Author: Martin

It looks like the fire in French operators about mobile Internet access has pretty much vanished for the moment. Last year at this time, there were posters such as this one everywhere, advertising how one could use a mobile phone to access the Internet. Nothing of the sort can be seen in the streets of Paris this year.

Also, no 3G USB dongle advertisements, most likely due to the lack of interesting pricing compared to those in countries such as Austria, the U.K., Sweden, Italy, Germany, etc.  Also, no iPhone advertising, no eeePCs with 3G dongles, just an E71 mobile e-mail advertisement by Bouygues.

Together with Orange's recent announcement that they will hold out on LTE for the moment, quite a bleak picture. But with their current data pricing, it's unlikely they will get any kind of real load on their 3G networks anytime soon anyway. Looks like French operators have gone into some sort of combined hibernation once more while the rest of Europe is moving forward at a rapid pace.

Am I too pesimistic?

Each year, mobile Internet access from PCs and other non mobile phone devices gets better and better and as I write these lines, I am sitting in a railway station in Paris, connected to the Internet via a 3G USB dongle at multi-megabit speeds. I travel a lot and depending on the country I am seeing lots of people doing the same these days. While at the beginning of this trend, the distinctively red Vodafone PC card adapters were dominant, today it's mostly 3G USB dongles and I wonder how many people still bother looking for suitable Wi-Fi to connect.

It's definitely a trend and operators in many countries are experimenting with it. So how will this trend continue? Dean Bubley over at Disruptive Wireless has worked on a detailed report on this and has published it this week. Here are some of the findings which I think are right on the mark:

• 3G USB dongles will continue to be more successful for some time to come than built in 3G connectivity. From my experience in countries such as Germany and Austria, getting online is as simple as walking into the supermarket, picking up a 3G dongle and SIM card for a couple of euros. Unfortunately, it's not everywhere like this. In other European countries, like France for example, the situation is quite different, with operators still resisting the general trend. Built in 3G cards on the other hand are unlikely to get as cheap as Wi-Fi chips for quite some time to come so the PC/notebook industry is probably reluctant to add 3G capabilities to notebooks by default in the same way as Wi-Fi.

• 340 million devices non mobile phone devices connected via 3G by 2014. An interesting number considering about 4 billion devices online by that time and unequal distribution of such devices mainly in developed markets. But given the falling prices and prepaid billing models by day, week and month, buying an inexpensive dongle for occasional use will definitely drive the numbers.

• Dean estimates about 45 million WiMAX users by 2012. I think that's probably in the right ballpark as well. After lots of activity around alternative WiMAX operators in Europe 18 months ago, this has pretty much died down in the meantime and I think the window of opportunity has been pretty much lost. After all, 3.5G HSPA is now available in Austria, for example, for 9 euros a month with a traffic limit of 15 GB.

• Impact of the Credit Crunch and the Capacity Crunch. Indeed, having more users on the network will of course drive bandwidth requirements and operators will have to monitor their networks closely and invest in upgrading the backhaul capacity of existing base stations and add additional ones in high traffic locations. The extend of this, however, has yet to be seen. I've done my own calculations on when we might see a general capacity crunch and I think it is still some years off. In the meantime, technology is developing and backhaul is getting cheaper. So it remains to be seen if the demand curve going upwards and infrastructure and backhaul prices going downwards can be brought into a healthy balance for everyone.

Lot's more to be found in Dean's report and if you are lucky enough to work for a company that appreciates the value of such research I encourage you to give your business intelligence department a call and ask if they have this report available.

DVB-H seems to be a roller coaster technology, quite different adoption rates from country to country.

In Germany, DVB-H recently flopped as the business model of setting up a single DVB-H company that resells the services to mobile operators did not spark a lot of interest if not to say outright opposition from network operators and had to close down recently.

In Austria, DVB-H was introduced a year ago and according to this report (in German), A1 and 3-Austria have only been able to get a couple of thousand subscribers so far. DVB-H service costs 6 euros per month.

In Italy on the other hand, the same report says that DVB-H has attracted one million subscribers to date, some of the channels are available for free, and on average, subscribers watch for one hour a day. To me, one hour a day seems to be quite a bit much. But I can confirm, every now and then I see someone in the streets of Rome watching a football game on his DVB-H mobile, quite easy to spot the antenna sticking out and to hear the typical sound of a football game.

For those interested in further background info on mobile TV, here's another blog entry on mobile TV I've written earlier this year on DVB-T on mobiles (the big twin brother of DVB-H) and 1seg in Japan.

Like in UMTS, China is determined to go its own ways with LTE as well. Instead of adopting FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) LTE like the rest of the world, China Mobile wants to deploy TDD (Time Division Duplex) LTE. One of the reasons stated for this is to have an upgrade path from TDD UMTS (which, to the best of my knowledge, is not yet deployed on a broad scale in China). I am sure Chinese companies and joint ventures have put a lot of work into TDD UMTS over many years and yet, it hasn't made it anywhere. So why should TDD LTE be different?

In fact, I see the same problems with TDD LTE:

• Economy of scale: China is a big country but in order for the technology to be a success, other countries have to adopt TDD LTE as well. As with TDD UMTS, I think that this is unlikely to happen, I don't see an incentive.

• Devices: Same issue as above. For a limited market, only few vendors will be tempted to develop mobile devices. One way out of the dilemma could be dual mode TDD/FDD devices. But what is the chance of this happening?

So without a real need for an upgrade path, why TDD-LTE? Unlike with UMTS, Chinese companies like Huawei do not have to catch up to the rest of the pack, this time they start at the same time and with an advantage.

The center gap, a glimmer of hope? In many countries the center gap between the uplink and downlink channel of UMTS and LTE is unused. Some operators in Europe for example have even bought TDD spectrum in the 2.1 GHz band during the UMTS auctions back in 2000. So maybe those bands might trigger some operator interest for TDD LTE!? 

As always, comments are welcome.

LTE is a great technology but it has one Achilles heel: No built in telephony solution that will work when network are first rolled out. I've blogged before about the different alternatives for voice over LTE before, such as IMS, Voice Call Continuity, CS Fallback and a Study Item how to connect a circuit switched MSC to the LTE radio access network. While the last one is only a study item and not standardized yet, the first three are standardized but either complicated or, in the case of CS fallback, not a long term solution.

Looks like some operators are not very happy with the state of affairs and have looked elsewhere for help. At the recent LTE World Summit in London, Motorola and China Mobile have both said that they are considering GAN over LTE as a further alternative. GAN is used today in some 2G/Wi-Fi phones for Voice over Wifi at home. What it basically does is it establishes an encrypted IP tunnel between the mobile and the GAN controller at the border of the operators core network, and then tunnels both signaling and speech data to the MSC. Furthermore, the mobile and GANC are able to perform handovers between the Wi-Fi connection and GSM for ongoing calls. In effect, GAN hides the access network (Wi-Fi in this case) from the operators circuit switched core network.

The solution proposed by Motorola at the conference, GAN would do the same for LTE. After all, an IP connection is an IP connection, the core functionality of the GANC does not care if the interface to the user is Wi-Fi or LTE.

On his blog, Zahid has a slide of the Motorola presentation that shows how the network setup could look like. The figure shows an interface between the Mobility Management Entitiy (MME) and the GANC which I think is probably for handover co-ordination. When the MME detects that a handover is necessary to UMTS or GSM, it informs the GANC which can then ensure that an ongoing voice call survives the handover.

The advantage of this approach over the evolved MSC approach, which only exists as a 3GPP study item so far, is that the current circuit switched network infrastructure does not have to be changed. Even though the changes required for the eMSC are minor in comparison to IMS and VCC, they still need to be standardized and implemented by the major infrastructure manufacturers. The GAN approach on the other hand requires some modifications in the mobile and the GANC only, which could well be made without waiting for 3GPP.

>From a design point of view I think the eMSC would be a much more elegant and native approach to the issue. But in practice, elegance does not always win if it is more complex, or as in this case, meets reluctance in the standards bodies.

So, let's see if this 'dear 3GPP, we either do it with you or without you' announcement will change the attitude of some players.

Thanks to Zahid Ghadialy for his coverage of the LTE World Summit

Once a year, Nokia hosts a 2 day conference to demo to the world what's in store from Nokia for the next 12 months. This year, Nokia World takes/took place in Barcelona this Tuesday and Wednesday. I haven't been there in person, but Nokia and WomWorld have made sure that those not on site could also watch the keynote speeches and product introductions via the web. Well done, Nokia, not a single glitch, no capacity issues, the live-streams performed flawlessly at 800 kbit/s.

You've probably already heard or seen about the new Nokia N97 introduced there so I'll just link to the keynote video where Anssi Vanjoki introduced it and a link to YouTube with first impressions of the look and feel as well as how the OS looks like and behaves for a general overview. Very insightful and I guess that's going to be my next device, if I can wait until it is released. Forecast 2H09. A long wait…

Here are the bits an pieces of hardware and software enhancements that I think will make a difference:

• Form factor: I like the idea of a small QWERTY keyboard hiding under the screen as well as the 3.5" 16:9 touch sensitive display. Thinner than my current N95 and not as wide as the iPhone makes it perfect from a handling point for both one hand and two hand operation. It's still more of a bar than a PDA shape.

• I expect it will still work with my Bluetooth keyboard for real fast typing which now gives three input methods, i.e. touchscreen, mini keyboard, and full bluetooth keyboard. The right input method for every location.
• 5 megapixel camera and flash. O.k. nothing really new here, the N95 has got that, too for two years now but it's still miles ahead of the 'toy cameras', as Anssi calls them, in competing products.

• A-GPS and electronic compass. While A-GPS gives you the location it can't tell the phone in which direction the user is looking while he stands still. That's an issue for street navigation, especially when you've marked the place you want to go beforehand, leave the metro station for example, your location is shown on the map but you have no idea in which direction to walk at first. It happens to me often enough. The compass should help with that. I'd be interested how that compass works from a practical point of view. Does anyone know?

• Also, the compass will be great to get more information about things you see together with Nokia maps. Though I think not yet in the product, Nokia is thinking in the right direction here, to send the location and orientation to a sever in the network, which then return information about what you are seeing like Wikipedia entries, map overlays, etc. So far I always assumed that such services would require the user to take a picture of what he sees which is uploaded to a server and then analyzed. With A-GPS and compass, things are much simpler, no need to analyze a picture.

• Nokia Maps enhancements: Quite a lot of announcements of what will happen here over the next year. Route overview for navigation will be included, something I am really missing today, terrain mode looks very nice, and 3D representation of sights. Also, Nokia has promised to include user generated content in Nokia maps, something I've been waiting every since I first used GPS and Nokia maps. Also, they are planning to include the location of other users in Nokia Maps so you can see where your friends are, if they wish so. And finally, synchronization between Maps on Ovi and Maps on the phone for planing trips on the PC and then downloading locations etc. you have marked to the phone automatically.

• Active idle screen enhancements: Widgets on the idle screen, customizable by the user to see his latest e-mails, what's going on on facebook, weather forecast, RSS stream, contacts, meetings, etc.

Nothing announced today is a revolution, but, I think these things are a powerful evolution over the current already great N-series devices and will definitely keep the competition going in the smartphone sector. Now, Nokia, let's just get this device and the new software out there as soon as possible. I can hardly wait.