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Self observation today: How is the daily morning news best consumed during breakfast? From a mobile device, TV or a plain good old newspaper? I guess the answer depends on whom you ask but I strongly prefer a mobile device for a simple reason: I can get to the news that interests me quickly, i.e. I decide, and it can be easily held and navigated on with one hand while the other hand takes care of breakfast.

With news on the TV I am not in charge so that's a no-go for me. And with the newspaper, I need both hands and my table is just not big enough so I can put it down. Sure it can be folded etc. but that won't help much as each time you are done with half a page both hands need to come back into action to "navigate" to the next page. There we go, my preference. How do you consume the morning news?

Average Revenue Per User, or ARPU, is a measure often used when discussing financial results of mobile network operators. But in this day and age, ARPU has become pretty much irrelevant as discussed here. Still it is used a lot. Finally, I've recently seen a refreshingly different approach being used by the London Times. Instead of reporting ARPU, network operator performance was assessed in market share and revenue terms. That makes a lot of sense to me!

All network operators need to build a nationwide network to compete. So comparing the market share between operators makes sense to me because each network operator has a similar network to build and support. How thoroughly and thin-meshed that network is built is another matter. That distorts the market share picture a bit. So maybe one should add the number of base stations into the equation?

As always, comments are welcome!

Ubuntu keeps surprising me positiviely! A few days ago I installed the OS on my somewhat older desktop computer as well, not really hoping that I could reuse the PCI Wi-Fi card inside. That was because I thought the card was broken as under Windows and the native driver it always stopped working after a while and would only come back after a reboot.

Surprise surprise with Ubuntu! Not only did it recognize the card instantly without the need to install an extra driver it is also rock solid and hasn’t stopped working after hours of using it. Looks like it wasn’t the hardware after all but just a crappy Windows driver installation by the manufacturer of the card. Incredible! While the manufacturer has long given up on the card, it works like a charm under the free OS and is much more stable. What more can you want?

The last couple of times I went to the bakery around the corner I noticed a Blackberry behind the counter. Being more intrigued every time I passed by I finally asked what the device is used for.

So I was told that the bakery is introducing an electronic ordering solution and Blackberries in their outlets are used to quickly update and change daily orders via a program running on the Blackberry which communicates with the central ordering system over the cellular network. Quite a step forward in flexibility from manually filling out an order sheet once a week for a full week in advance.

Also, compared to a more traditional setup with a PC and potential dial up or DSL access, this costs much less and takes no additional space. Maybe over time, the outlets can even cancel their fixed line phone as the Blackberry can easily substitute that as well.

And best of all, despite the introduction only being in an early beta and the software not quite stable, the non-technical user of the system I spoke to actually liked it and said she much preferred it over the old system as she can react immediately to special orders. What more do you want…

Here's a link to an interesting post that has recently been published on Wireless Week by Manish Sing of Continuous Computing on the top challenges LTE faces in the years to come. In the post he goes into the details of the different topics and it's a great read! Here's an overview of the topics he sees that will have to be sorted out as we go forward:

• Spectrum harmonization
• Voice over LTE
• Cell sizes, from femto to macro
• Backhaul
• Self Organizing Networks
• Security
• Devices and Terminals
• Traffic Management
• Flat Rate plans
• Intellectual property rights
• Interoperability
• Running several networks simultaneously

One thing I would like to point out is that these topics are not LTE specific. Whether an operator first goes down the HSPA+ path and only then starts thinking about LTE or goes straight to LTE, the questions and the issues are the same, just the answers might be a bit different. In other words, whatever mobile operators decide to do, the basic challenges are the same, with our without LTE.

National elections took place in Germany this weekend and if I had been at home and if I had a TV, I would have watched TV at 6 p.m. to see how things had gone. But I wasn't so I used my mobile phone to get the results. From previous experience I knew that the major news web sites could become quite overloaded at 6 p.m. so I used the built in FM receiver to listen to the six o'clock news for instant information. At the same time I also went to my favorite news web sites to see what they were saying. Here's the result:

My favorite one, Spiegel.de, was overloaded at 6 p.m. only a nice little error message was presented. Number two, Die Welt, did not have the results at 6 p.m., too slow guys, sorry. But finally, number 3, tagesschau.de, was both not overloaded (though a bit slow) and had the results I was looking for. I'd say that's still a clear tie between old and new media and shows that over-the-air broadcasting is still not out of date. For some things, the web is definitely not yet good enough.

Hm, maybe I should have tried Twitter, too!? Next time then.

Here's an interesting press release from FON, the company behind the FON hotspots that help you share your Wi-Fi Internet connection at home in exchange for free access around the world when you encounter another FON hotspot. In their quest to increase the number of FON hotspots, they have in the past already partnered with DSL providers in France and the UK to include their software in their home gateways. Now, FON has made an additional partnership with 3G femtocell maker Ubiquysis.

With this deal, future femtocells from Ubiquisys can also include the FON software so a home gateway can be used to enhance 3G coverage, to provide private Wi-Fi connectivity at home or in an office and can broadcast a public Wi-Fi signal. I think this setup might also make a lot of sense in hotels, airports and shopping areas and other places with lots of people who could benefit from better 3G coverage or Wi-Fi.

Now FON and Ubiquysis probably have to find out how to sell the concept to a fixed line / wireless network operator. I imagine that the incentive to include the FON software for a mobile network operator is similar as for the fixed line / wireless operators in France and UK. I'd say it is likely that they are splitting the revenue.

An interesting proposition that rises and falls with the popularity of Femtos. A winning cooperation? What do you think?

A follow up to this earlier post on LTE and capacity: Every now and then I see a debate of whether it is better to upgrade from HSPA to HSPA+ or to go to LTE. From a capacity point of view I think it's not an "or" decision, it's rather an "and" decision.

I don't see a reason why operators using LTE as a capacity extension in the 2.6 GHz band should not also upgrade to HSPA+ (before, after or at the same time) to make the best out of of the 2.1 GHz spectrum as well and to support as many HSPA users as possible. True, not all mobile devices will be HSPA+ capable for quite some time, but HSPA+ is backwards compatible thus taking everyone forward.

Especially once current equipment is end of life and replaced by multi-technology and multi-band base stations, potentially with new MIMO antennas that can be used simultaneously in the 2.1 and 2.6 GHz band, it seems rather a natural thing to do to me.

As always, thoughts are welcome.

Thought of the day: I keep hearing that LTE is great because you can go beyond the capacity of HSPA(+). Well, from an air interface perspective (Bits/s/Hz), that's going to be tough to achieve as HSPA(+) is going in the same direction capacity wise given the same amount of spectrum as LTE.

BUT, and that's how I haven't thought about it yet, LTE can be used in the new 2.6 GHz band, something for which HSPA is not specified and current base stations and many antennas are also not designed for. So once you get to the limit of your HSPA capacitiy, i.e. once you have used all the assigned spectrum in the 2.1 GHz band, you can use LTE to increase capacity with an overlay 2.6 GHz deployment. Where a lot of capacity is needed, range, which is going to decrease with the higher frequency, is also not a big issue.

Maybe you are lucky as an operator at this point and your 2G/3G equipment at this location is end of life and needs to be replaced at the time you run out of capacity anyway. It might then be possible to replace the old base station with a multi-technology, multi-band base station. If you are even luckier you manage to get a backhaul fiber to the site as we are talking triple digit MBit/s that have to be transported.

And at the same time you give your customers an incentive to upgrade to LTE: Higher speeds for them as they don't have to share the network with the masses anymore. At least for a while.

Despite its name, the Flying Scotsman is not a plane but actually a train with lots of history, running daily between London and Edinburgh. From a wireless perspective, a recent trip with it was interesting because free Internet access is offered to all passengers during the ride. A bit of background research revealed that the service has been realized together with Swedish company Icomera and some very high level information about it can be found here.

It looks like for most of the trip, a satellite based connection is used to backhaul the data. However, compared to the Internet access on Thalys trains between France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany, the connection is very slow and I could not get more than a couple of kbit/s over the link at any time. Round trip times varied greatly between a couple of hundred milliseconds to several seconds. Yes, several seconds (!), no idea where those packets went in the meantime…

It seems the connection is pretty much congested all the time, which might be because it is free for all passengers, due to a limited link capacity or a combination of both. So when web browsing, it usually takes quite some time for pages to come up. After a while I adopted a "better than nothing" approch but I wonder if some people would rather be willing to pay extra for the privilege to be "fully" connected and to shorten the wait!?

It would be interesting to know what kind of satellite system they use as I didn't see any dome like structures on top of the train such as those on the Thalys. Also, I wonder if they have similar uplink / downlink capacity on the link. No way of telling from the outside.

To summarize I'd say I got the work done I wanted to do during the trip, which was mainly e-mail, IM and a little bit of research on the web. I'd be quite unhappy to be stuck with such a slow connection for more than a couple of hours but for the train ride it was all right. That doesn't mean, though, that National Express East Coast should sit on their hands and do nothing, the service could be much improved as the Thalys example shows.