Out Of Time, Out Of Place, And Out of Cables

An eMail arriving two minutes before midnight on a Saturday evening on my mobile phone as a response to a request I had sent a couple of hours earlier made me think of what has become of time, place and cables in communication.

Well, they are all gone. In the old days, not so long ago, a fax was the fastest way one could transmit someone a document. But a fax machine was only observed at business hours, one had to be at a certain place and it was attached to that place by a cable. If the person was not next to the fax machine, chances were good an answer took at least a day or two or even longer, especially when sent at an odd time (such as a Saturday afternoon). Fast forward to today, and communication is no longer limited by time, place or cables. Messages are sent via email from anywhere to anywhere on the planet within seconds, independent from time and also from place.

When I received that email close to midnight, I first thought a mobile email device played a role in the fast response (think Blackberry, Nokia N- and Eseries, etc.) . The header of the email, however, revealed that it was sent from a PC. But not from Northern Europe, as I assumed at first, but from a location in the United States. Another important lesson here: A message is no longer sent to a device sitting at a certain place but to a person and that person can get his/her messages no matter of his/her current location. As long as there is connectivity, that message finds its way.

We have absorbed this new way of communicating pretty quickly it almost seems silly to talk about it since it has become so normal. But once every now and then I stumble upon a company that still wants to do business “the old way”. Pretty difficult in my case, since I don’t carry a fax machine around…

IPhone 3G Sparks Wireless Data Price Debate In Canada

Many people say many things about what the iPhone changes in the wireless world. But this one I haven’t heard about before: Looks like the introduction of the iPhone in Canada has made Canadians becoming aware of the high prices they have to pay for mobile Internet access compared to in other countries. When I checked a year ago, I had difficulties to even find a data plan on Roger’s web page. Looks like things have changed at least a bit since then, they are now offering packages from a couple of hundred megabytes to a couple of gigabytes, but still at rates several times higher than what you have to pay for the same package in Europe. Interesting links on the topic here, here and here. And for Roger’s price plans take a look here. What I don’t see at all yet are promotions for Internet access via 3G/USB sticks for notebooks which has become very popular in many European countries lately. One step at a time I guess…

No More Reboots In the Metro

In the past I have reported that my Nokia N95 had the nasty habbit of rebooting spontaneously while using OperaMini and moving from cell to cell e.g. while traveling on the train and in the metro. How often the mobile rebooted semt to depend on the country, i.e. which mobile network I used, i.e. which network vendor supplied the infrastructure. This week I noticed that my N95 no longer reboots in the metro. That is interesting, since I haven’t made a software update and the Opera Mini version is still the same. So it seems like the network operator, Orange France in this case, must have made a software upgrade in the network or has changed some parameters. In any case, mobile Internet use has become much more practical again for me in France. Thanks to whoever fixed it.

The Symbian Foundation: Will It Make A Difference For Developers?

A lot has been written lately about Nokia buying the Symbian shares of Sony-Ericsson and others and creating the Symbian Foundation to release the OS as open source in the future. A lot of people become ecstatic when they hear  ‘Open Source’ as it seems to be a synonym for success and the only way to go. However, there are different kinds of open source approaches and usage licenses so it is worth to consider what developers will be able to do with Open Symbian that they can’t do today.

I think the big difference to Linux, which is also open source and has attracted many individuals and companies to start their own distribution, is that I think it is unlikely the same will happen with Open Symbian in the mobile space. In the PC world, the hardware is well standardized so people can easily modify the kernel and compile and run it on their machine. In the mobile world however, hardware is very proprietary so I think it is unlikely that the same will happen here, no matter how open the Symbian OS becomes. Therefore, an open Symbian is mainly interesting for hardware manufacturers as they will have easier access to the OS and can customize it more easily to their hardware. That’s a long way from ‘I don’t like the current OS distribution on my mobile so I download a different one from the Internet and install it on my phone’. But maybe we are lucky and open sourcing the OS will allow application programmers to use the OS more effectively and extend it in ways not possbile today due to the lack of transparency.

For more thoughts on what the Symbian Foundation might or might not change in practice, head over to Michael Mace and AllAboutSymbian, they’ve got a great insights on their blogs from a lot of different angles.

The Ultimate Test: The N82 in the Hands of a Normob

A while ago I started the ultimate usability test by pre-configuring a Nokia N82 for mobile Internet access, as notebook modem, for mobile eMail and for picture uploads to Flickr to see how this would work out in practice with a normob (normal mobile user). While the project is still ongoing, the results so far are mixed 🙂

  • Notebook Access: The N82 as a notebook modem has become fully accepted, as it enables use of  the Internet as before.
  • Mobile eMail: While for me this is great, the test person’s eMail usage is a bit different. She gets lots of eMails with attachments that can’t really be viewed very well on a small screen. So as a consequence she prefers not to look at eMails at her mobile at all. Not a winner here…
  • OperaMini: Used from time to time, but sometimes it takes a bit of encouragement.
  • Picture Upload to Flickr: Still not really used. I am still trying to figure out why because to me the upload process looks really simple. Maybe not to a normob, not sure…
  • 3G Video Calls: Believe it or not but they are a sure winner to put the location into visual context accross the continent every now and again.

To be continued.

Chanalyzer 3.1 Beta for WiSpy with Cool New Features

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About half a year ago, I first reported on Wi-Spy by Metageek, a Layer 1 Wifi / Bluetooth tracing tool. Last week, Metageek reported that they have started trialling their 3.1 beta version of the Chanalyzer with a number of cool new features. The most useful one for me is that the software is now also able to query the Wifi card of my notebook for the network names, channels and signal strengths. This information can then be used to overlay the data reported by Wi-Spy. In the past I always did this with a separate program which was always a bit awkward. The picture on the left shows how this overlay looks like in practice at my place. My network  is on Channel 11, surrounded by numerous others. Not a pretty radio environment, maybe I should move to channel 1. Thanks Metageek, that's a great addition! For more details, have a look here.

Connectivity With Reliability and Peace of Mind

24062008683-smallLocation: London. I am on my way to the Eurostar Terminal on my way to Paris when I noticed two ads in a newspaper.

The first one addresses reliability: Obviously I am not the only one who thinks reliability and high availability are as important as a fair price. BT thinks so, too and tries to attract customers with 99.99% availability for a business DSL line. Not quite the five 9's carrier grade reliability but still far away from 2.5 day nationwide outages of others…

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The second ad addresses the fear of massive bills because of data usage with no or a wrong data plan. T-Mobile UK offers an all you can eat 3G Internet access with the promise that it will never charge more than 15 pounds a month. I wonder if that promisse holds when using the offer abroad… As always, read the fine print. The ad also mentions that the offer includes free use of T-Mobile's installed Wifi hotspots. A good way for T-Mobile to offload traffic from their cellular network in hotspots such as airports and hotels. A humble but good beginning of fixed/mobile convergence.

Blackberry Impressions

Location: A restaurant in Miami Beach and I am surrounded by Blackberry and a couple of Danger hiptop users! And no, these people are not the typical business users that used to carry the Berries exclusively only a short while ago.

I’ve noticed a similar trend at the conference I attended in Orlando last week. Most people had a Blackberry with them, nothing else, a bit of American monoculture. About half of them had a company Berry while the others bought the devices themselves because they see the usefullness of having mobile eMail. Each and everyone I asked also used the device for mobile web access and most of them used Facebook. And we are not talking about the teens and twens of Miami Beach here but of mothers and fathers in their thirties and forties.

Two very different and very interesting directions for the Berries and the mobilization of the Internet!

Can 300 Telecom Engineers Share a 1 Mbit/s Backhaul Link?

I am sitting in a Starbucks in Miami after an intensive conference week right now and starting to reflect on what I have seen and noted during the week. One of the straight forward things that comes to mind about last week is that conference organizers, especially in the high tech sector, have to ask about the details of Internet connectivity of the place they want to use. Just having Wi-Fi in a place is not enough, capacity on the backhaul link is even more important. In our case, 300 people were rendered without a usable Internet connection for the week because the backhaul was hopelessly underdimensioned for the load. When I arrived as one of the first on Sunday, the best I got was about half a megabit per second. During the week it was a few kbit/s at best. eMails just trickled in and using the Internet connection for Voice calls was impossible.

While some might see this just an inconvenience and argue that you should concentrate on the conference anyway there are others, like me, that require to answer a couple of eMails and call people throughout the day to keep the normal business going. So instead of making free calls, I and many others had to fall back on their mobile phones and paid a dollar/euro or more per minute due to high roaming charges. The extra cost of that to the company multiplied by 300 is significant. Last year, same conference, different venue there was an 8 MBit/s backhaul link and things ran a lot smoother. But I guess by next year, even that will not be good enough anymore to keep things going when 300 engineers arrive.

P.S.: Good that I had my AT&T prepaid SIM card. With the MediaNet add-on I could access the net and get to my eMails via AT&T’s EDGE network. Definitely not at multimegabit speed but a lot faster than over the hotel’s Wi-Fi.