Mobile Life – Page 4 – WirelessMoves

The SIM Card Family Pack

I guess it is no secret that in the supermarket, the space in front and alongside the cash register is great for selling those small things you can grab and consume on the way, which you would probably not pick up if you saw them somewhere else. These days, German supermarkets sell SIM cards this way. Only have 3 already? Why not pick up another one? The offer shown in the picture on the left must be the latest step in this direction: How about getting 4 SIM cards in a single family pack from Edeka Mobil, an MVNO using the Vodafone network, and distribute them to your family members!?

All yours for 30 euros, with 10 euros of credit already on each SIM card. For 3 euros a month, talk 10 hours between the SIMs of the MVNO. 9 cents a minute to fixed and mobile phones in Germany and 9 cents per SMS. Who could say no? Probably only your kids who already have SIM cards with community options to text their friends 🙂

It's an interesting trend to observe. The first no-frills but cheap MVNOs were launched by mobile operator e-Plus (KPN) about two years ago. O2 has been a bit quicker with MVNOs but their prices were not very competitive until e-Plus stirred up the market. Since then, all mobile operators have followed and even incumbents like T-Mobile and Vodafone are now offering no-frills prepaid SIMs via MVNOs with competitive prices for voice and SMS.

The same is now happening with mobile Internet access. Again e-Plus was first to offer competitive prices for small screen web browsing and now O2 is offering all post-paid Internet access plans also on their own prepaid SIMs. Let's see how the story continues in 2009.

A Mobile Christmas Spike This Year?

A couple of years ago, when mobile phones were still a novelty, one could read reports around Christmas that operators expect/experience a traffic spike on Christmas eve when people start unpacking their presents and start playing with their new mobile devices. I wonder if that still is the case these days and if the spike is moving more towards the packet switched part of the network. Forecasts, anyone?

The Second Wave of Mobile Web Users is Coming

When you sit in a restaurant and see how non-geeks at the next table check their Facebook accounts on their smartphones before the food arrives; if your colleagues to whom you have preached for years about the benefits of mobile e-mail and mobile web browsing without much success suddenly ask you which phone they should buy for that; when your friends proudly show you how cool opera mini is without being asked; when at meetings half the people attending now have a 3G dongle attached to their notebook; then I think the mobile web and mobile Internet are really about that have a big breakthrough in the mass market. Well, all of these things have happened to me recently so we must be close. I call it the second wave because the first wave were the geeks, the minority, and they have used it for some time now. The second wave however, are the 'normal' people, the majority. Finally…

8 SIM Cards and 3 Operators

In the days of prepaid SIMs and multiple phones many people carry, counting the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) based on SIM cards has pretty much become irrelevant. I am the best example that this approach doesn't work anymore. Let's make it simple and only take a look at how I use mobile networks in a single country, Germany:

The 'currently used prepaid SIM card' in my primary phone which has good rates for telephony and small screen mobile Internet access. Network: T-Mobile, MVNO: Congstar.

My 'I always stay the same' prepaid SIM who's phone number is known by all my friends and via
which they can reach me no matter in which country I am at the moment.
When I am in Germany, I forward all incoming calls to the currently used SIM card since the price for Internet access is too high. Network: T-Mobile, MVNO: Simplytel.

My business SIM card, the only one that is postpaid. Network: T-Mobile

The prepaid SIM card in my car. I have a block heater which is connected to a GSM module. In the morning and evening, I call the car to switch on the heater so my windows are de-frosted and the interior is warm by the time I arrive. Network: T-Mobile, MVNO: Simplytel.

The prepaid SIM for notebook Internet access. I can activate 200 MB for 10 euros or 5 GB for 20 euros. Network: O2/Telefonica.

Two prepaid SIMs for notebook Internet access in Germany (€4.95 a day) or when I travel abroad and no local offer is available (€14.95 a day). Network: Vodafone. I have two so I can lend one to guests or colleagues traveling abroad.

One prepaid SIM to use in the mobile phone abroad for small screen web browsing and mobile e-mail in countries where I don't have a local SIM card. 19 cents for 100 kB is not exactly cheap but does the job well for mobile only use. Network: E-Plus, MVNO: Alditalk.

Altogether that's 8 SIMs and 3 mobile operators. Have fun calculating the ARPU! From a technical point of view all this is quite uneccessary, one sim card for the mobile phone, one sim card for the 3G USB notebook dongle, and one for the block heater in the car is all I would need.

Uplink Downlink Ratios Revisited

I've been traveling for two weeks now in Austria and Italy and have been online throughout that time 'only' via 3G to do my daily business thanks to prepaid 3G Internet access. Wherever I went, 3G HSPA access has been available so using the Internet with a 2 MBit/s downlink on average didn't feel much different from using DSL at home. I've reset the data counters on my N95, which I used as my 3G modem during the trip, to get an idea on how much data I exchanged. In the past seven days, I used about 750 MB in total for e-mail, web browsing, company Intranet access, VoIP, IM, etc.

As can be seen on the picture on the left, my uplink to downlink ratio is around 1:2 and not 1:10 as I observed during a previous trip. That's probably got something to do with the fact that this time, I received and sent many e-mails with massive file attachments (those 5 MB PDF or PPT files everybody likes…) and have been using VoIP extensively for lengthy conference calls. With VoIP, the uplink / downlink ratio is 1:1 and generates around 20 MB per hour in each direction.

From a network point of view a 1:2 ratio means that I used about as much resources in the uplink as I did in downlink, since uplink transmissions are less efficient than those in downlink due to the smaller antenna and little transmission power compared to a base station. While in most situations, I could get uplink speeds of around 400 kbit/s, which is almost as fast as the uplink of my DSL line at home, I nevertheless wished I would have had a High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) capable device and network. Those 5 MB Power Point presentations do take quite a while to get transmitted.

Yes, one can never have enough bandwidth 🙂

3G Connection Sharing – Part 2: My Fritzbox DSL/Wi-Fi box speaks 3G now!

Recently, AVM, manufacturer of the 'famous' Fritzbox ADSL2+/Draft-N Wifi router, released a beta software that adds Internet connectivity via 3G USB keys to their router software. I really like this box as it's crammed full of features such as a DECT base station, SIP capabilities, meaningful status reports, Wi-Fi interference monitor, DSL line visualization, etc., and now also 3G capabilities with an external 3G modem.

While it wouldn't work with a Huawei E160 3G USB stick, I managed to get it working with a somewhat older E220. The software is still quite an early beta and the GSM/UMTS configuration page in the router is not updated correctly once the connection is established as it remains in the "trying state". Nevertheless the connection is established and the main configuration screen properly shows the IP address and connectivity state. The throughput is the same as if the stick was connected directly to the PC.

Kind of an inverse 3G femto cell and great for traveling when more than one person or device needs Internet access or in areas without DSL coverage. For traveling, however, a somewhat smaller configuration, e.g. a 3G stick in combination with a D100 is probably preferable. For most users, such a setup is probably a lot more practical than the 3G Internet connection sharing via a PC, as I described a long time ago in this post.

The Nokia 5000 with OperaMini and E-Mail

The battery of my 'voice call only' phone has pretty much given up after several years of use so it was time to buy a new low-end phone just for this purpose. Or almost. Inspired by this article of Krisse at All About Symbian, I decided to go for a Nokia 5000. While being an entry level phone and available for 90 euros without a contract, taxes and shipping included, it has a 320 x 240 pixels display that is really stunning. The resolution is the same as for example the display on the N95 but much smaller, hence, the the graphics are even sharper. With 65k colors the display can't quite match that of the N95 with 16 million, but it doesn't make a difference for the other main application besides making voice calls: web browsing.

Yes, you read correctly, web browsing. Nokia delivers the phone with Opera Mini pre-installed and I was looking forward to see how well web browsing works on such an entry level device. I quickly replaced the pre-installed Opera Mini with the latest version (4.1) as the original version had an ugly quick, it didn't save some of the settings I made in the browser. But the latest version works flawlessly.

Configuration and Startup Time

Launching Opera Mini takes a bit longer than on the N95 but 12 seconds is still quite acceptable. Once Opera Mini has started one can surf the web straight away. No APN or other configuration was required, as the Nokia 5000 seems to have an internal database of networks and their corresponding APNs. I tried with several different SIM cards and the correct APN was configured automatically in all cases. Well done Nokia, this is how it should be!

Page Load Times

Pages also don't load quite as quickly as on the N95 even though the device is EDGE capable. While downloading the latest version I could experience the speed gain of EDGE over GPRS. While loading a web page, however, the transmission is quite slow, probably because the browser is downloading and rendering the page at the same time, which seems to take a lot of processing power that is missing for treating incoming data quickly. Despite pages loading slower than on the N95, the experience is still o.k.

Scrolling

Scrolling up and down in the page is, yes, you guessed right, also slower than on the N95. However, using the full page up/down feature of the browser instead of scrolling line by line much improves the experience. Also switching off soft scrolling 'visual effects' in the configuration menu brings quite a significant speedup.

Memory Management

Memory seems to be quite scarce on the device. After loading a couple of big pages, a 'memory full' error message pops up every now and then with the screen remaining empty. Ignoring the message and reloading the page solves the issue, Opera Mini seems to use the notification to clear up memory. However, the number of pages one can scroll back is quite limited. Depending on the size of the pages, it's only possible to go back 2 to 4 pages without triggering a reload. On the N95 on the other hand, one can go back almost indefinitely without reloading earlier pages. Still, the experience is o.k.

No Multitasking

While being a bit slower than what I am used to which is quite o.k., there is one limitations which I have difficulties to cope with: No multitasking. While browsing the web on my N95 I am quite used to jump seamlessly between Opera Mini, the calendar to make notes when something comes to mind while browsing the web and the e-mail inbox to copy/paste links. The Nokia 5000, however, is a single tasking OS as far as user applications are concerned so I can't exit the browser without closing it.

The E-Mail Client

The second most important application on my mobile phone is e-mail. The S40 e-mail client looks quite o.k. and it gets all the required settings from a server on the network after typing in the email address. Impressive. The downside of automatic configuration is, however, that I can't get to the configuration information afterwards so I have no idea if my e-mails are encrypted during transmission. When configuring an e-mail account manually, this can be set during the configuration process and changed later on. While receiving email works quite well, the client can unfortunately only retrieve the full e-mail or only the header, but nothing in between. This makes the client completely unusable for me as I often receive e-mails with attachments. While I am usually not interested in the attachments on the phone, I'd like to read the message itself and not only the header. I can't quite understand why this feature didn't make it into the e-mail client!? But o.k. there's still the mobile web client for my inbox.

Summary

For phone that costs 'only' 90 euros, the Nokia 5000 is extraordinarily versatile. The biggest disadvantages I could make out are the somewhat slow but still acceptable scrolling in the browser, no multitasking and the missing support for partial e-mail downloads. On the positive side there is the Opera Mini browser that works really well, renders even full web pages just as on my N95 and also the auto-configuration of the packet data parameters. So if you don't have a lot of money and want to browse the web from a mobile with a good screen, this is the phone for you!

18% of Voice Calls Handled in Swedish 3G Networks Now

Two more facts caught my eye in the 2007 market report of the Swedish Telecommunication Authority:

3G Network use for Voice Calls

18% of mobile voice calls (3 billion minutes) where handled by 3G networks, while the remaining 82% must consequently have been handled by GSM networks. Not a huge number yet but it shows the subscriber base is slowly moving to 3G handsets.

Decreasing overall use of Circuit Switched Telephony

The second number is even more astounding: The number of fixed and mobile telephone minutes decreased from 60.000 million minutes in 2001 to just 45.000 million minutes in 2007. The major factor for this is that dialup internet connectivity are being replaced by DSL. Another factor, but minor is the decreasing use of voice telephony due to the adoption of other forms of communications. Mobile minutes are increasing which means fixed line minutes are falling fast.

Mobile Broadband Use in Sweden – Interesting Statistics

I have never been to Sweden before, but judging from Ram Krishnan's report on his blog and the pages on Sweden on the prepaid wireless internet wiki, it seems the situation there concerning mobile broadband use is similar as in Austria: Affordable prices and prepaid SIMs that make it easy to go online with a 3G USB stick have made the mobile broadband market surge in the past 18 months. Ram quotes from the 2007 Swedish Telecommunications Market Report of the National Post and Telecom Agency (PTS), available in English here, on the uptake of mobile Internet access in Sweden. Here's my interpretation of the facts and figures:

Only 1% use mobile broadband as their only Internet access

If you have some time, take a look at diagram 8 in the report and Chapter 5 in general, there are some very interesting facts: The diagram shows that at the end of 2007 there were about 375.000 mobile broadband users, up from only 90.000 a year earlier. That compares to about 3 million DSL users and a population of around 10 million. The report says on page 39 that of 2.000 people questioned, only 40 said that they used the 3G dongle at home to complement another access method and only 20 (i.e. = 1%) said that the 3G dongle was their only Internet connectivity at home. So these numbers clearly point out that 3G Internet access is currently used mainly as a supplement to fixed line Internet connectivity. The report also says that since this is a relatively new phenomenon and that it remains to be seen if 3G will remain mainly an add-on to fixed line connectivity at home or if it will seriously start to compete with DSL.

500MB on average per user per month

Diagram 8 says that 375.000 users generated a traffic of 2.200 Terabyte (in the whole of 2007 ?). If you do the maths that amounts to (2.200.000 GByte / 375.000 users / 12 months = 493 MBytes / month.

How Close Are We To Saturation?

So how much is this in practice, how close are we to network saturation? I guess that's quite easy to say for someone who has access to the data of mobile operators. But I don't have that, so let's do a little extrapolating to get an idea of where we might be here with a bunch of assumptions: Let's say the number of people covered by a single 3G base station is roughly the same as a 2G base station, 2000 people. 375.000 broadband users compared to a population of 10 million is 3.75% of the population. Let's double that value to 7% to account for unequal 3G network distribution. 7% of 2000 people are 140 people per cell with a 3G card. Let's say the base stations usually have 3 sectors, and each sector gives an average throughput of 2 MBit/s. That's 6 MBit/s in total. Let's say busy hour accounts for 10% of the daily traffic of 500 MB * 140 people / 30 days / 10 = 233 MB/hour/base station. The capacity of the base station is 6 MBit/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes / 8 bytes = 2700 MB/hour (minus the capacity used for voice calls).

The above calculation brings us at less than 10% of total available capacity of a base station today. But the input parameters used are highly speculative so the number could easily be half of that our it could be double. If anyone has a different opinion, please let me know.

How Much Traffic Growth in 2008 And Beyond?

This of course opens up the big question of how the growth will continue. When taking the 2006 numbers from the report, an average user consumed 200.000 GByte / 90.000 users / 12 months = 185 MByte / month, i.e. less than half of that of 2007. So this year's traffic and that of the following years will depend on:

How many additional users can be signed up
Do these users have the same usage patterns as the users today, or more, or less? Potentially, falling prices could attract users with less usage and only very occasional use but also other groups with little money but high Youtube desire.

I think the numbers are hard to predict since the user behavior and clientele will change. While I think that at this point Generation Youtube is not yet on a 3G stick, I wonder what will happen once they do?

The report references a forecast for 2008,
which reports another 140.000 3G USB sticks have been sold in the first
quarter 2008 and which expects 600.000 users by the end of 2008, an
increase of 40% over 2007. This is impressive but definitely a slowdown over the growth observed between 2006/07.

If we stick to the numbers above, we should still be way clear of the capacity limit for 2008. Same for the year after if another 300.000 subscribers are added. If the amount of traffic per user grows by a factor of two in that time frame and the network stays the same, data traffic would grow to 933 MB/base station/h in 2010, still clear of the capacity limit.

Once the limit of current deployments are reached, operators have a number of options:

Deploy a second carrier frequency
Densify the network, i.e. install more macro, micro or pico base stations to reduce the coverage per site and thus the number of users per base station
Work on DSL/mobile broadband conversion and offer interesting packages to users to offload traffic from the mobile network. This of course only helps if people start using wireless broadband as an alternative to DSL. This doesn't seem to be the case so far.

Anyway, one thing is for sure: In countries where broadband wireless access is priced attractively, base stations are no longer just stitting around idling and producing only heat.

The Line Is Busy But You Don’t Notice

I recently surfed the web with my Nokia N95 over my home Wifi network using the OperaMini browser while simultaneously downloading a movie from my online video recorder at the full DSL line speed (7 MBit/s). What quite surprised me was that despite the line being 100% busy because of the file download, the browsing experience on the phone was perceptively not slower than if the DSL line was not used at all.

There are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from that:

It shows the huge difference in bandwidth requirements of different applications and due to the little bandwidth requirements of one application the user does not even notice that a network with a significantly higher bandwidth is already fully loaded.

From a technical point of view mobile web surfing with compressed page downloads costs almost nothing compared to the transmission costs incurred by other applications such as huge file downloads and full web browser use.

The situation obviously changes when even small screen devices download full web pages including high resolution images. Mobile web browsers such as Opera Mobile, the Nokia N- and Eseries web browser and the iPhone already do that today. However, for most web pages the experience is not as good not only due to the high amount of data that has to be transfered but because the processor is not being able to render the page as quickly as on a PC. Over time, this might well change but I guess there is still a lot of time left where the OperaMini compression approach will deliver suprerior results in most cases.