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Yes, I'm admittedly a long standing Symbian fan boy who appreciates a flexible and mobile optimized operating system, fine grained network access control to keep my data roaming charges under control and who's manufacturing company is not spying on me and also not telling me what I can and can't do with my mobile device. Uh, long sentence. For a number of weeks the N8 has now become my everyday device and quite admittedly it's a huge leap beyond the Nokia N95 I hung on to as all Nseries devices that followed were just not what I was looking for. Fortunately this has changed with the N8 and I've even adapted to the touchscreen, although it is still something of a let-down not to have a real keyboard anymore.

Lots of reviews are out there saying good and bad things about the N8 and Symbian^3 and the one which reflects my impressions best is over at AllAboutSymbian in 6 parts. So I won't start raving about the great camera, the cool multitasking, etc., etc. but I'd rather like to write down a list of improvements I noticed in usability that have gone into Symbian since the N95. Most of them are just small things but they have a huge impact on usability:

• RAM plenty: The N95 was one of the few devices with ample RAM for running programs. Later models have had less leading to frequent complaints in the blogosphere. The N8 again has plenty of RAM and despite heavy multitasking I haven't had a single out of memory error yet. 

• Remote Phone Lock: A bit hidden and not advertised at all, but there's now a remote phone lock via SMS functionality with an SMS reply when the phone has been locked. Gives me a lot of peace of mind because I hate typing in an unlock code every 5 minutes.

• Timed Profile: An expiry time can be set when switching to the 'meeting' , 'silent' or any other profile. It frequently happened to me so far that I forgot to switch my phone back to normal mode once a meeting was over and frequently had missed incoming calls afterward. 

• Date and Profile always shown: One of the few things I always disliked on the N95 was that I couldn't see the date when I was in any other profile than the standard one. That's fixed now!

• Alarm clock easily reachable from home screen: A tap on the time display and I'm in the alarm clock feature right from the front screen. I use it a lot so that's very helpful.

• HDMI TV out: Like the N95, the TV output is great for showing pictures and videos.

• Bluetooth Headset range: The Bluetooth chip and antenna in the N95 had a very limited range and I found it to be pretty much unusable when the phone was in a pocket. The N8 now has a really good implementation and streams music to a headset even at a significant distance through an office space. Incredible!

• FM transmitter: Every now and then I take the car to work and listening to podcasts and music stored on the mobile phone is now so easy. Just switch on the radio, tune to the frequency set in the FM transmitter settings on the phone and there you go. No fiddling with a cable, plugging the phone into something, etc. etc. The transmitter is even strong enough to blast over a radio station on the given frequency.

• Clock on the standby screen: The N8 is the first phone I've used that shows the date and time in big numbers on the screen when the device is locked and the screen is off. Great stuff!

• Bluetooth mouse and keyboard support: For long emails and other things a full QUERTY keyboard can't be replaced by anything that attached to a mobile device. I've had a Bluetooth keyboard for years which is again supported by the N8. And on top, even Bluetooth mice are supported.

• Ovi Maps improvements: As I travel abroad a lot I very much like the downloadable maps as there are no data charges except for retrieving the ephemeris data for the GPS receiver. Getting a first fix only takes a few seconds and scrolling through the maps is much faster now than on the N95. Very smooth and both search and navigation work like a charm.

• Profimail touch: For many years I've used Profimail as my mail client as it is highly customizable, knows how to partially download emails (again, good to keep roaming charges down) and is very stable and mature. I've heard that Mail for Ovi has matured to a good state by now but I see no reason for switching. For Symbian touched based devices, there are a number of slick features in Profimail now, one of them being a circle that pops up when one keeps the finger on an email or inside an email on the display for a bit with a number of options what to do next distributed around on the circle.

• A native Opera Mini: Forget the build in browser, I need speed no matter where I am and what network is available at the time. Opera Mini uses a network based compression and is ultra fast and now also available as a native application on the N8. Ueber-cool!

• Touch phone and one hand use: And the last one today, but most important, is that the form factor of the device and the OS enable me to use the phone with one hand, despite the lack of a hardware keyboard. A must have for me!

Great work, thanks a lot to the Nokia and Symbian teams!

P.S.: Oh yes, and there is Angry Birds… 😉

Recently I was on the road again for a couple of days and as always had my 3G/Wi-Fi router with me to connect several devices to the net with a single 3G connection. After a while I was a bit surprised that despite my mobile phone and the 3G/Wi-Fi box showing very good coverage (5 signal bars) transmission speeds were consistently below 500 kbit/s. Network overload? So I got out my little analyzer and saw that in the spot I placed the 3G router, the signal level was strong (-72 dbm) but there was high interference as two cells were received with an equally strong signal level. The result was an EcNo (signal to noise ratio) of -12db for both cells (for details see here). So despite the 5 signal bars, not an ideal place to put the 3G router.

So I walked around a bit to find a better spot and in most other places I encountered a similar situation. But in a few places I could consistently receive one cell much stronger than the other one, with the serving cell having a much better EcNo of -6 db while the first neighboring cell continued to have -12db. The signal level was a bit weaker (-78 dbm) but the result was quite stunning. Instead of a throughput below 500 kbit/s I persistently got well over 2 MBit/s.

In other words, the signal bars shown on mobile devices today are clearly optimized for showing the user the quality of the network for voice calls but not for finding good spots for placing a 3G router. On the one hand, I don't think it will help to put RSSI and EcNo values in front of the average user as that might be too complicated. On the other hand, though, I think that for data centric products device manufacturers should think about a more meaningful indicator. It's not an easy task though as the signal to noise ratio of the serving cell can vary widely and quickly depending on the activity of other users. But I am sure some middle ground can be found.

A number of network operators are already selling femtocells today to their subscribers to improve their 3G network coverage at home these days. All of them so far offer it as a standalone box with its own power supply and its own space requirements. A shortcoming of this is that when connected via Ethernet to a DSL or cable modem not supplied by the same network operator, it's usually not possible to prefer IP packets to and from the femto box to ensure quality of service.

But things are evolving and Lightreading now reports that fixed/mobile network operator SFR will shortly launch a new home gateway (combination of DSL/Wi-Fi/TV/fixed line phone box) that has a slot that can hold a femto card. I've been waiting to see news of this approach making it to the market for quite some time now and I think it will help to bring femto deployment to a whole new level. No additional box, no 'visible' extra transmitter, no 'visible' additioanl power requirements, easier installation, QoS can be ensured as the femto is now part of the access device at home.

Here's a question that's been on my mind for quite a number of years know which I've finally had the time to figure out: When a 3G or LTE Voice over IP user (think IMS One Voice or VOLGA) roams in a network in another country, how can the local resources be used?

The question might seem a bit strange at first but today, GPRS and 3G connections abroad are usually connected back to the GGSN (or the LTE PDN-GW) in the home network. This has a number of advantages. For the user, such a setup is good as no configuration changes are necessary to allow packet switched roaming. Also, the additional latency incurred is often not very high when the roaming and home networks are not too far away from each other or if the servers the user accesses are in his home country anyway. For the network operator, this home routing has the advantage that the connection remains under his control and he can collect billing information and meet the traffic policy as per the contract with the subscriber.

So far, so good. But for voice over ip, the issue is that a call to someone in the visited country first goes back to the home network and then has to come back to the visited network. If one roaming subscriber calls another roaming subscriber both in the same country, the speech packets travel backwards and forwards several times. Also, its difficult to establish local emergency calls this way as the voice infrastructure of the home country is used that knows nothing about emergency numbers in foreign countries.

For this reason, the GPRS standards that govern 2G, 3G and LTE have always included a sort of "local breakout" option with which the GGSN (or LTE PDN-GW) in the visited country can be used. This is good for network operator based VoIP as this allows the use of the visited network voice infrastructure. The disadvantage is, of course, that the home network operator has little to no control over the connection and can't do the billing for it.

So much for the foreplay. How does it work in practice. There are two interesting documents that describe the details. First, there is 3GPP TS 23.060 which describes the protocol theory and then there is the GSMA IR.33 GPRS Roaming Guidelines which describes how things can work in practice which is linked at the end of this post over at LinkedIn. In short, the two documents describe the process as follows:

The subscribers record in the HLR contains a VPLMN (Visited Network) Address Allowed flag in the GPRS permissions. If set to 'no', and that's the default that is used today, all GPRS PDP context activations have to go back to a home GGSN. This is done by appending the Operator ID to the APN sent by the mobile device. A subsequent DNS query with that extended APN then results in the IP address of the GGSN in the home network to which a connection is then established.

If the VPLMN Address Allowed flag is set to 'yes', a GPRS connection can remain in the visited network, i.e. a GGSN in the visited network can be used if (!) the Access Point Name specified by the mobile device is known in the visited network. In other words, there needs to be some sort of information exchange between home and visited network on the APNs that can be used locally. In this scenario, it's the Operator ID of the visited network operator and not that of the home network operator that is attached to the APN sent by the mobile device before the DNS query for the IP address of the GGSN is made. If the APN is unknown, as far as I understand the documents (and I'm not quite sure about this), a GGSN in the home network is established in case the APN is known there.

There we go, that's the process for a "local breakout" in the visited network.

Back in 2006, it was Nokia with its N80 phone that introduced Wi-Fi in a mobile phone to me. What is so  normal now was revolutionary and daring then and I wondered at the time if we would see software for such devices that turned the phone into a Wi-Fi access point. Pretty much unthinkable only five years ago as mobile devices and operating systems were pretty much closed to the outside world and Symbian was pretty much alone at the time (perhaps acompanied by Windows Mobile?) with multitasking capabilities for third party applications and a native program runtime environment.

In 2007, first things about Android were heard and I was once again speculating about the Wi-Fi chip being used as an access point. Here, my hopes were even higher as Android is even more open so more chances for third parties to do this, at least in theory.

Fast forward to 2010 and we now have Wi-Fi AP functionality in both Android and Symbian but not quite in the way I was imagining then. On Symbian it's a third party application while on Android, the functionality is directly built in by Google. That might have something to do with apps on Android running in a virtual machine which probably makes it a bit more difficult to get to lower layer functionality.

About two years ago, I reviewed the Nokia 5000, a sub 100 euro phone to see how well Opera Mini would run on such a comparatively cheap device. I came away quite impressed at the time but since then the world has moved on. Recently I noticed that the Samsung released the Android based Galaxy 550 which is currently available for 169 euros without a contract. Albeit it costs 70 to 80 euros more, it runs Android 2.1, has a touch screen, Wi-Fi, a memory card slot, a 2 Megapixel camera, FM radio, supports 3G HSDPA and has a GPS unit built in. Incredible at this price point and according to this test report (in German, sorry), the phone including the web browser works quite well. Give it another two years and I guess Android phones with this feature set will be in a price range of the Nokia 5000 I reviewed two years ago. In other words its going to get very tough as we move forward to sell non-smartphones for more than 30 to 40 euros in the foreseeable future.

When I still had a prepaid SIM in my mobile phone and had to pay for mobile data use by the megabyte I was quite heavily using my phones Wi-Fi at home so my e-mail, web browsing, podcast downloads, etc. would run over my “free” network while being at home. Great money saver. These days, I’ve switched to a contract that includes 1GB of data a month. It’s interesting to notice that, probably unsurprisingly, I only use Wi-Fi for exceptional things like download a couple of hundred megabytes of podcasts every now and then. The rest is all 2G/3G now.

I guess it has to do with convenience as it is still a bit of a hassle to switch applications from 3G to Wi-Fi at home. Symbian makes it quite easy by having connection profiles and priorities so applications always connect to the network with the highest priority. However, the application doesn’t change the bearer once it is connected so a manual restart of applications is still required with this scheme. If you pay by the megabyte, there is an incentive to do that, but if you have a huge bucket of data available at least I’ve stopped caring.

So why do I post about it? Well, I’m thinking ahead a bit and about Wi-Fi offload scenarios. I can see network operator Wi-Fi hotspot networks and Wi-Fi networks at home as interesting offload infrastructure that is already available today. But to make it work, the switchover has to be fully automatic and fully seamless. On the usability layer that means that the phone automatically switches the bearer without the applications knowing it. On the protocol layer it means that the IP address assigned to the device must not change so the switch is transparent to the application. In other words, a form of mobile-IP is required. And there is more than one option to choose from.

When home Wi-Fi networks are part of the equation, things have to get a bit more intelligent still, as a mobile device should then also be able to access devices in the home network. Once could do that with an additional local IP address that comes and goes when the home Wi-Fi is in range or a tunnel back to the home network. This would have the additional benefit that the user could access devices and data at home even while he is not under the umbrella of his own home Wi-Fi.

I think this should be standardized to bring together manufacturers and network operators. If every operator comes up with its own solutions and manufacturers to the same thing it’ll be ugly. And since connectivity is the bread and butter service of network operators, it’s them who should take this up and get it working. In the end it has two benefits for them, macro network offload and integrating services running in the home network.

Finally, it has become more apparent than ever now that this is also a good opportunity to make sure that communication over public Wi-Fi hotspots is secure, no matter whether a notebook or mobile device is used. For details see my recent post on FireSheep. And don’t think you are secure just because you access that popular social network side from a mobile phone with an app instead of via the browser on the notebook. Are you sure the app encrypts the data before it is sent?

In some countries there's fierce competition between network operators, and the media is anually reporting about the performance of the networks. To come up with meaningful values, they perform yearly drive tests on their own in cooperation with field test companies. Reported values are then for example call setup success rates, call setup times, call drop rates, average and hotspot data throughput in the networks, etc. When recently analyzing the results of such a test in more detail, it occured to me that it's likely to be a challenge to match call setup success rates that are today beyond 98% and call setup times of less than 7 seconds (mobilt to mobile) once there is one method or the other deployed for Voice over LTE.

The challenge will be to match all of those values, be it call setup success rates, call setup times and also the drop rate when the call is handed over (or not) to a 2G or 3G network at the LTE coverage border area. CS fallback for example is unlikely to match any of those values as it is undisputed that the fallback mechanism adds 2-3 seconds to the call establishment time on each side. Also, making the fallback a success in at least 97% of the cases is a challenge as the procedure either requires the UE to blindly drop to the 2G/3G network or a well configured LTE network with perfect neighbor relationships. In addition, good interworking configuration between the 2G/3G CS core network and the LTE core for the signaling exchange of incoming calls is required. Quite a challenge. VoLTE and VoLGA would probably do a bit better in this regard but I won't go into the details in this post, no need for a fight between the two sides today.

Think about it, what will happen if a network operator deployes a Voice over LTE solution and the values do not match those of the 2G/3G network today. It's going to be a bloodbath in the press. I can already imagine the headlines…

Over at Light Reading, Michelle Donegan reports that TeliaSonera over in Sweden who were early in starting their LTE network about a year ago have now gotten competition from Telenor, who has built an LTE network together with Tele2. From a consumer point of view it's great to see a second LTE network being fired up. I haven't heard of any other country in which two overlapping LTE networks are running and open to the public yet, so that's another first.

Personally, I am a bit sceptical about the network sharing part of the announcement because that reduces competition between network operators which in the long term might not only have positive consequences for the consumer. I've done some background reading and Sweden seems to be one of those countries where this is already done for 3G as well. Interestingly, the constelation is a bit different here. While Tele2 shares the LTE network with Telenor, it's 3G network is a shared operation with TeliaSonera (click on Sweden for details). Interesting triangle. 

And on top, Telenor seems to share it's 3G network with Hutch 3G according to Wikipedia. Is your head spinning? Mine is, so here's a summary:

• TeliaSonera — LTE
• Tele2 + Telenor — LTE
• Tele2 + TeliaSonera — 3G
• Telenor + H3G — 3G

Pretty much everyone with everyone, except for Hutch 3G who doesn't yet seem to have ties with TeliaSonera.

 

Yes, app stores is where most people get their applications for their smartphones today. While this is convenient, simple and offers a way to earn money I'd argue it's not the 'natural' state of things. I'd never buy a PC, notebook, netbook or any other device where I can only download programs from a single store that is controled by a single entity with its own agenda. So why should I limit myself to that for a mobile device (think smartphone, tablet, etc.)?

This became quite apparent from a technial point of view to me when I recently tried to download something from an app store and couldn't due to some strange error that persisted for quiet a while. Well, at least I could download my most favorite apps (web browser and email client) from the web pages of the developers and thus bypass the store and the problem. A single point of failure, always a bad thing.