Wireless Vs. DSL in Italy

In the past couple of years I wrote a number of posts on how wireless Internet access for example via a 3G USB dongle will for some people be a good replacement for the DSL line at home (see here and here). During my recent stay in Italy I also found evidence of this there.

Two of my friends have each decided that a DSL line at home is too expensive and have given it up in favor of a 3G USB stick in one case and tethering the phone in the other case. As they are not heavy users, the amount of data included in their monthly option is more than enough for their use both at home and while underway. For heavy users and multi-member families with several devices at home that's not an option but for singles and single Internet connected device households its an interesting option to save money.

University of Oxford Events in October

October is going to be an exciting month for me as I'll be in Oxford for a couple of days for two events:

The first is my two day 'Beyond 3G – Bringing Networks, Terminals and the Web Together' course, which follows the lines of one of my books. I am very happy to co-present with Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens and John Edwards of PicoChip who will bring in their great expertise from their angle of the industry. It's scheduled on October 13th/14th and you can find out more about the course via the link above. It would be great to see you there!

The second event which follows on October 15th is the Forum Oxford Mobile Apps and Technologies Conference, an event definitely not to be missed! I've attended and presented in the previous two conferences and I think it's THE mobile event of the year to visit!

In addition, there are two more courses that will run in the two days before the conference that might also be of interest to you: Tomi Ahonen will present his 'Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media' course on October 12th and 13th and Ajit Jaokar has a one day course on 'Mobile Application Stores' on October 14th.

It's going to be a packed week and I am very much looking forward to it!

Orange UK launches AMR-WB

After many many years of talking about higher quality speech codecs, Orange (France Telecom) is the first network operator to finally activate it in some of its 3G networks.

Having activated the Adaptive Multi Rate – Wide Band (AMR-WB) codec in Moldova about a year ago it seems they are now confident enough it works well and have decided to also switch it on in Orange UK. According to IntoMobile the devices that support the new codec with a software update are the Nokia 5230, X6, E5 and the Samsung Omnia Pro. Have a look at the IntoMobile page, there's an Engadget video that demonstrates the difference between AMR and AMR-WB. A very impressive difference!

While it may take a while before AMR-WB is widely used I can imagine that once people have experienced the difference they might just decide to switch carriers and phones when contract renewal comes up anyway to enjoy HD voice, as Orange calls it, with their most frequent and important contacts. Think wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, children, etc.

For further technical details on HD voice or AMR-WB, have a look at a number of posts I've written about the topic in the past.

1 Million Base Stations in 20 Years, Another Million in Only Three

Here's an interesting press release from Ericsson, not necessarily for all the self praise but more for the claim at the beginning of the text that it took them 20 years to sell one million base stations and then only three more years for the next million. Here's a couple of thoughts on these numbers:

  • As the 20 years are counted up to 2007, the one million base stations must also include pre-GSM base stations as 2G base station shipments did not start until the early 1990's.
  • The number shows nicely how mobile networks have spread over the world and how networks have been densified over the years to serve more users, increased use per person and increasing wireless Internet access bandwidth demands.
  • It also shows that prices of base stations are declining as otherwise, Ericsson would have made a lot more money in the past three years than in the past 20.
  • A base station of 20 years ago has little in common with a base station today when it comes to size, power consumption and capacity. When GSM first started, huge cabinets were required that could only support a few carriers. 

To summarize: Compared to 20 years ago, base stations have significantly shrunken in size and their capacity in number of simultaneous voice calls and also available data rates is orders of magnitude higher than in the early days. Together with decreasing prices this is what is required to serve the continuously increasing demand, both on the voice and the packet data side.

Congrats to Ericsson!

LTE Speeds on a 20 MHz Carrier in Stockholm

Computer World editor Mikael Ricknäs seems to have taken a little trip to Sweden to give the live LTE network there that operates on a 20 MHz carrier in the 2.6 GHz band as well as their 3G network a try. Very interesting numbers he gives in his report indeed, with peak downlink speeds of 59.1 MBit/s and peak uplink speeds of 18.2 MBit/s. Also, the reported HSPA speeds of up to 8.5 MBit/s (in a 5 MHz carrier) are quite notable. For the details, here's the link again to the article.

(Via LTE Watch)

Six Sector Sites, Wi-Fi, Femtos and LTE

SK Telecom over in Korea, one of the most advanced wireless countries in the world when you speak to Tomi Ahonen, has recently announced how they intend to increase their wireless network capacity. This article in the Korea Herald mentions capacity upgrades via six sector cell site compared to the 3 sector sites mostly used today, using Wi-Fi in areas where people requiring Internet access are mostly stationary, as well as femto cells and LTE. In other words, further capacity increases will mainly be achieved by further shrinking cell sizes on the macro layer and by building a very small cell grid with femtos and Wi-Fi to cover demand in very busy areas.

This makes me wonder at which point network operators will not charge you for a femto anymore but actually reduce the price of a DSL/mobile bundle when a subscriber puts a femto in place connected to his DSL line for general use!? 5 years from now, or maybe 10? I'll link back to this post when we are there 🙂

HSDPA Modulation and Coding Schemes

Back in May this year I wrote a post about the new 28 different HSDPA Categories and the defined top speed now reaching 84 MBit/s. At the time I also updated the Wikipedia article on it, especially the HSDPA category table. I didn't have some of the info at the time so it was incomplete and I asked in the blog and hoped someone would pick up the pencil and complete the table. And somebody did in the meantime, it is now complete. Very nice, I very much like Wikipedia!

Ikea Should Get Some Femtos

I am fortunate enough to live in an environment that is incredibly well covered by 2G and 3G networks day in and day out and further progress can be noted every now and then. But some places seem to remain black holes. Take big furniture stores for example, like those of Ikea. The mix of concrete, corrugated metal and heat reflecting glass doesn't only keep the heat out but also the signals of cellular networks. So how about it Ikea, you are big enough to be taken seriously by wireless network operators when it comes to improving coverage. Get some femots or repeaters inside and do your customers a favor!

Smartphone OS Market Share and Internet Use

Every now and then I stumble across a nice diagram showing the market shares of different smartphone operating systems such as Symbian, Android, iOS, and so on. Wikipedia, for example, has such a figure on this page. However, I think these are a bit misleading as they implicitly suggest, at least to me, that the percentage of each OS also equals the percentage of devices with a certain OS being used with a data subscription, i.e. to access services on the Internet.

While this might be true for most iOS and Android devices, as they have specifically been built and bought for this purpose, other operating systems like RIMs operating system for the Blackberry and Symbian are bought by many people without having Internet services in mind. So I highly doubt that the market leadership of Symbian, even though I personally prefer it over the other OSes, translates into an equal device market share that is actually used with a data subscription. Maybe this would be a much more relevant statistic to come up with?

And one more thought on the topic: Concerning Android, I also see it on devices now being bought by people for other reasons than using Internet based services. Take the Sony Ericsson X10 Mini for example. So maybe in a couple of quarters, Symbian won't be alone with a high percentage of devices not being used with a data option.

Manual Network Selections and PDP Context Survival

An international roaming thought today: While in the past I used manual network selection while roaming mainly to reduce the number of unwanted welcome SMS messages I have recently found another good use for it: As I am usually always connected to the packet side of the network, using manual network selection and thus locking the mobile to a particular foreign network prevents the PDP context from dropping every time there's a coverage hole and the mobile phone searching and attaching to another network. Quite a nasty thing if you are billed extra for each context activation or in big increments. But I would certainly trade manual network selection for affordable data roaming prices…