza restaurants are nearby?". As I've said before, mobile search is a red herring. Search on mobile, yes, but local search or this fatuous notion that "mobile users want to find, not search". Please. It's just wishful thinking from people jealous of Google.
iPhone 3G - what's Apple got against cameras?
Has Steve Jobs lost the plot? Although details are vague, it seems like the new iPhone has the same sub-grade 2MP camera as the original one. That was already obsolete a year ago, when most top-end phones already had 3MP cameras. Now, most mid-top tier devices have 5MP and many have xenon flashes.
This isn't just me talking either - a Nokia keynote speaker at the Handset World conference this morning from singled out camera capability as *the* most important purchase decision criterion for many customers.
GPS is a nice-to-have. WiFi is a nice-to-have. A decent camera is a must-have.
So, I've reluctantly already added the device to my list of also-rans of phones that look good, but fall down on a deal-breaker element. It doesn't make the grade as a potential day-to-day "personal" phone for me, although it might be good business device.
This isn't just me talking either - a Nokia keynote speaker at the Handset World conference this morning from singled out camera capability as *the* most important purchase decision criterion for many customers.
GPS is a nice-to-have. WiFi is a nice-to-have. A decent camera is a must-have.
So, I've reluctantly already added the device to my list of also-rans of phones that look good, but fall down on a deal-breaker element. It doesn't make the grade as a potential day-to-day "personal" phone for me, although it might be good business device.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
At Handsets World & Mobile Web 2.0 this week
I'm at events in Berlin & London this week - Mon-Weds at Informa's Handset World, where I'm chairing a session on Handset IP Connectivity, Power Management & Storage. And I'll be dropping a few hints about the femto-aware handset issue I mentioned the other day. And on Thurs I'm at Osney Media's Mobile Web 2.0 Summit.
I should be pretty vocal & visible at both, so please come & say "hi" if you're there.
I should be pretty vocal & visible at both, so please come & say "hi" if you're there.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
So... you think that femtocell users won't need new handsets?
There's been much joy in the femtocell industry this week, as 3GPP has decided on a standard architecture for connecting HSPA femtos (they call them Home NodeB's) into the network. This should make life an awful lot easier, given that there have been assorted proprietary and semi-standard approaches suggested up until now. The consensus among operators is that standardisation is mandatory for widespread large-scale deployments.
The output is a hybrid of the UMA/GAN approach advocated by Kineto, and some of the other "RAN Gateway" approaches advocated by the likes of ip.access, NSN and others. It's called the Iuh interface, and it's pretty much kicked the IMS/SIP approach into the long grass for the medium term, at least for 3GPP networks - although that architecture is more likely to be adopted by CDMA operators.
This is in the latest version of 3GPP's specifications, Release 8.
So far, so good for the femtocell proposition.
But unfortunately, the picture is likely to get a little murkier. I've been working for some time on what's going to be a rather controversial report. This post is a bit of a teaser before its publication in the next week or two.
In a nutshell, I think that one of the fundamental assumptions about femtocell business models has serious flaws.
Although existing "legacy" 3G handsets can work with femtocells, they are not optimised for them. There are some enhancements also likely to be in 3GPP Release 8.... and quite a lot of other considerations outside R8's scope that the vendors, and the standards and requirement-setting bodies haven't considered yet.
I have.
If you're interested in getting a heads-up on "The Argument for Femtocell-Optimised Handsets", keep an eye on this blog. And if you pre-register your interest via email at information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com, I'll let you know as soon as the full report is published.
The output is a hybrid of the UMA/GAN approach advocated by Kineto, and some of the other "RAN Gateway" approaches advocated by the likes of ip.access, NSN and others. It's called the Iuh interface, and it's pretty much kicked the IMS/SIP approach into the long grass for the medium term, at least for 3GPP networks - although that architecture is more likely to be adopted by CDMA operators.
This is in the latest version of 3GPP's specifications, Release 8.
So far, so good for the femtocell proposition.
But unfortunately, the picture is likely to get a little murkier. I've been working for some time on what's going to be a rather controversial report. This post is a bit of a teaser before its publication in the next week or two.
In a nutshell, I think that one of the fundamental assumptions about femtocell business models has serious flaws.
Although existing "legacy" 3G handsets can work with femtocells, they are not optimised for them. There are some enhancements also likely to be in 3GPP Release 8.... and quite a lot of other considerations outside R8's scope that the vendors, and the standards and requirement-setting bodies haven't considered yet.
I have.
If you're interested in getting a heads-up on "The Argument for Femtocell-Optimised Handsets", keep an eye on this blog. And if you pre-register your interest via email at information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com, I'll let you know as soon as the full report is published.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Handsets, handsets everywhere. Yet not a single one I want.
Maybe June will be the month I finally replace my main personal phone. I've been utterly exasperated over the last 11 months that there has not been a single phone that's ticked all the boxes. I'm still using the SonyEricsson K800i I got from O2 almost two whole years ago (despite being on a 12 month contract....).
Sure, lots of phones have come out in the meantime that are superficially attractive, but they've all fallen down on one ground or another.
My wishlist for a new personal handset (not a work device):
5MP cameraphone with a proper flash
HSDPA
GPS (this has come up my list of wants recently. Not sure about aGPS though)
Looks quite cool aesthetically
Comfortable to hold & use
Decent browser
No horrible operator-customised menus
Preferably candy-bar, or maybe slider
Preferably WLAN - although it's got to be fully open if it's there
Preferably no full OS like Symbian or Windows (Fine for a work device but not personal)
Preferably keypad (not QWERTY, and only a touchscreen if it's excellent)
Extras like big memory & high-end music player are an added bonus.
Phones I'd thought about all lost out one way or another:
SonyEricsson K850i - nasty semi-touchpad screen for softkeys, no GPS
iPhone -2MP camera, no GPS, no 3G (I'd probably live with the touchscreen) & too expensive
Nokia N95 - clunky and I really don't like S60 on my main device
Nokia N82 - huge, S60 and awful keypad
Nokia N78 - OK size, but even worse keypad & 3MP camera
LG Viewty - no keypad, no GPS
Assorted HTCs - OK as a work device, but no 5MP cameras & I don't want Windows on my personal phone
Samsung Soul - getting closer but no GPS
LG Secret - same story as the Soul
Motorola - not been tempted by Z8 or Z10
Blackberries - camera limitations & operator-locked WiFi and connectivity
But maybe, just maybe I'll find something over the next month or so, although I think I might have to compromise a bit. It's starting to get embarassing going to mobile conferences with a battered-looking 2-year old phone.....
SonyEricsson C902 - looks OK but has no GPS
SonyEricsson C702 - aGPS but only 3MP camera
Nokia N96 - maybe I'll grit my teeth over the UI. Looks a lot better than the N95.
HTC Diamond - maybe I'll grit my teeth again... the UI looks better than normal WinMob
Nokia 6220 Classic - looks promising
.... although if some of the rumours are true, I might end up with a 3G iPhone.
Or maybe I'll just keep the K800i for another year.....
Sure, lots of phones have come out in the meantime that are superficially attractive, but they've all fallen down on one ground or another.
My wishlist for a new personal handset (not a work device):
5MP cameraphone with a proper flash
HSDPA
GPS (this has come up my list of wants recently. Not sure about aGPS though)
Looks quite cool aesthetically
Comfortable to hold & use
Decent browser
No horrible operator-customised menus
Preferably candy-bar, or maybe slider
Preferably WLAN - although it's got to be fully open if it's there
Preferably no full OS like Symbian or Windows (Fine for a work device but not personal)
Preferably keypad (not QWERTY, and only a touchscreen if it's excellent)
Extras like big memory & high-end music player are an added bonus.
Phones I'd thought about all lost out one way or another:
SonyEricsson K850i - nasty semi-touchpad screen for softkeys, no GPS
iPhone -2MP camera, no GPS, no 3G (I'd probably live with the touchscreen) & too expensive
Nokia N95 - clunky and I really don't like S60 on my main device
Nokia N82 - huge, S60 and awful keypad
Nokia N78 - OK size, but even worse keypad & 3MP camera
LG Viewty - no keypad, no GPS
Assorted HTCs - OK as a work device, but no 5MP cameras & I don't want Windows on my personal phone
Samsung Soul - getting closer but no GPS
LG Secret - same story as the Soul
Motorola - not been tempted by Z8 or Z10
Blackberries - camera limitations & operator-locked WiFi and connectivity
But maybe, just maybe I'll find something over the next month or so, although I think I might have to compromise a bit. It's starting to get embarassing going to mobile conferences with a battered-looking 2-year old phone.....
SonyEricsson C902 - looks OK but has no GPS
SonyEricsson C702 - aGPS but only 3MP camera
Nokia N96 - maybe I'll grit my teeth over the UI. Looks a lot better than the N95.
HTC Diamond - maybe I'll grit my teeth again... the UI looks better than normal WinMob
Nokia 6220 Classic - looks promising
.... although if some of the rumours are true, I might end up with a 3G iPhone.
Or maybe I'll just keep the K800i for another year.....
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
UMTS at 900MHz becoming a reality
With all the recent focus on the US 700MHz auctions, and the ongoing 2.5/2.6GHz band auctions, it is worth catching up with another less glamorous trend in spectrum (OK, I'll admit that radio frequencies aren't that glamorous to begin with, but you'll get the point).
According to the GSA there are now 3 active UMTS900 networks, and 7 capable devices. That's Elisa in both Finland and Estonia, and now also AIS in Thailand. Various other operators have announced intentions to roll out the technology, and there are ongoing consultations in many parts of Europe.
(The UK's is mired in dispute - unsurprising with 2 incumbent GSM900 licence holders and 3 more large 1800/2100 operators each hoping to get a slice. It's a bit of a nightmare for the industry to sort out.... and made even more complex because of T-Mobile's reported threatened legal action to delay the 2.6GHz auction until it's resolved).
Interestingly, some consulting work I did about a year ago basically suggested that most handset manufacturers and their silicon/RF suppliers thought that UMTS900 was an inevitable "done deal", while only few had progressed that far on UMTS2600/LTE2600.
UMTS900 is ideal for operators needing to meet 3G coverage obligations, and it should also get much better indoor penetration than 2.1GHz. Currently announced devices with UMTS900 support include Nokia 6121 and N96, the HTC Diamond and assorted others. Interestingly, it seems to be being supported in quite a lot of phones first rather than just modems/dongles - reflecting its suitability for coverage rather than capacity.
It will also be very interesting to see whether operators deploying UMTS900 are as aggressive on alternative options like WiFI dual-mode and femtocells for enhancing indoor coverage.
According to the GSA there are now 3 active UMTS900 networks, and 7 capable devices. That's Elisa in both Finland and Estonia, and now also AIS in Thailand. Various other operators have announced intentions to roll out the technology, and there are ongoing consultations in many parts of Europe.
(The UK's is mired in dispute - unsurprising with 2 incumbent GSM900 licence holders and 3 more large 1800/2100 operators each hoping to get a slice. It's a bit of a nightmare for the industry to sort out.... and made even more complex because of T-Mobile's reported threatened legal action to delay the 2.6GHz auction until it's resolved).
Interestingly, some consulting work I did about a year ago basically suggested that most handset manufacturers and their silicon/RF suppliers thought that UMTS900 was an inevitable "done deal", while only few had progressed that far on UMTS2600/LTE2600.
UMTS900 is ideal for operators needing to meet 3G coverage obligations, and it should also get much better indoor penetration than 2.1GHz. Currently announced devices with UMTS900 support include Nokia 6121 and N96, the HTC Diamond and assorted others. Interestingly, it seems to be being supported in quite a lot of phones first rather than just modems/dongles - reflecting its suitability for coverage rather than capacity.
It will also be very interesting to see whether operators deploying UMTS900 are as aggressive on alternative options like WiFI dual-mode and femtocells for enhancing indoor coverage.
Monday, June 02, 2008
DoCoMo dual-mode consumer VoWLAN launches
DoCoMo actually launched the first operator-based dual-mode WiFi/cellular service several years ago in 2004 - based on SIP and aimed at enterprises. It was called Passage Duple and was based on the NEC N901iL handset, and has subsequently been followed up with a replacement N902iL.
However, Japan has been pretty slow about extending dual-mode into the consumer arena. This changes with the introduction of the new N906iL "onefone" and a new service called Home U. It's not immediately obvious what the architecture behind it is, but given the previous SIP approach, I suspect it's some sort of pre-standard VCC rather than UMA.
However, Japan has been pretty slow about extending dual-mode into the consumer arena. This changes with the introduction of the new N906iL "onefone" and a new service called Home U. It's not immediately obvious what the architecture behind it is, but given the previous SIP approach, I suspect it's some sort of pre-standard VCC rather than UMA.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Extending mobile presence - the need for context and device state information
I speak to a broad variety of vendors and operators about presence in a mobile context. It crops up repeatedly both for operator-centric developments like IMS and RCS, and also for independent applications like mobile VoIP and corporate unified comms.
In theory, mobile phones ought to be good platforms for presence information - both rudimentary connection details (online, offline, idle etc) and some personalised state or emotional content as well ("Dean is currently thinking about lunch" and so on).
In addition, the network is sometimes able to add some extra information about the user - maybe location cell ID, whether the user is on a call, whether they are connected via fixed or mobile and so forth.
All this is useful, and currently highly under-exploited. There is a lot of work needed just to prove the current user experience and gain adoption. Although I can't see anyone actually paying for presence directly, it potentially enhances other services, and could also generate increased traffic and call completion.
But at the same time, I think the mobile presence industry is missing a trick. The presence client on a phone ought to be able to pick up a lot more information about the device's - and the user's - context. In particular, it would be fantastic if it could pick up details from the underlying phone APIs, and enable that data to be exploited by clever applications in the network, or directly by a contact. So for example - whether the phone is on charge, or is running low on battery. Or whether the user is using a Bluetooth headset. Or that the accelerometer can detect motion that looks like walking or driving. Or that the memory for SMS's is almost full.
These are just some ideas, but you get the picture. There are all sorts of clever things that could be achieved with this approach.
(Yes, clearly privacy is a huge concern here, but let's assume that we can simultaneously invent some form of reasonably-effective permissioning system - perhaps an easier version of that seen on sites like Facebook)
Now clearly a fundamental issue is that phones differ in many of these regards. I don't think there's a standardised API for % battery remaining for example, and the SMS memory may be split between phone, SIM and memory card. Different OS's and models of phone have very different capabilities which would make creating "common denominators" extremely difficult.
But maybe we could start with a couple of basic aspects - perhaps standardised by OMTP or OMA - and then incrementally add more features over time.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to catalyse development of this type of concept. Bodies like the 3GPP shy away from dependency on mobile phone-resident software, often naively believing that everything of value can be done from the network core. It may be that we will need to rely either on operator-customised handset platforms (DoCoMo, maybe?) , or third-party software providers, probably from VoIP or IM backgrounds (Truphone? Skype? social networking clients?). We're getting there first with location context (Loopt, fring and others do this), but that still not providing data at the level of "device state".
On the other hand, one of the downsides of any extensions to current mobile presence technology would be the amount of extra signalling traffic involved. I'm already hearing that the IMS-centric view of a "presence enabled phonebook" is running into scaling problems. If you have 100 entries in a contact list, and you expect all of them to be continually updated, this causes a huge amount of (typically SIP) traffic. It also requires presence clients to be running continually in the background on devices, with consequent implications for power consumption.
In theory, mobile phones ought to be good platforms for presence information - both rudimentary connection details (online, offline, idle etc) and some personalised state or emotional content as well ("Dean is currently thinking about lunch" and so on).
In addition, the network is sometimes able to add some extra information about the user - maybe location cell ID, whether the user is on a call, whether they are connected via fixed or mobile and so forth.
All this is useful, and currently highly under-exploited. There is a lot of work needed just to prove the current user experience and gain adoption. Although I can't see anyone actually paying for presence directly, it potentially enhances other services, and could also generate increased traffic and call completion.
But at the same time, I think the mobile presence industry is missing a trick. The presence client on a phone ought to be able to pick up a lot more information about the device's - and the user's - context. In particular, it would be fantastic if it could pick up details from the underlying phone APIs, and enable that data to be exploited by clever applications in the network, or directly by a contact. So for example - whether the phone is on charge, or is running low on battery. Or whether the user is using a Bluetooth headset. Or that the accelerometer can detect motion that looks like walking or driving. Or that the memory for SMS's is almost full.
These are just some ideas, but you get the picture. There are all sorts of clever things that could be achieved with this approach.
(Yes, clearly privacy is a huge concern here, but let's assume that we can simultaneously invent some form of reasonably-effective permissioning system - perhaps an easier version of that seen on sites like Facebook)
Now clearly a fundamental issue is that phones differ in many of these regards. I don't think there's a standardised API for % battery remaining for example, and the SMS memory may be split between phone, SIM and memory card. Different OS's and models of phone have very different capabilities which would make creating "common denominators" extremely difficult.
But maybe we could start with a couple of basic aspects - perhaps standardised by OMTP or OMA - and then incrementally add more features over time.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to catalyse development of this type of concept. Bodies like the 3GPP shy away from dependency on mobile phone-resident software, often naively believing that everything of value can be done from the network core. It may be that we will need to rely either on operator-customised handset platforms (DoCoMo, maybe?) , or third-party software providers, probably from VoIP or IM backgrounds (Truphone? Skype? social networking clients?). We're getting there first with location context (Loopt, fring and others do this), but that still not providing data at the level of "device state".
On the other hand, one of the downsides of any extensions to current mobile presence technology would be the amount of extra signalling traffic involved. I'm already hearing that the IMS-centric view of a "presence enabled phonebook" is running into scaling problems. If you have 100 entries in a contact list, and you expect all of them to be continually updated, this causes a huge amount of (typically SIP) traffic. It also requires presence clients to be running continually in the background on devices, with consequent implications for power consumption.
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