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Time flies and it's almost time again for the yearly trip to Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress, which I still fondly call the 3GSMWorldCongress. To further promote the recent launch of my latest book which gives a solid technical introduction to all technologies between GSM and LTE, with WiMAX, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on top and to meet up with readers and friends, I'll join my publisher John Wiley at their MWC Booth in hall 2 (2A.100) on Wednesday between 9 and 11 a.m. So if you want to have a closer look at the book, browse a great collection of other interesting telecom books or just chat with me, just come over and say hello. Looking forward to meeting you there!

I travel a lot and keeping in touch with family and friends back in Germany and Europe is important to me. While in Europe, voice roaming charges have fortunately come down to a level in recent years to make calls back home, even longer ones, pretty much headache free. Still not cheap, but not expensive enough to look for a more complicated alternative. Outside of Europe, however, things are still different.

When I am in the US, for example, the price per minute for a voice call back home is a staggering 1.49 euros a minute. That is almost 90 euros per hour! That's a bit much so I have found myself the following alternative that you might be interested in if you plan to travel to the US as well:

I went to an AT&T store and got myself a prepaid SIM card, which is now free by the way, and activated the 2 dollars voice+sms a day option. This includes all national calls to US numbers. Since my calls all go abroad that doesn't help much by itself. To add the international calling ability I use Rebtel for many years now. They are giving me national numbers in the country I am that I can call for fixed and mobile numbers abroad. The call to those numbers are part of the 2 dollars a day offer. And from there Rebtel charges a cent or two per minute to a fixed line destination or around 12 cents a minute to a mobile. So for one hour of calls a day to fixed line destinations I pay 2 dollars + 60 x 2 cents = 3.8 dollars. Compare that to 90 euros a day if I dialed direct and sum that up over a week…

And for Internet access on the move or in overcrowded meetings, my D100 Wi-Fi/3G router with a US band capable 3G stick + an AT&T prepaid SIM card with one of their data options serves me good as well. Skype calls are possible, so I can enjoy better voice quality when calling other Skype users when I am stationary.

For more tips on how to save on communication charges while traveling, have a look here.

Here we go, a month after the first announcement and my latest book is finally shipping worldwide! After being printed in the UK it has made its long voyage to North America and other corners of the world and is now available for immediate delivery. Sales at Amazon seem to go nicely, Amazon has almost run out of stock again but new copies will be delivered swiftly. So if you are interested to find out more, here's a link to my initial post and here a direct link to Amazon.com. As you can imagine I am very happy that it is finally available globally and I am looking forward to receiving your feedback. I will also be at my publishers booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week so if you happen to be around I'd be happy to meet you there. More about that soon.

One of the first train companies to introduce Internet access over Wi-Fi on board its high speed trains was Thalys, connecting Paris with Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam and a couple of cities in between. When I first tried it back in 2009, performance was great, almost unbelievable. A year later in 2010, however, the offer was significantly downstripped, actually to the point of being of little use. When I complained at the time by email the response after many weeks was that it was a temporary problem and actually there is not much Thalys could do since it is managed by another company. Yes, yes, it's always the others that are at fault. No date was given when the service would improve again.

But Thalys keeps advertising the service, so now in 2011 I gave it a try again and found that the service has still not improved. Most of the time during the trip, the connection was so slow that web surfing was practically impossible. A few times, speeds increased to a usable level but only for a minute or two before the connection slowed to a crawl again.The only good use I could find was to send and receive short emails where it doesn't really matter how long it takes. What a shame because my initial experience shows that this is not a technical problem as things can work if enough bandwidth is provided via the satellite link. So Thalys, either fix your offer or stop your advertising that creates expectations your service can't meet…

Sincerely, a disillusioned customer

Many network operators are using some form of steered roaming, i.e. the mobile is actively discouraged to use a network it tries to attach to so it searches for another one that is potentially more attractive to the home operator of a customer. From a usability point of view this has one major downside which is the longer initial waiting time if the mobile is steered away from a network. But recently I have found at least one advantage: Every now and then, I use Vodafone Websessions for Internet connectivity when roaming which is usually only available in one of the networks in a foreign country while the voice service is available in several. So with steered roaming, the home network operator can increase the chances the 3G stick ends up in the right network without my help.

I just heard that the paper submission deadline for Mobilware 2011 to be held in London this year has been extended by a couple of days to the 13th of February to probably give a number of late submitters the chance to get their papers in. As I'm involved in the conference organization a bit I thought I'd let you know in case you are considering to participate. For details see my earlier post here.

In the past, I've used 3G in the US mostly for Internet connectivity for my notebook with prepaid SIMs, as only my Europe / World – 3G USB dongle could tune to the frequencies used in the US. But now with the new Nokia Symbian^3 phones with pentaband UMTS support such as the N8 and C7, that 3.5G indicator also popped up on my mobile phone when I recently switched it on in Los Angeles, both with the T-Mobile and the AT&T network. On first impression, Internet connectivity on the phone feels reasonably faster than just over EDGE. A definite advantage in an international meeting where dozens of international Blackberries hang on to the two GSM networks. Very nice, I love pentaband UMTS chips!

Recently, there's been an article in "Der Spiegel" (in German) on the, what I would call, "electronic revolution" in the German parliament. Since tablet computers have been allowed for use during parliamentary sessions, the article says that at least half of of the parliamentarians have gotten themselves an iPad.

And who could blame them as the devices are undoubtedly useful and they get them for free anyway as they get reimbursed (see the article). The other reasons for the sudden popularity of tables could also be the fact that other forms of electronic computing, i.e. anything with a physical keyboard is still banned. In other words, no notebooks and netbooks (see another article here). At first I wondered why such a discrimination was imposed but I assume it has been done to keep the noise level to a minimum that might increase if people en masse started to type on their netbooks. Ah well, you can't have it all I guess.

In my opinion, the good thing coming from this is that parliamentarians are now integrating computing, wireless Internet access and the Internet in general more in their daily life than before. And that's very positive as the laws they make having to do with the Internet, data privacy, etc. will impact them more than before as well. So they just might think a bit more before giving their vote.

Recently I was quite positively surprised when I noticed that the apps I bought in the Ovi store are not locked to a certain device but are part of my account in the Ovi store. In other words, when I changed my device I could install the apps again free of charge on my new device. That's good to know since I tend to change devices quite often so I'm quite happy that my apps will follow me to a new device. Makes a lot of sense from a user point of view!

How about the behavior of other app stores, do they allow to do the same?

These days I have to rub my eyes when reading just about any wireless news tidbits from the US. In almost every report the acronym "4G" is used for just about everything that is faster than a crawling few kbit/s. 4G is HSPA, 4G is LTE, 4G is this, 4G is that. Well, 4G isn't any of it. And quite frankly I am a bit tired and nerved because just like "open" and "free" it has lost any meaning in the mobile world. Another word or acronym misused to death. And actually I am just waiting for a marketing department pushing the line that a 4G phone that has to have 2 radios active simultaneously for voice and Internet is better than a HSPA device that can do the same over the same radio.

So hey, since everyone uses the "G" for whatever he likes, how about calling well built networks (not particularly in the country in which networks are called 4G…) that have the capacity to serve their subscribers with true broadband speeds in the 10 MBit/s range or more 5G? Hm, doesn't sound sophisticated enough for me, so I'll call them 6G networks. Yes, my frustration shows 🙂

In other words, I'm really tired of the "G" debate… Theoretical maximum speeds and "G's" are perhaps good for catchy marketing slogans but it's meaningless in practice. Instead, access ubiquity and capacity are what counts in a world where connected devices are becoming the norm rather than the exception.