Category: Uncategorized

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.

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!

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)

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 🙂

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!

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!

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.

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…

Back in 2007 I wrote a post about why I think that the 'Average Revenue per User' (ARPU) has become totally meaningless and needs to be replaced by another measure. Three years later, not much has changed on the reporting front, but I think in terms of definition, the general ARPU is even more meaningless now as back then. In fact I think the lower the ARPU reported by a network operator is today when compared to other national operators and operators in comparable countries, the better it is for the network operator.

The lower, the better!? Look at it this way: The lower the ARPU, the more subscribers have been won over by the network operator to use the network that do not spend as much as subscribers that use the network more. But even though those subscribers spend less, they are by no means less valuable to have. Also, there's a growing trend of people owning more than one SIM card for various reasons such as making cheaper calls to other networks with a second SIM card (hello Dual-SIM phones), an additional subscription for business, a 3G stick for business use, a 3G stick for private use, additional 3G enabled gadgets such as the iPad, 3G enabled netbooks, etc., etc.. All require a separate SIM and hence a separate prepaid or postpaid subscription that generates its own ARPU.

From this point of view I generate at least 5 separate ARPUs today and even more if you count the various prepaid SIMs I occasionally use for test purposes. So the PU "Per User" part of the ARPU is far from reality today. It's really time for a new measure…

Interesting self observation: I regularly use two computers, one notebook at home that remains on the desk 99% of the time and is fully wired to the local infrastructure (mouse, printer, scanner, power supply, etc.) and a netbook I use a lot while traveling and commuting. One of my printers has a Wi-Fi interface while the other one only has a USB connector. So while I use both printers from the notebook that is always on the desk as it is connected to both permanently anyway, I only use the Wi-Fi enabled printer from the netbook.

Not that it is a lot of effort to unplug the USB cable of the other printer and plug it into the netbook but it is really very inconvenient compared to just clicking on the 'print' button on the netbook and the page magically appears on the printer without any further action. And I can even print from another room if I happen to use the netbook somewhere else for a change. Also, I use a wireless mouse with the netbook so there's no fumbling with the cable of the mouse when I get the netbook out of the bag.

As Internet connectivity runs over Wi-Fi, too, the only cable that remains for the moment is the power cable. Some early solutions for this are also in sight with induction based chargers that are now sold for mobile phones (e.g. the Touchstone for Palm Pre) and currently standardized in the Qi Wireless Power Consortium. I'd really like to have that for my netbook as well. Just put it on the table when coming home and it magically recharges without any further action to be taken.