Author: Martin

Book Review: Mobile as the 7th of the Mass Media

I've known Tomi Ahonen for quite a while now and I've met him at conferences before and I am a regular reader of his Communities Dominates Brands blog. Up to this point, however, I haven't read a single one of his books so far, due to mostly being busy on my own writing or other activities. It was time to change that so I ordered a copy of "Mobile as the 7th of the Mass Media" as I've seen bits and pieces of it over the years on his blog and as I quoted one of his blog articles on the topic in my recent book.

I was not sure how fast I would get through with it, being a 300+ page book but I made it in less than a week, as Tomi's writing style is entertaining, his facts solid and the material top notch. Most of the material can be found on his blog, too, but the point of the book is that all the material has been put together in a single place so one thing leads to another and ideas can be built upon each other, something that is not so simple when writing a blog.

Tomi has many examples of exciting mobile services from many different countries ranging from Blyk inthe UK for mobile advertising to young people to mobile social networking in Japan and Korea. At one point I was thinking that if all the things he describes would come together in a single country, it would indeed be a very different world from now. But all the things exist today and they will go around the world and be adopted step by step.

Some thoughts I found particularly useful:

  • SMS: My thinking on SMS has changed. I did indeed see it a bit as the tiny brother of the e-mail, but as Tomi points out the mobile and instantaneous nature of it makes it quite different to the e-mail. And as far as the limit of 160 characters is concerned, it's not really a limit for the main target group, as I've recently discovered myself with Twitter.
  • Mobile Payment: Very differently handled from country to country, see my recent experiences in Austria. As a frequent traveler I'd really like to see a common approach but I guess that is unlikely to happen.
  • Why America is behind in mobile: Very good analysis of the issues and I fully agree on the impact side with the major thing being the incoming call charges. While Tomi sees the the variety of different network technologies not as one of the core issues for the problems, I personally do, I probably have a bit of a different angle on it. Maybe a thing for a separate post. One can't agree on everything 🙂
  • Battle for the Pocket: Tomi argues the mobile phone is taking over more and more things that have so far been done with separate devices. Not only that but by including it into mobile phones things get cheaper and the quantities change significantly.
  • Generation-C, aka the community generation: Yes, when I look at kids today in the metro, etc., I see them texting 3 words in a message and it is less a message than a dialogue. While people like us would abstain from doing that because it's a waste of money to send 3 words for the price of 10 or 20 cents, kids think in a different way. And you or me are not going to change this 🙂
  • 18 month replacement cycle: Mobile hardware evolves faster than the PC because it is replaced more often. True, I get a new mobile phone roughly every 18 months and the notebook I am typing this on is already over three years old. If I look at the mobile I had three years ago… No, I don't want that anymore, while my notebook still compares well to today's models.
  • And of course, the mobile internet is not the small dumb brother of the desktop Internet: Fully agree, lots more can be made with the Internet when embracing mobility, location, built-in payment, we are only at the beginning of this. One of the things I regularly do is consult Wikipedia when sightseeing to go beyond what is in the tourist guide. And that just exploits one aspect, mobility. I am looking forward when I don't have to type in the name of the sight but the phone/application figures it out by itself from my current GPS coordinates and offers me an overview of sights nearby with a deep dive link to Wikipedia. I could go on but Tomi has more space in his book, so I leave it to him 🙂

By now I think you get the point: If you are interested in the social and economical changes mobiles brought and bring about then this is the book for you.

SMS Forwarding

More often than not I have at least two mobile devices with me, a business phone and a private phone. When abroad, the count usually goes up to three as I often use a local SIM card in my private phone for affordable Internet access on the device for e-mail, web browsing etc. In most cases, I have an automatic call forward from my other phones to this one so I don't have to keep them switched on or with me all the time. While this works quite nicely there is one problem with this approach: Arriving SMS messages are not forwarded and thus I usually do not see them coming in and only read them much later. Totally unacceptable for many people who use SMS for near real-time communication and I had some embarrassing moments due to this in the past myself. While there is an application that could take care of this that runs on Nokia S60 phones it has the disadvantage that the phone needs to be switched on for the forwarding to work. I haven't tried it myself but anyway, what I really want is the network to give me an SMS forwarding option (e.g. via (mobile) web based or USSD configuration). Where is this service? I am sure I am not the only one who would use such a service. And I think the business case is simple, one could argue that the SMS forwarding is the same as call forwarding, i.e. the forwarding party pays for the forwarding. In other words, one SMS, two billing events.

OperaMini Doubles Users and Tripples Consumed Data in a Year

I am a huge fan of OperaMini and about a year ago, I reported on the usage statistics published by Opera over at their website. While they report their usage statistics once per month, I haven't been over in a while and I was quite possitively surprised when I compare their current report to that I have reported on a year ago. Here are the points I've taken away from the comparison:

  • Compared to a year ago, the active user base has increased from 11.9 million users worldwide to 20 million users. So it's almost doubled in a year.
  • Number of transcoded pages: 7.5 billion, up from 2.4 billion a year ago. so while the user base has doubled, consumption has trippled. Looks like the per person appetite is rising.
  • The amount of data sent to users: 122.00.000 MB during the month, that's almost 4x more than a year ago. So not only do users view more pages but the content per page is also growing. A year ago, I calculated their outgoing average data rate at around 100 MBit/s. At the current usage, their average outgoing data rate must now be close to 400 MBit/s. In addition, there's the traffic for fetching the full web page in the first place and then compressing it to those average 400 MBit/s output. It's difficult to say how much bandwidth that requires due to caching but I'd say its very significant as well.

From what I've heard, Opera has a number of regional data centers now in the US and China, so the overall load is split now. Still, the number is staggering.

For this post, let's do another rough guess: With 7.5 billion pages served a month, that's 250 million pages a day, or almost 2900 pages a second.

All very impressive!

T-Mobile: Probably Integrating Fixed and Mobile Branches Again

After Vodafone Germany has reversed its course last year and stopped the sale of its fixed line branch, T-Mobile is now also revising its pilar model. Current rumors are that with the the boss of the wirline business going towards finances, CEO Rene Oberman will use the opportunity and combine wireless and wireline under a common roof once more. Looks like another major operator gets itself into a position to explore the possibilities of Connected Home Services, i.e. services in the homes of users ranging from sensor networks, accessing audio and video libraries to remote controlling devices not only from devices in the home network but also from mobile devices while on the go. I've had many posts on this in the past two years, for more background info see for example here and here.

The US Discovers Prepaid

Here's a link to an interesting post in the New York times on the growing use of prepaid SIM cards in the US. Living (at least partly) in Germany, where prepaid SIMs are the norm rather than the exception and where they've had a big impact on pricing in the past couple of years, it's interesting to see how radically different the perception of prepaid still is in the US:

  • Hardly known
  • The article suggests most know them from gangsters in TV shows to avoid being wiretapped. Should they do this in practice, they are in for quite a surprise, one of those TV myths 🙂
  • Perceived as expensive, when you compare it to some countries in Europe. I can't remember when I last paid the equivalent of $50 a month for voice calls. At 9 cents a minute, or 4 cents in Austria, that's difficult to do.
  • But in the US, $50 a month seems to be cheap and the article states more people are turning to it to reduce their monthly costs.

So it looks like the old ways of doing wireless in the US are slowly changing. Good news, also for me personally, and I already put it to good use last year when I was in the US for a week with an AT&T prepaid SIM card for Internet access via my phone. There are rumors the option I used at the time has been discontinued since, but should that be true, maybe one of the other emerging prepaid offers has something similar for me next time I visit the US.

Now it would be nice if coverage was improved and charges for inbound calls to be abolished, in my eyes one of the main inhibitors of using prepaid with accurate per call billing instead of a monthly minutes bundle applied for both incoming and outgoing calls.

Maybe an upcoming business opportunity for retailers to sell SIM cards and phones separately via the web or otherwise?

2 Day LTE Services Course at the University of Oxford

Oxford-logo
Great News: On April 20 and 21st, Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens and I will host a 2 day course on LTE Services at the University of Oxford's Department of Continuing Education!

Here’s the agenda:

  • New services based on enhanced capacity of the network
  • IP based business models
  • Rich voice applications
  • New role of devices to handle rich content and social networks
  • Social networks based on rich content like video
  • Services unique to LTE and the core network
  • Greater role for user generated content and for rich media
  • Unified communications and beyond 3G networks
  • Fixed mobile integration – leveraging enhanced networks and learning from past mistakes
  • Integrated networks and connecting back to home networks
  • Network elements: Femtocells vs Wi-Fi in the home gateway and services based on these elements
  • Wireless sensor networks at home and their role and opportunity in an overall beyond 3G network

I am very happy to be part of this and it will be great to look at these topics from our two different angles. We've also put together a questionnaire to see what your angle is on this topic. If you have a minute and are interested, we'd be happy to get your feedback. We'll share the result with those who leave their e-mail address and of course with all course participants. Needless to say that all responses are treated confidentially.

So, if I have caught your interest, head over to the course's web site for the details. During this week, there’s also the yearly Forum Oxford Future Telecommunication Conference. More about that in an extra post once the details are sorted out.

Nokia and Mobile Home Services

You might remember one or the other of my posts in the past where I've been speculating about mobile home services being an interesting field for mobile network operators with both fixed and mobile access networks. They are in control over both types of access and in addition sell mobile devices as well. In other words, they are in a perfect place to offer services that work both at home and on the mobile device while being away. Not many other players in the industry can do the same in this space. Now, Nokia wants to become active in this domain as well and has started development on what they call "Smart Home Solutions".

Basically the smart home solution is a home gateway with a Wi-Fi access point, built in storage and software to access home network sensors to for example control the room temperature, security systems, low-energy walls, programmable thermostats, self-adjusting curtains, configurable set-top boxes, self-operating yard lights, etc. From the outside, the gateway is accessed via a mobile devices' built in web browser. The ideas have been floating around for quite some time now and I agree with Nokia that all pieces have now pretty much fallen into place to make it finally work.

Nokia knows they can't do it on their own so they position it as an open solution and are looking for partners. According to their website they have their first partner for the project with RWE, one of the big German power companies that are also active in the Internet business. Let's see if they will also find an interested mobile operator over time to kickstart this project. I'll keep watching. More technical details on their web site.

MWC: Roundup

Another Mobile World Congress has come to an end. Thursday is usually a bit strange as everyone is alreday quite tired and just waits for the closing bell to ring. To my surprise, my Thursday was quite different.

In the morning, I met with Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens / Futuretext to prepare for our upcoming course on LTE Services at Oxford University. Lots of great energy flowing in that session and I went out in a very positive mood. More about that soon in a separate post.

Next I went to the Next Generation Mobile Network Presentation stream to listen to some network centric presentations. Julius Robson reported on the progress of the LTE/SAE Trial Initiative, which I already reported on in one of the first MWC posts. Great presentation, Julius, it’s good to see LTE making progress.

China Mobile had a presentation on common FDD and TDD chipsets for LTE, so like me, they also think that a common chipset, i.e. mobile devices being able to do both FDD and TDD are vital for TDD to become a success.

As usual there is also the odd presentation from a North American carrier bashing on the vendors and the users alike, calling European network operators stupid for their extensive 3G network rollouts and sale of prepaid SIM cards for voice and data. I wonder if they will ever wake up!?

Good that most other operators have quite a different view on that and out of the many other presentations I especially liked Seizo Onoe’s presentation for NTT DoCoMo on Deployment and Realities of LTE. The most interesting chart for me was how DoCoMo plans to deploy LTE. It seems that they already have a deployment in which the UMTS radio module sits on the mast and is connected via a fiber cable to the digital module of the UMTS base station. For LTE, they will reuse the existing antennas and hook their digital LTE module into the fiber link that is already in place. Quite cost effective. In the Q&A the presenter was asked by a representative of T-Mobile (who also push very hard for LTE and don’t want to invest much more into the HSPA network) what he thought of HSPA+. Seizo Onoe seems to be one of the “fathers” of LTE, if one can say so, so he was of course not quite in favour of HSPA+ and said with a smile on his face that he doesn’t like it, it makes things too complicated in the mobile devices and one should go to LTE straight away. I had to smile as well, that was brought over very well. But no matter, HSPA+ will go into handsets anyway, that’s my opinion.

On into the afternoon, I had some more meetings with companies doing testing equipment and I learnt a great deal about how the optic interface between the LTE radio module and the digital part, called CPRI, will be used by maeasurement and testing companies to simulate mobile devices to stress test the base stations and the network in general.

And finally, I went to Wiley’s again to pick up a book about wireless to read on the way home and to say good bye. More about that in a separate blog post as well.

There we go, another Mobile World Congress has closed its gates. Not the most splendid one I have seen but I hugely enjoyed it again, have learnt many new things and spoke to lots of people enthusiastic about what they are doing. What else can one ask for?

MWC: Author Session, Television and More

It’s Thursday morning and before I head of for the final day of the Mobile World Congress, here’s what happened yesterday.

In the morning I went to see a number of companies doing measurement and testing equipment for LTE networks. While in UMTS, a lot of info can be extracted from the Iub interface between the base station and the radio network controler, this is no longer possible with LTE as all functionality has been put into the base station. So other innovative ideas are required to analyze and debug the radio access network in the future. I’ve seen lots of interesting approaches and I am sure the hearts of many engineers while beat faster when they get one of these new testers into their hands.

The highlight for me on Wednesday was of course my author session at the Wiley booth in hall 2 to promote the launch of my new book. Lots of people came by to say hello, to have a chat, to see what is going on and to pick up a copy. At the end of the session we were sold out. Thanks to all who stopped by it was very nice meeting you and to see the different angles you have on the industry.

Later in the afternoon I went to see TV moderator Guy Daniels at the TelecomTV studio to see what he thinks of this years MWC and the state of the industry. It was good to see them being in Barcelona again in full force pumping out lots of great interviews that one could watch live, over one of the huge video walls at the Fira, and as a live stream on the Internet on the TelecomTV.com homepage. This year, the program was also broadcast via DVB-H, so people lucky enough to have a Nokia N96 or other DVB-H capable handset could watch this and a number of other channels for free. I also had a chance to get a backstage look at the TV equipment used for producing the shows, including the 10 Terrabyte disk array that stores the week’s production.

One thing I didn’t get to see was a demo of Nokia’s Home Control hard and software which seems to have been cancled at the last moment. A bit dissapointing, I was very much looking forward to that.

After the Symbian Foundation Party on Monday and the great dinner reception of Ip.Access on Tuesday I didn’t really get enough sleep so I opted for something more quiet and with less people last night. The food was good and the amount of sleep a bit more so there is enough energy left for the final day at the Fira.

You might have noticed I have not written anything about new mobile phones having been announced this weeks. Well, they have just not really been my prime focus. Too many other things to see here that can’t easily be seen on the web. Any suggestions from your side which mobiles I should look at before the Congress closes this year?