Silently, my fellow co-worker Pierre Lescuyer has updated his excellent book on UMTS called "Réseaux 3G" (3G networks) and the 3rd edition is now available in French. The new edition contains among other additions new chapters on HSDPA, HSUPA, IMS and MMS. Previous editions are also available in English and German.
Very well done, Pierre, congratulations!
I haven’t been able to attend this months Mobile Monday in Paris due to a business trip. Fortunately Alexander Casassovici has made videos of three of the presentations. Thanks Alex, it’s almost like having been there myself.
A couple of days ago Yahoo and Three, a UMTS operator in a number of countries in Europe, Asia and Australia, announced a partnership to bring Yahoo services to Three’s customer base. Some news organizations like here, here and here are already speculating that this might mean the end for the walled garden strategy of Three.
I am a little bit more cautious in this regard as the original announcement just mentions that access to the Internet will be possible via a transcoding service for web pages delivered by Yahoo. Well, that’s a step forward but it’s still kind of a garden with a hedge around. As long as someone only wants to use the phone to browse the web via the mobile phone that’s probably o.k. but don’t dream that this offer will be useful in combination with a notebook.
I think this could be a win-win deal for both Three and Yahoo. Yahoo definitely needs such deals with operators in order to get their software pre-installed on mobile phones which is a precondition to reach an audience beyond early adopters who are willing and capable to install software on a mobile phone or type in URLs with the keypad in the mobile web browser to get to Yahoo’s services. Three on the other hand will surely welcome the attention the Yahoo brand will bring to its network.
For Yahoo, I think this is an important step in order to catch up with Google, who’s partnered with T-Mobile recently for its Web’n Walk mobile Internet access.
Great stuff, the mobile Internet is slowly tacking shape for the masses! In the next step the hedges and prices have to come down.
A recent personal experience is yet another proof of how even small features can make or break usability in any product, no matter how good it is. I am away from home quite often so mobile technologies, the Internet and VoIP help me a lot to stay in touch. Since Skype has started to offer video telephony, things have improved even more. However, there was a catch.
We’ve had web cams for quite a while now but we didn’t use them a lot as my better half always felt uncomfortable with that "eye" (lens) staring at her even when not used. So the web cam was always unplugged and stowed away, usually not used again for a long time as it is just too much effort to position the camera and plug it in again before a call. Now Logitech has found a solution to the problem. One of their latest web cam models, the QuickCam Fusion features a lid that can be opened and closed to reveal or hide the lens. A small feature, but it makes Skype’s video service finally usable for us! No more camera positioning and plugging. After the call, the lid is closed and the "eye" is no longer staring at you! Strangely enough, Logitech doesn’t even mention this feature in their production description. Are they aware what they have done?
Now let’s take the lesson into the mobile domain: One of the small things that break the mobile Internet experience for most people is the fact that they have no idea how much it will cost them if they open their mobile phone’s web browser to go to the operator’s portal. Not a single person I asked who’s not regularly using the mobile web could answer this question. It’s unlikely this can be solved anytime soon, no matter how much mobile operators spend on advertising.
A different solution has to be found and actually, it is quite simple: How about having a button on the phone that automatically starts the web browser and directs the user to a pre-programmed page on the operator’s portal? Agreed, this already exists. However, most people hate this button because they feel it’s dangerous as they have no idea how much a press of that button will cost them. This is similar to the fear of the "eye" staring at you. So the only way to take that fear away is to make a subset of the portal free of charge. Sure, operators want to make money but to enter the shop (the portal) must be free and people must be made aware that entering the portal is free.
P.S.: Dear operators, once you do this, do this right! That means: Make the button free of charge for roamers as well!
Debi over at Media Slaves has asked me if I’d like to be her guest for her next podcast on mobile network technologies and the effect of mobile social media on network usage and capacity. Two topics right from the top of the list of wireless topics I am interested in, so how could I have refused? You can find the result in mp3 format here. I hope it’s interesting.
One of my favorite topics is cellular network capacity. I posted an example a while back on the 1 kb/s 3G surfer. At the time I excluded VoIP as part of my application mix as it increases network traffic quite a bit. Today I found some interesting material which sheds some light on this part of the story:
Wireless Networks have a particular problem with Voice over IP. While traditional circuit switched traffic was optimized on all layers of the protocol stack to be transferred as efficiently over the air interface as possible, achieving the same effect for Voice over IP is very difficult due to the decoupling of the different network layers on the IP protocol stack. Thus, a VoIP call today consumes at least four times as much bandwidth on the air interface than a circuit switched voice call. In other words, if everybody started to use VoIP over wireless today, network capacity for voice calls would shrink to only a quarter of what it is today.
Now Ericsson has released an interesting slidepack on the topic which targets the non geek investment community but which nevertheless contains some interesting numbers on wireless network enhancements and optimization for VoIP in the future: As described above, Ericsson’s slide pack shows on page three that UMTS networks today could only provide 20% of the voice capacity with VoIP compared to standard voice calls. So that’s close to my number above. With HSPA (I think they refer to HSDPA + HSUPA) capacity increases to 70% if IP robust header compression (ROHC) is used. They then go on to claim that with efficient signaling (whatever that is…) and improved scheduler (what improvements?) and optional GRAKE2 (again what is that?) VoIP capacity can be pushed to 140% of today’s standard voice capacity. Finally the next evolution of UMTS called LTE (Long Term Evolution) targets 200% of current voice traffic for VoIP in the same bandwidth.
Not sure what the improvements are they are talking about as they don’t give any further explanations but it seems we are getting somewhere in due time. VoIP VoIP Hurray!
Debi a.k.a. Mobile Jones has discovered that a lot of people seem to quit one thing or the other this year. She wanted to join the pack and has quit smoking. Good idea 🙂 In a recent podcast recording she asked me what I would quit this year (has it become kind of an obsession with her)? Well, I might just quit blog reading…………… on the PC. My blog reader program (Resconews) on the mobile phone is almost good enough to let me do all my blog reading while on the go. Not much is missing in the software. So what will you quit this year?
The Carnival has returned to it’s founders blog at MobHappy and I’ve never seen so many great articles as in this one. So if you are looking for a place to discover new things and thoughts about mobile from the blogsphere, head on over.
Sometimes I download video podcasts I would like to watch and which would also be suitable for watching while on the go on my Nokia N70 mobile. The built in Realplayer, however, does not recognize a lot of different video formats so most of the time, attempts to play such video podcasts on the mobile phone are not very successful. Now I’ve discovered that Apple’s Quicktime player in it’s pro version is able to export video format into the .3gp format which is used by most mobile phones. I gave it a try with a 20 minutes news show which I downloaded as MPEG-4. Reformating to .3gp format took about 3 minutes and the 20MB input file produced a 13MB output file. To my very positive surprise the phone’s built in Realplayer instantly recognized the file and played the 20 minutes video file flawlessly.
Experimenting with my newly acquired Bluetooth GPS receiver, Python and S60 phone to come up with a tracking and network measurement software, some further thoughts have sprung up about what could be done with the location data. Once the GPS device is embedded in the phone it’s easy to store the exact location as part of the ‘exif’ data of pictures taken with the built in camera. It’s already got a name: GeoTagging. Here are some ideas what I would like to do with it:
Automatically geotag my pictures I upload to Flickr from the mobile phone via Shozu: Flickr could then be enhanced to detect the geo location in the picture and offer a link directly below a picture to a mapping site such as Google Maps / Google Earth or the Yahoo equivalent. The user clicks on the link and a map of the location where the picture was taken pops up. The photo site could also go through its database to see if other users have taken pictures in the surroundings and show provide a link on the map to those pictures.
Enrich my private picture archive with location information: How about adding some geo functionality in Nokia’s Lifeblog!? The software could detect the geoinformation in a picture and open up my locally installed Google Earth and show me the location. Beyond that the user could create ‘location sets’ of let’s say all pictures taken during a vacation or a trip. Lifeblog could then open Google Earth to show which route I was taken and provide a link back to my pictures at every location a picture was taken.
Enhanced eMail program that detects geotags in pictures: Let’s say I want to show a friend where I am. So I take a picture which has an embedded geotag and use my mobile phone’s eMail client to send the picture. When he receives the picture the eMail program or external picture viewer should detect the geotag and again offer me a link to either my locally installed mapping software (e.g. Google Earth) or a web link to an online service to see where the picture was taken.
The beauty of these solutions is the ease of use for both creator and consumer of the picture. No user interaction is required to geotag the picture as the phone automatically puts the GPS coordinates into the picture. Once programs and websites support geotags there’s also no complicated user interaction required to use the information. Just click on a link or a button and ‘voila’, a map pops up to bring you closer to the image.
So Yahoo, Flicker, Shozu, Nokia and all others, it’s time for some products 🙂