Category: Uncategorized

During the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, I heard from Adrian Scrase for the first time that 3GPP has specified how to put information on the SIM card for "In Case of Emergency" (ICE) events, i.e. to help first responders to identify someone and to contact their next of kin.

A great idea and now that it is specified it will hopefully become a worldwide accepted feature. It's not in current phones and SIM cards yet so it will take a couple of years for the feature to be added. Let's keep our fingers crossed a critical mass is reached so people actually enter information and first responders actually use the feature.

As somebody asked me over at Forum Oxford at how it will work in practice, I've had a look at the standards:

• The user enters ICE information like names of persons, relation to these persons and phone numbers. For details see 3GPP TS 22.101, A28

• During an emergency, the information can be retrieved by pressing '* * *'. That's specified in 3GPP TS 22.030, 6.8

• The information is stored in a new file on the SIM card referred to as EF(ICE_DN) and the format is described in 3GPP TS 31.102

It's time for another Carnival of the Mobilists and this week's edition is hosted by Andrew Grill over at London Calling. As always, a great read and I fully agree with Andrew on the post of the week by Dennis Bournique where he explains that despite recent misinterpretations, the iPhone does not account for more than 50% of the US mobile data traffic.

So for the latest and greatest from the mobile blogosphere, head over and enjoy!

You might have noticed my earlier post on my upcoming Oxford University course on LTE Services I'll be doing together with Ajit Jaokar after Easter. In addition to that I am happy to announce that I've also been invited to speak at this year's Forum Oxford Future Technologies Conference on Friday, April 24, 2009.

My topic: Evolution of Mobile Networks. Impact and Possibilities for Future Services.

As I attended last year as a visitor myself, I fully agree with Tomi Ahonen that this is the "can't miss event" of the year and it's at a very moderate price as well. Most of last year's presentations were filmed and the event's web site has links to the individual presentations.

Here's the provisional agenda:

09:00 start (speakers shown in order of presentations)

* Professor William Webb, Head of Research and Development, Ofcom
Presentation: Wireless Communications: The Future Revisited
(I reviewed his book on the same topic here)

* Nick Allott, Chief Technical Officer, OMTP

* Graham Trickey, Senior Director, GSM Association (tbc)

* Phil Northam, Global Manager, Samsung Mobile Innovator
Presentation: 'War is Peace'.

* Martin Sauter, Wireless Consultant and Author, WirelessMoves
Presentation: Evolution of Mobile Networks. Impact and Possibilities for Future Services.

* Mark Curtis, CEO, Flirtomatic
Presentation: Dislocation of Expectation: the Challenges of a Mobile Start-up.

* Simon Cavill, Chief Technology Officer / Director of Strategy, Mi-Pay
Presentation: “Show me the Money!” – Why mobile money is this year's Next Big Thing.

* Professor Ed Candy, Chief Technology Officer, 3 Group

* Tony Fish, CEO, AMF Ventures
Presentation: My Digital Footprint.

* Helen Keegan, Specialist in Mobile Marketing, Advertising and Media, Beep Marketing
Presentation: Media and Marketing in a Mobile 2.0 world

* Agustin Calvo, CEO, Movidream, Spain
Presentation: A Mobile Marketing Evolution to Contextual Interactivity and VRM.

* Christine Maxwell, Chief Information Architect, MobileWorks 3D Inc.
Presentation: Use of the Arts in Designing the Mobile World

* Ramu Sunkara, CEO, Qik (tbc)
Presentation: The Revolution Will Be Live Streamed: Live Mobile Video for the Masses.

A great lineup I would say and I am also looking forward very much to the lively discussions between all attendees during the coffee and lunch breaks and to the always stimulating and controversial Q&A sessions after the presentations.

And some more links for those of you who'd like to find out more:

• My impressions from last year's conference
• Tomi Ahonen's thoughts as organizer of this year's conference.

Hope to see you there!

Pico- and Femtocells have been a hotly debated topic at the Mobile World Congress this year and to my great pleasure I've been offered the opportunity to have a look at a real Picocell installation in a live network after returning home.

So one day, I was invited to visit an installation at a shopping mall, where a number of GSM picocells from IP.Access were deployed, as the surrounding macro network did not cover the interior of the mall very well. In essence, this means that the picocell was deployed as a coverage filler rather than to add capacity to the macro network.

It looks like the network operator using the picocells was not the only one having coverage problems, as I saw a number of repeater antennas throughout the building from other operators. Repeaters are another solution to get in-house coverage but I was told that while it sounds easy enough, they are rather tricky to deploy as permission is needed for the external antenna on the roof. Also, the coax cables running through the shopping center to the antennas inside are quite expensive and again a permission is required to lay the cables and install the antennas in the hallways.

Picocells on the other hand require no permission whatsoever and the installation is rather trivial: A phone line for DSL that serves as a backhaul link, a DSL modem and the picocell itself, that's all it takes. In the specific installation I was shown, an Ethernet switch was connected in addition as the DSL link was also used to connect the computers of the shop back to the mother ship. Quite a nice setup as the backhaul cost for the picocell is effectively zero that way.

I ran a couple of calls over the picocell and couldn't tell the difference in voice quality in the picocell compared from that in the macro network. Moving from the picocell to the macro network worked quite well as soon as I left the coverage area which was around 20 meters. I'd say there were only using a very low power output. In the opposite direction, however, the mobile lost coverage and had to perform a network search before the picocell was found. My test mobile revealed that the macro cell did not broadcast the parameters for reselecting into the picocell. Looks like it hasn't been configured correctly at the time I tried.

All in all, I was very impressed with the simplicity of the setup and not only the customers coming to the mall but also those that work there are probably quite happy to have the network there and are probably even unaware that their call is not handled by the macro network but is actually backhauled via a DSL IP connection.

Thanks for the visit, it was very insightful!

Over the weekend I read an article whereby a German cable network operator is now looking actively for cooperating with a wireless network operator to offer a fixed / wireless access package and combined services. That’s good news for connected home services I am advocating as the next great thing for network operators after fixed line voice telephony, as this is further proof that network operators on both ends of the table are looking into how the connected home can be enriched with remote access.

Interestingly enough, the cable operator in question, Kabel Deutschland, was rumored to be a takeover candidate itself for Vodafone Germany just recently to bolster its fixed line assets beyond the DSL business it already has with Arcor, soon to be renamed into Vodafone. Looks like there is a lot of movement in the market these days.

This week's Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at the Vision Mobile blog and Vanessa Measom has done a great job of guiding us through a wide range of topics discussed in the mobile blogosphere in the previous week. From Voice over LTE, carrier strategies to the untangling of the network neutrality debate there's something for everyone. So don't wait, head over and enjoy!

Sometimes a couple of words are enough but I have to admit, it only applies to the minority of the SMS, Twitter and e-mails I send from my mobile phone. While in the metro or another public place without a lot of space I use the keypad of my Nokia N95 and T9, but it's a concession to the situation. If there's any chance I can sit down and have some space, I prefer plan-B, which is typing that message or e-mail using my Nokia Bluetooth keyboard with 10 fingers.

I've had mine for several years now with various Nokia S60 phones and have done everything with it from writing SMS messages to reporting from the Mobile World Congress. Usually the keyboard is not cheap, costing well over $100. I am not sure why, but Amazon.com currently sells the SU8W for around $57! Amazing! If I hadn't already two I'd buy one right away before they increase the price again or run out of stock. So if you've hesitated before due to the price, now's your chance!

In case you wonder why I write such a straight forward product recommendation, the answer is simple: For me and for those who've bought one in the past due to my advice, the Bluetooth keyboard has been a game changer and one of the main reasons to stay with Nokia/S60 in the future.

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is long over for this year and it hasn't really been my focus, but I also had a look at how well the exhibition ground for the Mobile World Congress was covered for non-3G users.

While many if not the majority of the MWC attendees had 3G phones I am sure there was still a sizable percentage of people with 2G Blackberries and other GSM only phones. Even with my 3G phone I was mostly using the GSM/EDGE network due to Vodafone Spain's battery killing network configuration when being always-on. While I haven't checked how many cells Vodafone had deployed and if they had dedicated coverage in the exhibition halls, I can nevertheless report that unlike during other exhibitions I have been in the past, incoming and outgoing calls worked fine throughout the week and I saw no degradation in download speeds for my e-mails and while browsing via Opera Mini.

Especially when web browsing, one can immediately feel the difference between a loaded network in which only few timeslots are available for data transfers which on top are heavily used for example by Blackberries. But no, everything was fast and swift, despite probably more than 20.000 people being at the exhibition simultaneously.

So kudos to Vodafone Spain, your 2G network was working fine as well.

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at Judy Breck's Golden Swamp blog. As always a great resource for what's happened in the mobile blogosphere over the past week and Judy has done a great job of packing everything into a super dense and great looking post. So for the latest and greatest on mobile, head over and enjoy!

Another Mobile World Congress has come to an end. Thursday is usually a bit strange as everyone is alreday quite tired and just waits for the closing bell to ring. To my surprise, my Thursday was quite different.

In the morning, I met with Ajit Jaokar of Open Gardens / Futuretext to prepare for our upcoming course on LTE Services at Oxford University. Lots of great energy flowing in that session and I went out in a very positive mood. More about that soon in a separate post.

Next I went to the Next Generation Mobile Network Presentation stream to listen to some network centric presentations. Julius Robson reported on the progress of the LTE/SAE Trial Initiative, which I already reported on in one of the first MWC posts. Great presentation, Julius, it’s good to see LTE making progress.

China Mobile had a presentation on common FDD and TDD chipsets for LTE, so like me, they also think that a common chipset, i.e. mobile devices being able to do both FDD and TDD are vital for TDD to become a success.

As usual there is also the odd presentation from a North American carrier bashing on the vendors and the users alike, calling European network operators stupid for their extensive 3G network rollouts and sale of prepaid SIM cards for voice and data. I wonder if they will ever wake up!?

Good that most other operators have quite a different view on that and out of the many other presentations I especially liked Seizo Onoe’s presentation for NTT DoCoMo on Deployment and Realities of LTE. The most interesting chart for me was how DoCoMo plans to deploy LTE. It seems that they already have a deployment in which the UMTS radio module sits on the mast and is connected via a fiber cable to the digital module of the UMTS base station. For LTE, they will reuse the existing antennas and hook their digital LTE module into the fiber link that is already in place. Quite cost effective. In the Q&A the presenter was asked by a representative of T-Mobile (who also push very hard for LTE and don’t want to invest much more into the HSPA network) what he thought of HSPA+. Seizo Onoe seems to be one of the “fathers” of LTE, if one can say so, so he was of course not quite in favour of HSPA+ and said with a smile on his face that he doesn’t like it, it makes things too complicated in the mobile devices and one should go to LTE straight away. I had to smile as well, that was brought over very well. But no matter, HSPA+ will go into handsets anyway, that’s my opinion.

On into the afternoon, I had some more meetings with companies doing testing equipment and I learnt a great deal about how the optic interface between the LTE radio module and the digital part, called CPRI, will be used by maeasurement and testing companies to simulate mobile devices to stress test the base stations and the network in general.

And finally, I went to Wiley’s again to pick up a book about wireless to read on the way home and to say good bye. More about that in a separate blog post as well.

There we go, another Mobile World Congress has closed its gates. Not the most splendid one I have seen but I hugely enjoyed it again, have learnt many new things and spoke to lots of people enthusiastic about what they are doing. What else can one ask for?