Author: Martin

DVB-T On Mobiles: Cheap, But What Is The Added Value?

Recently, a friend of mine showed me his new mobile, which came with an integrated DVB-T TV tuner. No, not DVB-H (handheld), but DVB-T, the standard TV set digital standard. The TV stream is crisp and sharp, very nice to look at but the rest left some doubts.

I asked him why he bought a DVB-T capable mobile and he said that he actually didn't. He bought the phone because it was cheap and had big keys for SMS and he only figured out it could do DVB-T once he discovered the extractable antenna. Great!

But then, what's the value of DVB-T on a mobile phone? Without content adapted for mobile consumption and without a built in possibility to get further information with a single click or to succumb to that instant urge to buy something it's quite limited.

The value is also quite limited for the broadcaster and for the content owner because they can't deliver additional information, they can't create additional revenue and they don't even know somebody watched it.

No, that's definitely not the final word on mobile TV broadcasting.

German Cable Operator Now Looking for Wireless Assets

Over the weekend I read an article whereby a German cable network operator is now looking actively for cooperating with a wireless network operator to offer a fixed / wireless access package and combined services. That’s good news for connected home services I am advocating as the next great thing for network operators after fixed line voice telephony, as this is further proof that network operators on both ends of the table are looking into how the connected home can be enriched with remote access.

Interestingly enough, the cable operator in question, Kabel Deutschland, was rumored to be a takeover candidate itself for Vodafone Germany just recently to bolster its fixed line assets beyond the DSL business it already has with Arcor, soon to be renamed into Vodafone. Looks like there is a lot of movement in the market these days.

Prices for Voice Minutes and GPRS Very Different in Africa vs. India

As you might have noticed, I've been doing some research into GSM voice + mobile Internet in Africa lately. When comparing the results to prices in India, however, I was quite surprised.

Compared to the average price for a voice minute in Africa of around 10-15 Euro cents today, Indian carriers sell their voice minutes for around 2-3 Euro cents (taxes and recharge fees included, see an example of Airtel here and of BSNL here). Also, GPRS is much cheaper.

Assuming that the cost of running the networks in both regions is similar (just an assumption, please prove me wrong), I can't quite explain the difference. It's not missing competition, most African countries have 3 or 4 GSM networks today. It's not missing profitability either. EBITA of African and Indian wireless carriers are quite o.k. (see fore example the results of Airtel for 2008). Any ideas?

Focus Africa: Mobile Internet

There are quite a number of initiatives these days that aim at bringing the Internet to developing countries. From my point of view the ones which I think will have to most success are those using the infrastructure that is already there, the GSM networks. Satellites with local distribution over Wi-Fi might be an option in the future, too, but I think that will still too expensive and would only be available near the satellite downlink. Initiatives like OLPC and meshed networking might change that but I don't see that in the short- or mid-term. GSM networks in the other hand are already there today so I did some research into how available and affordable the mobile Internet is in Africa today.

There are about 300 million GSM subscribers in Africa today and a sizable portion of those phones should be capable of running the OperaMini browser. In the monthly analysis of the state of the mobile web for September 2008, Opera has a focus on Africa with some interesting numbers:

Out of the 65 TB of compressed data consumed by 19 million users in September 2008, 5 TB was consumed from Africa. That would be around 8% of worldwide traffic, or about 1.5 million users. Note that this is only a rough assumption as it's based on an average and doesn't take things into account such as higher or lower use compared to the average for various reasons. But the number itself is already quite impressive even though this means that currently less than 1% of African GSM subscribers would use OperaMini.

So where is GPRS or EDGE available in Africa and how affordable is it? I've checked in the countries in which I also checked for voice rates for the previous post in this series:

  • Kenya – Safaricom: They have EDGE in their network and even 3G is available in some places. I couldn't find prices per kb but they do offer a 3G USB dongle and the price per MB if you buy the smalles bundle (300 MB) is 10 Euros or about 3 euro cents per MB. However, USB dongles and 10 Euro recharges are probably only for a select view. Also, I didn't see any promotion on their web pages for mobile Internet use on the phone yet.
  • Côte d'Ivoire – MTN: They are promoting a EDGE USB dongle and unlimited monthly access is 15 Euros.
  • Uganda – MTN: Around 1 euro per megabyte, billed per kb. According to this report, Opera Mini seems to be involved with MTN's mobile Internet offer.
  • Egypt – Vodafone: They run a mobile Internet promotion with OperaMini. Daily access to the Vodafone mobile portal and 3 MB off portal (with OperaMini that's a lot) is 14 euro cents. According to this report, the offer has triggered 400.000 OperaMini downloads in just a month. Impressive! I am looking forward to the Opera Mini statistics with a focus on Africa to see what kind of longer term impact this has made.

Summary: While the mobile Internet seems to have arrived in many countries in Africa, prices are still quite expensive, especially for the region. But it's likely that things will probably change in the not too distant future and the Vodafone Egypt example is hopefully a trendsetter.

Are you using the mobile Internet in Africa or would you like to share your views? If so leave a coment below.

Carnival of the Mobilists #165 over at Vision Mobile

Cotm-button
This week's Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at the Vision Mobile blog and Vanessa Measom has done a great job of guiding us through a wide range of topics discussed in the mobile blogosphere in the previous week. From Voice over LTE, carrier strategies to the untangling of the network neutrality debate there's something for everyone. So don't wait, head over and enjoy!

Is the Speed Gap between Fixed an Wireless Widening?

I've recently been shown an interesting comparison that seems to suggest that wireless is really loosing out because despite wireless speeds rising, fixed line speeds keep rising much quicker. An interesting twist of numbers to get to a single message but in practice, things are a bit more difficult and the conclusion to which that chart arrives is not accurate. Here are some thoughts on this suggested widening gap:

  • ADSL top speeds have been rising constantly and today you can get a 16 or 20 MBit/s line IF (upper case!) you live close to a switching center. However, most people don't and as a result get much lower speeds out of their line.
  • VDSL is next in the evolution path but in order to achieve 50+ MBit/s speeds, the DSLAMs have moved very close to the homes. We have a VDSL roll out where I live in Germany and there is a huge cabinet (base station size…) every several hundred meters. Also, they had to dig up the ground to lay fibers for the backhaul. I can also imagine some other applications for those cabinets in the future, think low power low range micro cell wireless deployments…
  • Fiber directly into the home is next but that requires more digging and that's why for example Deutsche Telekom (the brothers of T-Mobile 🙂 have selected VDSL instead of going with the fiber to the buildings.
  • In big cities it can be observed today that the ADSL line rates of existing customers are going down due to the cross-talk on the coper cables due to more and more people subscribing to ADSL. Some people have started with a 16 MBit/s link and have in the meantime arrived down at 2 MBit/s with their link due to the cross-talk. A drastic example, probably a big exception, but I can feel it in Paris as well. Previously, my ADSL modem there could easily connect with 8 MBit/s. Lately, it's only doing 4-6 MBit/s.
  • The only application for those higher speeds beyond 2 or 3 MBit/s fixed line carriers like is IPTV supplied by them. If the user uses his super fast ADSL link for anything else that requires a 10+ MBit/s bandwidth, the carrier gets quite unhappy because that costs real money at the interconnect to the Internet.
  • Wireless has evolved as well, and with HSPA, top speeds have arrived in the field today at a theoretical 21 MBit/s. And things keep rising. But in practice, speeds are much lower due to the number of subscribers per base station, signal to noise ratios, etc. You can go down with cell sizes, you can increase the frequency band you use, you can put in MIMO, you can do all sorts of things but the raw bandwidth available to the individual customer will always be below what you can get through an individual copper cable to the customer premises. But it's a moot point, nobody wants to replace all ADSL and TV cables with wireless. Why? They are already in the ground, they are already working. That's another reason why I think the combination of fixed and wireless Internet access makes so much sense.
  • But even for the ADSL and TV cable modem, the bits transmitted through the copper or fiber do not hop directly into the notebook 🙂 Instead there's usually a wireless link in between, Wi-Fi 🙂
  • So I don't see a competition of fixed and wireless access in most cases, I see a healthy combination which will get a great push from the currently ongoing re-integration of fixed and wireless.
  • There are some exceptions were wireless (e.g. HSPA) is in direct competition with fixed line ADSL or cable access. Take Austria for example where ADSL and cable was sort of expensive until lately and where wireless operators have positioned themselves as an alternative. Works pretty good, I am quite often in Austria, use one of those offers myself and the speeds are o.k. Definitely not in overload yet. Another example is rural areas where wireless technologies can bring broadband much cheaper than copper cables.

As always, comments and thoughts are welcome!

Focus Africa: Cost of Mobile Voice Calls and SMS

While reading "Less Walk More Talk – How Celtel and the Mobile Phone Changed Africa" I did some background research on how much mobile telephony actually costs in sub-Saharan Africa. I expected very cheap prices compared to high income countries but I was very much surprised by the result.

Here are three very different examples in terms of African countries I selected for my background research. Fortunately, the web pages of all network operators were either in English or French and the Yahoo currency converter made it simple to convert the prices given in local currency into euro cents. Like in other countries, each mobile network operator has a number of different prepaid plans to choose from, each with advantages and disadvantages. For my examples below, I took the general basic plan:

Kenya – Safaricom:

  • On-net calls: 8 Euro cents / min
  • Off-net: 15 Euro cents / min
  • SMS: 3.5 Euro cents

Nigeria – MTN:

  • Voice calls: 15-17 Euro cents a minute, billed by the second
  • SMS: 2.6 Euro cents on-net, 8 euro cents off net

Côte d'Ivoire – MTN:

  • Voice calls: 27 Euro cents / min
  • Calls to friends: 9 Euro cents / min
  • SMS: 6 Euro cents
  • Minimum use per month: 7.6 Euros

Côte d'Ivoire – Orange:

  • Voice calls: 15 Euro cents / min
  • Preferred numbers: 5 Euro cents / min
  • SMS: 5 Euro cents

So while SMS messages are generally much cheaper than in Europe, voice calls are quite expensive, especially when taking local salaries and standards of living into account. I've also checked out ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) levels, which probably still mean something in Africa, and they are in between 6 and 10 Euros a month. In many African countries that's probably a significant amount of money to most people but the convenience and live improvement seems to be worth it. And by the way, mobile telephony is by no means only for a few anymore, there are currently more than 300 million mobile subscribers in Africa, that's more than in North America!

In one of the following posts, I'll take a look at prices for GPRS and 3G (!) in Africa and at some statistics of how many people already use it.

Playing with the Digital Dividend

The German government has recently announced its intentions to reassign analog TV spectrum between 790 and 862 MHz, the so called digital dividend, for providing broadband wireless Internet to rural areas. With this intention it follows other EU member states and it looks like we’ll get another harmonized band in Europe pretty soon.

I was hoping this band is similar to the digital dividend band in the U.S., which was awarded to a number of operators some time ago. Unfortunately EU digital dividend band is about 100 MHz above the US 700 MHz band. Too bad, it would have been nice to have a common band, so a single device could have been manufactured and used in both parts of the world. It looks like we won’t see economies of scale and global roaming for this band either. And this would have been direly needed as the digital dividend band at least in Europe addresses mainly rural communities due to its propagation characteristics, a minority application in the global wireless game anyway.

The article announcing the re-assignment of the digital dividend band in Germany also contains a quote from an industry representative saying that if the German government goes ahead quickly, deployment of Internet access in this band could start in 2010. Hm, I wonder what kind of network they would use!? It’s unlikely it’s going to be either HSPA or LTE. For both, this frequency band is not yet standardized (see 3GPP TS 25.101 and 3GPP TS 36.101). A long way to go, I seriously doubt 2010 for those two systems.

Amazon.com sells the Nokia Bluetooth Keyboard for under $60

Sometimes a couple of words are enough but I have to admit, it only applies to the minority of the SMS, Twitter and e-mails I send from my mobile phone. While in the metro or another public place without a lot of space I use the keypad of my Nokia N95 and T9, but it's a concession to the situation. If there's any chance I can sit down and have some space, I prefer plan-B, which is typing that message or e-mail using my Nokia Bluetooth keyboard with 10 fingers.

I've had mine for several years now with various Nokia S60 phones and have done everything with it from writing SMS messages to reporting from the Mobile World Congress. Usually the keyboard is not cheap, costing well over $100. I am not sure why, but Amazon.com currently sells the SU8W for around $57! Amazing! If I hadn't already two I'd buy one right away before they increase the price again or run out of stock. So if you've hesitated before due to the price, now's your chance!

In case you wonder why I write such a straight forward product recommendation, the answer is simple: For me and for those who've bought one in the past due to my advice, the Bluetooth keyboard has been a game changer and one of the main reasons to stay with Nokia/S60 in the future.

Google Voice – Calling Party Pays vs. Bill and Keep

Google has been in the press in the past couple of days for resurrecting Grand Central, a web based PBX system that, among other cool features, can forward incoming calls to several virtual and physical phones simultaneously. Some of the reports also say that for the moment Google Voice is only available in the U.S. and not in Europe and other parts of the world, as termination charges to fixed and mobile networks are higher. That’s an interesting twist on the different charging models for calls that are sent from one telephony network to another.

In the U.S., telephony networks use bill and keep (B&K), which means that the originating network can keep whatever it charges the caller and the terminating network routes the call to the destination free of charge for the originator network.

In Europe and elsewhere, calling party pays (CPP) is the standard interconnection charging model. Here, the terminating network charges an interconnection fee to the originating network. For fixed line networks this interconnection fee is around 1-2 cents a minute these days while for mobile networks it’s much more expensive, around 6-10 cents depending on the country.

Some people including me and for example Tomi Ahonen think that CPP is a good idea because:

  • Incoming calls on mobile phones are free unlike in the US, where B&K makes the mobile operator charge mobile users for incoming calls.
  • This in turn keeps many people from getting a phone, has led to relatively high priced flat rate plans or a high number of included minutes and thus keeps people from communicating more cheaply and getting more than one subscription or mobile device.
  • As a result mobile adoption in the US is still far behind that of most other industrialized nations.
  • Also, there is no incentive to increase coverage and capacity of networks since the terminating network is not getting paid for incoming calls so it doesn’t matter if they are connected or not. Outgoing calls are included in the flat fee as well so missing or bad coverage does not reduce revenue either.

The Internet Based Voice Centric Service Twist with B&K

So in general, CPP has been quite good for competition and network build outs. But here is a twist with Google Voice and Internet based voice centric services: In the US, while B&K doesn’t generate revenue for Google for incoming calls, it allows them forward calls to mobile networks for free, because the terminator pays for it. In the CPP world (Europe, Asia, etc.) Google would have to pay for those calls. As the users phone number for incoming calls would have to be a fixed line number for the service to be attractive to users, the difference in termination charges they could earn with the fixed line termination fee and the money they would have to spend on the much higher mobile termination fee makes the business model very different.

What this means is that in the US, Google just has to recover its own costs for running the servers and for interconnecting with the telephony network. In the CPP world, Google would in addition have to recover the cost for the difference between the fixed and mobile termination fee, which is anywhere around 4 and 8 cents a minute.

So it looks like this aspect of B&K is quite beneficial for Internet based voice centric service innovation. From a mobile operator point of view, the bottom line does not look as good because when people start using this service their traffic and workload increases while their revenues stays flat due to flatrate pricing. In effect the potential service upsale can easily be made by Internet based companies and mobile operators have no handle to promote their own services, if they had them. Maybe an incentive for them to consider moving to CPP to reduce competition from Internet based voice services? It would be an irony.