Author: Martin

Here's a cool yet very simple SMS based service I recently tried, "Text For Your Car": In a hotel I recently stayed I used valet parking after searching for a parking space myself in the neighborhood without success for a while. While handing over the car, I got the card on the left with a mobile number on it I could send my parking-id to when I wanted my car to be retrieved and waiting for me when leaving the hotel. I gave it a try and within seconds, I got a confirmation back that the car would be retrieved. Sure, one could have also called ahead but sometimes I just prefer text based communication.

While I admittedly don't usually have many good things to report when it comes cellular network coverage, capacity and availability in the U.S. I have a real praise for a change this time. With some time to spare after a week of meetings I drove out from San Diego in the direction of Palm Spings, preferring the small roads and enjoying the countryside. When stopping for lunch at one of those traditional family run highway restaurants a dozens miles away from the next town I was surprised that I could find good 3G coverage from AT&T inside.

Even more surprising was that I could get connected with both my penta-band UMTS Nokia N8 as well as with my tri-band 3G USB stick. In other words, AT&T has deployed UMTS 1900, despite the very low population density. If using the 1900 MHz band for 3G was done on purpose or not is another question but it has served me well while being there. Here's a link if you want to see the location for yourself. The pictures on the left show a typical cellular installation along the highway of which I've seen quite a few. It's an Ericsson mini-RBS, probably 2G only. And it must have been there for a while already as there was still a Cingluar logo on it next to the current AT&T globe.

Whenever I read about Verizon and their open access program I have to wonder how many more intepretations or uses of the term "openness" there could possibly be!?

Let's look at Europe for a minute. Ever since the type approval scheme for mobile devcies came to an end in the later part of the 1990's anyone could bring GSM and later UMTS mobile devices on the market and they could be used in all of the networks independently from the blessing of any network operator. SIM cards and devices are separated since back in the 1980's and I am only a SIM card away from using any device in any network. I would call this "openness".

Has it harmed the industry and the networks in the past decade? Quite the contrary I would argue and real live shows the result of this policy. The ecosystem is flourishing, networks are (mostly) properly built and maintained and healthy competition has prices (mostly) on an affordable level.

Perhaps the picture is painted a bit too rosy and and doubtlessly, things could still be improved. But compare that to the so called "open access" or "open development" program of Verizon where you still have to go through their lab and get their blessing before you can sell the device. On top of that, once you have an EVDO or LTE device that works on Verizon's particular (LTE) band you have to go back to them again if you want to sell your device to customers. I'd call this a "pretty firm grip". In other words, the devices have to work in a monopoly situation and the monopolist still has to give blessing before you can use their "open" network. Is this openness?

But perhaps I am missing something here? If so, please enlighten me with a comment.

In quite a number of countries, UMTS is used on more than one frequency band. In the US, AT&T, for example, has UMTS deployed in both the 850 and 1900 MHz band. And when I am in the US I can experience the difference quite often. My Nokia N8 is a penta band UMTS device while my 3G dongle is triple band and only supports the 1900 MHz band in the US. So quite often, when I am indoor I can still get reasonable 3G coverage with my N8 over the 850 MHz band while my 3G dongle finds nothing anymore.

In Europe, O2 in the UK has deployed UMTS in the standard 2100 MHz band and in addition, in London for example, also in the 900 MHz band (for details see here). Network operators in France, Finland and perhaps in a few other countries also use UMTS 900, but for the moment only for rural coverage outside the bigger cities.

And now I've come accross another example, this time from Australia. Telegeography reports that Telstra and H3G have run a 2100 MHz UMTS network together for the past couple of years while Telstra has run it's own UMTS 850 MHz network in addition as its workhorse. With the common 2100 MHz network now being shut down due to H3G having been acquired by Vodafone Australia, the report says that Telstra will continue using UMTS 2100 in some places. Also, if I am not wrong, UMTS 900 is used in Australia as well by one of the other network operators. So it's similar as in the US, where UMTS is run on 3 different frequency bands (in the US, it's 850, 1900 and 1700/2100 MHz).

I'm dwelling on this a little bit because of the LTE frequency challenge arising these days with LTE being used in a myriad of different frequency bands which makes it hard building devices that will work across the world. But as the examples above show we have already arrived there with penta-band UTMS now required for truly global access. So countries like Germany, where LTE is already deployed in three frequency bands (800 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz) are not all that much different from other countries using UMTS in three frequency bands. Not that this makes the issue any easier but it is an interesting way to look at it.

With Android firmly established in the smartphone domain in developed countries, Huawei and others now seem poised to bring such smartphones also to emerging countries, with hardware that has quite a different price point.

$80 for a current IDEOS device from Huawei, a price point that seems afordable to quite an audience for example in Kenya. Erik Hersman, who doesn't only write about tech in Africa but who knows the countries there inside out, reports via links that in Kenya alone 350.000 Ideos smartphones were sold this year alone. Apps with local appeal have sprung up in the meantime and Google is fostering development and thus device take-up. After "less walk more talk" this could very well be the important jump-start required for the second revolution mobile technology brings to emerging countries.

And I wonder how Opera Mini adoption is doing on the Ideos!? For full web access, the browser offers an ideal combination of access to full web pages on low spec (RAM, processor power) smartphones in combination with only 2G EDGE coverage in most places. Not that I would give up Opera Mini on my high end smartphone with 3G network availability in most places as even here, it has its advantages, especially in trains and when roaming. But that's anther story already previously told.

So far I was wondering why network operators around the world where enthusiastic about selling pad devices from a number of manufacturers that have not even implemented their core service, i.e. circuit switched voice calling and barely do SMS while on the other hand, Skype and other over the top voice services run just fine on them!?

Perhaps their pain is sweetened by the fact that people are willing to pay 500+ euros for the device, from which they get a commission if it is bought in their shop I suppose and on top they get a monthly service revenue for data usage. A real live example: Someone I recently met is very cost conscious when it comes to voice calls. It must be a cheap device and the choice of prepaid vs. postpaid and the cost per minute are carefully thought over before the cheapest one is picked. But when it comes to the pad, the floodgate opens the 500+ euros device is bought like it is nothing and a 25 euros per month service contract is certainly no barrier either.

So strong is the attraction of over the top services that people are willing to spend 25 euros a month on network service to get them in addition, yes, in addition (!), to another device and service contract / prepaid SIM for voice. Quite a "happy pipe" situation I would say.

Compared to the UMTS auctions back in the year 2000, LTE frequency auctions seem to be of much less interested to the press. Without much fanfare, France has held its 2.6 GHz frequency auctions and finalized them this week, about one and a half year after similar proceedings in Germany and elsewhere. They are by no accounts the last, however, with LTE spectrum still unassigned in many other European markets, like for example the UK and Italy. According to this report from Telegeography, the following companies have acquired spectrum:

• France Telecom (Orange) got 2×20 MHz of spectrum
• Iliad (Free) also got 2×20 MHz with the highest bid. Iliad is currently building a 3G network with only 2×5 MHz of spectrum available and if they are anything as competitive with their prices as in the fixed line ADSL world, that won't last for long. So the 20 MHz of LTE spectrum is a good investment in the future.
• Bouygues and SFR could each "only" get 15 MHz.

Total money spent on the licenses was just under 1 billion euros. This is significantly more than what resulted from the same auctions in Germany. Here the total amount spent for spectrum in the 2.6 GHz band was roughly 260 million euros (the total result was 4.4 billion euros but most of that money was spent on the 800 MHz digital dividend band). Also interesting that two of the incumbents settled for 2×15 MHz rather than trying to go for the full 2×20 MHz.

Here's a tribute to complexity once in a while:

On my mobile device my favorite eMail client is Profimail. Yes, it's little known but it is ultra configurable and does exactly what I want. It makes an LED on my phone blink when eMails come in, I can use POP3 and not IMAP because I like that, I can configure when and how messages are deleted on the mobile and on the server, I can configure how much of an email is downloaded in the background so I don't have to wait when reading the email later because only the header was loaded or incur high data charges while roaming because those multi megabytes of file attachments that are totally useless on the mobile device have been downloaded as well. On top it's user interface has a number of nice hidden gems that increase productivity and the built in file browser makes things very efficient for quick photo viewing or file attachments. Well, I think you get the message. There's also a version for Android but when I tried some months ago I couldn't get the visual indication working and also for some reason or other the program now and then had issues synchronizing while the phone was in dormant state. Perhaps this is fixed once I make the step from my current Nokia N8 to an Android phone (unless Nokia makes a radical turn around for the good of Meego) but perhaps also not.

As a consequence I gave K9 a try, and I have to say it's a fantastic eMail app for Android which is as configurable as Profimail. And on top, the visible indication for incoming emails and synchronization in the background word flawlessly. In a world where everything has to be simple and non configurable to appeal to a mass audience it's refreshing to see that there are programs out there that can be configured to do just what I want. Great!

Last year around this time an interesting Firefox plugin appeared on the scene called Firesheep, making it easy for just about everyone to track other people on unencrypted public Wi-Fi and to easily get to their Facebook, Twitter, etc. information. Most of those companies have reacted in the meantime and have introduced secure http (HTTPS) sessions for their services so all traffic would be encrypted. Facebook was among the first. However, even now, one year later, HTTPS are still not activated by default. Users have to go to their security settings and turn it on manually. I wonder how many people have done that in the meantime. Not many I suspect.

Over the past couple of days I've taken a closer look at some of the demos of the first Windows 8 developer releases aiming to set Microsoft's message into a larger context. There are two things that I find of particular interest: ARM support and a tile like interface as an alternative to the current Aero interface.

Perhaps these two things should be seen in reverse order: First, the new interface, which has many similarities with the current Windows Phone 7 user interface. The UI is tiles based, the layout is simple and everything can be moved and manipulated with fingers. In other words, this is a user interface for smaller devices such as mobile phones and pads. The direction is clear from the user interface and the demos shown, Microsoft seems to see Windows 8, the successor of Windows 7 and not of the current Windows Phone OS to be its next operating system for pads.

Microsoft therefore takes exactly the opposite steps compared to the rest of the industry. Apple and Google have initially scaled down a BSD or Linux based kernel to a bare minimum and then built an API and user interface around it and only then moved to larger screen devices with no legacy attached in terms of overhead. Microsoft on the other hand seems to take a different route: Take Windows 7, remove everything that's not necessary, try to make it as fast as possible, put a second user interface on it to be used on pads / tablets and other devices in the future. Given the current bulkiness of Windows 7 that's a huge challenge. I wonder how much RAM and solid state storage a Windows 8 based tablet will need in the future compared to Apple and Android, which, compared to Windows 7, are ultra "lean and mean".

This brings me to the second avenue Microsoft is pursuing, porting Windows to the ARM architecture. The idea is quite clear, Intel seems to continue to be struggling to produce anything based on the x86 architecture that is anywhere near as power efficient as ARM. And in small devices, power efficiency is the most important thing as this defines the amount of heat and size of the battery a device will feature. And quite frankly, a fan on a pad is something unlikely to acceptable to a mass audience.

But with power efficiency comes a performance limit. I think few doubt that even a dual core ARM processor running at 1.5 GHz today can't come anywhere close to even a two year old Intel Atom processor in terms of performance. But it doesn't have to, it's designed for a lean operating system and the graphics chip in the mobile device takes over when it comes to rendering web pages quickly and to stream HD videos. But I've seen a standard Linux running on an ARM chip with some applications like Firefox and OpenOffice and it was no joy at all. Things will get better over time but I have a hard time imagining Windows 8 running on a pad that is light enough that I don't need a stand for it like in the demos.

Perhaps Windows Phone 7 apps will be able to run on Windows 8 in the tiles interface? I think it's almost a must as otherwise the Apple and Google camps have a decisive advantage when it comes to apps. But if that is so and if Windows Phone 7 apps run on Windows 8 then why bother with the heavy Windows 8 on pads? Why not do it like the rest of the industry and evolve from the bottom? Perhaps the long term strategy of Microsoft is to sit this one out until ARM or Intel processor become powerful enough with acceptable energy consumption to drive a full Windows 8? And then, perhaps not only on pads but on even smaller devices. And what about Windows Phone then?

One way or another, Microsoft is running a tricky gamble here. On the one hand, they have to persuade their desktop users to migrate to Windows 8 and use the tile interface because otherwise what's the difference to Windows 7? At the same time Windows 8 needs to be lean enough to run on light weight pad devices. With or without an Aero UI mode, with ARM or with Intel, it doesn't matter it just has to run and do so as lightly as a feather. And I wonder what they are saying to their Windows Phone development team?

Exciting times it must be in Redmond!