Category: Mobile Life

Trend: Mobile Internet Lookup Replaces Address Book Entries

Interesting to see how my handling of addresses and phone numbers has changed since mobile Internet access is possible for almost anywhere now. Here’s an example: Once or twice a year I need to call my shoemaker to bring in some shoes to repair and I need to know his opening hours. Of course I never remember his phone number but I am also just too lazy to create an entry in the address book of my mobile phone. No need anymore these days anyway since a simple Internet search from the phone with "shoemaker" + the town name and I get a web page with a clickable phone number to call instantly. It the small things that drive usability…

SNCF is now .mobi

Sncfmobi
Bienvenue, SNCF in the mobile world! This December, SNCF has launched their .mobi mobile portal for travelers to look up train times and to order tickets. I’ve been used to this service from other train companies for years and I am glad to finally see a similar service in France now as well. Even though there seems to be an advertisement cooperation in place with Bouygues Telecom the service is based on HTML and usable on all wap 2.0 capable mobiles. Well done, SNCF, thank you!

Next task: Please upgrade your vending machines to accept international credit cards so I don’t have to queue up every time I have bought a ticket online (and please tell RATP, too…). A sorrow I share with many foreign travelers in France!

Via Fullblog

Velib’s Mobile Site

For a couple of months now, the city of Paris has an extensive network of automated bike rental stations throughout the city. The service is called "Velib" and is very well accepted. Velib’s are everywhere these days when you are out and about.

Screenshot0014_2
Velib also has a mobile site where people can search for the nearest Velib station and can see how many bikes are available there. The picture on the left shows how this looks like in the browser. It’s a bit pathetic that in this day and age, the service is still based on WAP 1.0, but o.k., it’s better than nothing. The service in it’s current state is a bit difficult to use but it shows the potential for tomorrow: With mobile phones with built in GPS receivers becoming more common and powerful mobile web browsers with AJAX support can be easily enhanced in the future to locate the user, center the map around his position and show him the next bike rental station with the information he needs.

Velib should publish a JavaScript API to retrieve bike rental station positions and availability information. I am sure somebody in Paris will quickly come up with a mobile mashup that combines Velib and Google Maps.

Vodafone Websessions with SFR in France

Spring is one of the best times of the year to be at the Côte d’Azur in France. While the weather and landscape is great, France is really missing attractive prices for Internet access over 3G. Not really affordable for post-paid customers, nothing is available for pre-paid customers at all. A good opportunity to use my Vodafone Germany prepaid SIM card for Internet access via the WebSessions roaming offer.

Downlink Speeds

Vodafone’s partner network in France is SFR and according to their web page, they’ve got HSDPA deployed in some parts of the network. Accordingly my speed expectations where high. And indeed, when I activated the 3G connection my data card showed that HSDPA is available in the network. Speed tests performed over several days revealed however, that the downlink speed is artificially limited to around 45 kBytes/s. The limitation is certainly not the air interface as the signal strength was good and speeds I measured in Germany and Italy were much higher.

It’s hard to tell from a users point of view exactly where the bottleneck is. It could be that Voda’s Home Location Register (HLR) in Germany and SFRs SGSN in France can not exchange the QoS profile correctly which subsequently leads to the throttling of my connection. It could also be that there is a limitation on the IP link used for forwarding my packets between the SFR network and the Vodafone Germany network. It’s also possible that the SFR SGSN or the Vodafone GGSN is unilaterally limiting my speed. In practice this means that HSDPA does not give me a great advantage in the SFR network over a 3G UMTS device as the speeds are the same. Due to this I was not sure if the connection was HSDPA at all. Subsequent tests described below showed, however, that the data card really got an HSDPA and not UMTS bearer.

Uplink Speeds

After getting a 384 kbit/s uplink bearer in Italy and Germany I was also disappointed about the ‘meager’ uplink speed of only 128 kbit/s in the SFR network. It’s likely that this is no interoperability or throttling problem but a general network limitation of the SFR radio network. Either they haven’t activated the higher bearer option or it’s not yet available in the current software version of their radio network. Whichever it is they should consider upgrading or switching on the option as the difference is remarkable.

Round Trip Delay Times

One of the indicators that the data card got an HSDPA bearer and not a UMTS bearers were the round trip delay times. With the data card I got a round trip time of about 170 ms. HSDPA usually delivers a round trip time to an external host of around 120 ms (100 ms to the first hop). The additional delay is most likely due to international roaming which means that my data is tunneled from SFR into Vodafone Germany’s network before entering the Internet via Vodafone’s GGSN. With a Nokia N93 3G ‘only’ terminal I got round trip times of around 380 ms. I am not quite sure why there are an additional 200 ms of dealy as UMTS is usually only around 50 ms slower.

Radio Ressource Management

On the positive side I noted that the HSDPA radio resource management was more advanced than what I experienced in the TIM network in Italy and the Vodafone network in Germany. While the HSDPA bearer is active, the above mentioned round trip times to an external host of about 170 ms can be observed. In Cell_FACH state, which TIM and Voda’s network in Germany might not support yet, round trip delay time s were around 360 ms. This reduced activity state was only entered after around 45 seconds. After about 60 seconds the connection is put into Idle, Cell_PCH or URA_PCH state from which it takes around 800 ms to get back into active state. This is a lot quicker then the 2 seconds observed in Vodafone’s network in Germany and TIM’s network in Italy.

Skype, VoIP and IPSec

I tried Skype and my companies VoIP client over both HSDPA and UMTS and got crystal clear connections. Also, my IPSec tunnel worked fine between the notebook and my company. Very well!

Wifi competition

Except for the artificially throttled speed, my experiences in the SFR network with the HSDPA card were very positive. I should also note, however, that some Wifi operators such as Orange have moved forward a bit as well and are now offering 10 hours online for 15 euros. The 10 hours can be distributed over 30 days. For 15 euros, one can stay online for several days if the connection is only used for a couple of hours a day. For me a Vodafone 24h WebSession for 15 Euros is still better because I am online for more than 10 hours a day. Also, I need access at different locations throughout the day which is difficult with Wifi hotspots. People with less online time and stationary use, however, might find a 10h over 30 days for the same price more attractive. Also, they are not limited to 50MB of traffic per WebSession Vodafone intends to introduce in September.

P.S. For more articles on this topic, click on the HSDPA link next to the date below

Insight Into Who Backs WiMAX And Who Opposes It

Ericsson recently announced that they will stop their WiMAX development and that they will instead accelerate their LTE development. The Register has taken up on this and has published a very interesting article by Wireless Watch on which companies are pushing WiMAX and which companies are rather opposed. So if you are interested in the technical and political quarrels between 3G, 3.5G, 3.9G, 4G, UMTS, HSPA, WiMAX, LTE and UMB this one is a must read.

The Big Supporters:

  • Motorola
  • Nortel
  • Samsung
  • Huawei
  • ZTE

The Big Reluctant Followers:

  • Alcatel-Lucent
  • Nokia Siemens Networks

The Big Opposers:

  • Ericsson
  • Qualcom

My personal opinion: I think it’s good to have different technologies out there in the market that compete with each other. It speeds up development and it offers new starters in the wireless operator world possibilites which have not existed so far. As I discussed in more detail here, I think the consumer will benefit from this no matter in which direction the market will go.

CoComments Big Brother Plugin

CoComment is a great tool to keep track of comments left by you and others on blogs. Lately, they have added a Firefox plugin which makes the service even more comfortable to use. Unfortunately, however, the plugin raises a serious privacy issue about which CoComment does not inform its users about.

I’ve tried to get in contact with them to get a statement but got no response. O.k. so let’s discuss it in the blogsphere. While the plugin’s functionality is doubtlessly interesting, it contacts the CoComment server after each and every download of a web page. Part of the message sent to CoComment is the visited URL. In effect, CoComment is thus aware of each and every move a user takes on the Web. Cookies pale in comparison to this! What is so unacceptable to me is that CoComment does not inform users about this to let them choose if this is acceptable to them or not.

For my part I’ve uninstalled the plugin again and have reverted back to their bookmarklet. It offers less functionality but preserves my privacy except of course of keeping track of my comments, which is what it’s supposed to do.

Upload Times For Mobile Video Podcasts

If you have seen my previous entry you might have noticed that I am starting to expand my web activities from blogging to podcasting. The next step could be mobile video (pod)casts as my Nokia N70 has excellent video capabilities. With a resolution of approx. 352×288 pixels, mobile video capabilities have advanced far advanced beyond the first stamp size videos of doubtful resolution and quality.

The downside, however, is the amount of data that is generated. A movie of 30 seconds generates around 2 MB of data. With 1 GB flash cards available for less than 30 Euros today, storage space is no issue. For mobile video-casting on the other hand, 2 MB data transfers require quite some time. Here’s a list of upload times for a number of different wireless technologies. Upload times are calculated for a 2 MB video file which is put on a blog or other web site via eMail. eMails tend to increase attachments by at least 50% due to the coding used for attachments which is why the times below are calculated for a total transfer volume of 3 MB:

  • GPRS: 19 minutes, based on an uplink speed of 25 kbit/s (2 timeslots)
  • EDGE: 5.5 minutes, based on an uplink speed of 90 kbit/s (2 timeslots, good uplink quality)
  • UMTS: 7 minutes, based on an uplink speed of of 64 kbit/s
  • UMTS: 3.5 minutes, based on an uplink speed of 128 kbit/s
  • HSDPA: 1.5 minutes, based on an uplink speed of 384 kbit/s (only few networks and mobiles support this uplink speed category today)
  • HSUPA: 45 seconds, based on an uplink speed of 800 kbit/s (no networks support this today but coming soon)

Quite obviously, mobile videocasting only makes sense with EDGE or UMTS, as GPRS is just too slow. What astounds me most is the huge difference in upload times between the oldest technology (GPRS) with 19 minutes and the latest technology (HSUPA) with just 45 seconds. Less than a decade is between these technologies. GPRS was introduced five years ago in 2001. HSUPA is not quite here yet, but expect it late next year or early 2008. Just 7 years between 19 minutes and less than one. Makes me wonder where we will be in 2015…

Is Yahoo the end of Three’s Walled Garden?

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.