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During the day I ran a number of traffic tests on the public 3G network of Vodafone on the Mobile World Congress exhibition ground and I have to say I am very impressed by the results.

Even around high time with the main hall packed with people communicating, performance with my speed test application was around 700 kbit/s with peaks at 1.2 MBit/s. And this with all the people around me communicating and showing mobile Internet applications. One presenter at the Nokia booth even told me that she has switched to 3G for her demos as the Wi-Fi network they have installed couldn’t cope for one reason or the other. Now that’s something…

On the technical side my trace mobile shows that Vodafone is using three 5 MHz HSPA carriers. If the other three network operators do the same, there should be 12 carriers or 60 MHz of bandwidth used at the Fira for 3G. Even in the busy Barcelona city center currently only one carrier is used by Vodafone.

The tracer also detected only a single neighboring cell on one of the three carriers used, so neighbor cell interference must have been low, another must for getting high throughput. It’s probably a micro cell setup, although I have to walk around a bit more on the exhibition ground to confirm that.

GPRS performance in Vodafone’s 2G network was equally good with Opera Mini downloading web pages very quickly. A good indication that enough timeslots were free for data use.

On the voice side: All calls I made today mostly to other people at the exhibition connected very quickly and I never got a network busy response or people complaining I was not reachable.

I don’t think there are many other places in the world with wireless data and voice traffic as high as at the Congress except maybe Manhattan. So it’s good to see that despite the increasing use for Internet connectivity, well planned and deployed networks can do the job.

Here we go, day one at the Mobile World Congress and one of the first places for me to check out is of course the Nokia booth. While lots of people have reported about the new E75 and other devices having been launched this morning, I’ve been looking at some details of other already announced phones and applications which are of particular interest to me.

So everyone speaks about “Touch these days” and my next phone also needs to be one, too, no doubt about it. So I played around with a Nokia N97 for a bit to get a feel for the device and the touch screen. I really like the form factor of the device and also the sliding mechanism which tilts the screen while in the open position. Not only is it good for working with the phone while holding it but the screen can also very well be read when the phone sits on the desk. No complaints about the small keyboard either, I could type quite quickly with two fingers. With the new idle screen widgets it makes for an ideal central place to keep me updated on news, e-mails, social networking events and other bits and pieces that come in throughout the day.

I also very much like the finish of the device and the display resistance, it makes scrolling through web pages very easy and natural. The experience is much better than on the 5800 Express Music on which I find the screen surface a bit to resistive when quickly moving the finger over it to scroll down a page.

On the software side I think Nokia still has some work to do. Some things still feel a bit slow and other things such as the Gallery integration into other programs such as e-mail was still missing in the demo device they showed.

The other thing that I would like Nokia to improve a bit before launch is the built in browser. It doesn’t (yet?) reflow text and so on some pages the text is either tiny or one has to scroll left and right when zooming in. Also, scrolling does not work while the page is processed, something that I found quite irritating. Definitely not an easy thing to get working properly but I think it’s essential.

So all in all still a bit of mixed feelings on the N97 for the moment but with some luck the firmware that the first devices will be shipped with deal with these things. Can’t wait to get one then.

When I get on a new mobile network I usually give it a thorough check for my research and to discuss results with interested operators. Most already do application testing on their own such as how many videos are viewed without interruption or how fast web pages load, etc. However, some do overlook some other important parameters.

One of the first things I noticed in Vodafone’s 3G network here in Spain at the Mobile World Congress is that sometimes when I log into the network with my mobile phone and remain connected, the battery runs flat within only 2 hours. A bit of research revealed that the reason for this is that they are assigning public IP addresses for transparent Internet connections (via the APN airtelnet.es).

So you might wonder what the battery drain has to do with a public IP address assignment!? Well in theory, not much, but in practice, quite a lot. When getting assinged a public IP address, all IP packets to this address get routed to the mobile device no matter whether they are wanted or not. Since IP addresses are dynamically assigned the new holder of an IP address potentially gets the ‘leftover’ from a previous user and all the junk emitted from viruses and other malware on the Internet. While the mobile device doesn’t really care and discards those incoming packets, the radio link is constantly active instead of falling back to a power conserving state while no user data is exchanged.

In my case I noticed that in some cases when I attached to the network the air interface link was constantly kept up as every couple of seconds an unsolicited IP packet was received. Most operators use network address translation (NAT), which assings a private IP address to the mobile and thus fixes this issue.

A somewhat crude fix for this problem from the user side short of hooking up the mobile to a power source once an hour is to fall back on the 2G GPRS network. The unwanted IP packets still come in but the power consumption in 2G mode is significantly less as the air interface link is kept for a much shorter time than in 3G mode after the last IP packet has been received and also requires less power.

So Vodafone, while I appreciate a public IP address for my 3G notebook dongle I think it’s a particularly bad idea for battery driven devices and user statisfaction. Also from a network point of view this is far from ideal as it wastes significant ressources on the radio link that would better be used for real traffic.

PS: I’ve noticed that there is also an APN with private IP addresses but that seems to be only good for web surfing as all my other applications are blocked.

Like every year I will post live from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona again and provide my own angle on the show off the beaten path. Last year, I had a Nokia N93 and a Nokia N800 Internet tablet with me for the job. This year I was thinking about replacing the N800 with my eeePC as the web browser of the N800 is just too slow, i.e. very painful to use. However, after some deliberation, I decided against it, it is just too heavy to carry around all day. The benefit from having a full web browser and spell checker is just not big enough. So I decided that less is more and I will exclusively use my Nokia N95 and my Bluetooth keyboard to keep me connected during the week. Let the show begin.

I've noticed today that after the launch of my new book last month in Europe, it is now also available on Amazon in the US. It took a bit for the bulk shipment from the UK to arrive but now that it's available, sales seem to have picked up quite quickly. At the moment, Amazon.com says only a few copies are left and more are on the way. Thanks to all who have already ordered a copy! So if you live in the US or Canada and have considered getting a copy from Amazon.com, now's the time. At some point it will go back to "shipping in 7-10 days" status but it's usually restocked much quicker now that it is available from a local distribution center.

Interesting trend to observe these days in Europe: The revenue generated from data services in mobile networks is now close or even surpasses the revenue generated by SMS services. Recently, Vodafone Germany reported their numbers of the previous quarter compared to the quarter a year ago here and the table shows how data service revenue is now slightly higher than SMS revenue. Only a year ago, data revenues were still significantly behind.

What the table does not show, however, is that from an earnings point of view, SMS is probably still far ahead. After all, transferring 160 character messages through the network at a price of around 10 cents makes a far better bottom line than the megabytes of data transferred at a flat rate. But nevertheless, things are changing and it shows how mobile Internet access continues to increase in importance to mobile network operators.

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at Ram Krishnam's "The Mobile Broadband Blog". It's edition 159 this week, quite amazing, and I still remember how I was part of one of the first single or double digits ones by accepting to run an edition by exchanging e-mails with Russel Buckley on my mobile phone while being on the way from Lisbon airport to a meeting. Nothing special these days anymore but at the time, quite something. Tomi Ahonen would probably say it was a magical moment. So without further ado, I can warmly recommend to head over and enjoy the great writeup.

Here’s some free advertising for T-Mobile. Stunning, so I had to link. Watch in HQ and full screen!

The T-Mobile Dance in Liverpool station:

And the ‘making of’:

Enjoy!

Not a truly mobile story today by itself but one that started as a such some time ago on this blog. A while back I reported on a first weakness found in the Wi-Fi WPA encryption. I didn't get all the facts right the first time and was promptly corrected by a reader who was kind enough to supply a link to Security Now, a great podcast show, that each week explains security issues at great length but easy to understand. I listened to the podcast, corrected my mistakes and subscribed to the podcasts on my N95 to have interesting podcasts while traveling. Recently I listened to podcast 172 about a program called Sandboxie for Windows machines that I think is so useful that I would like to mention it here.

With Sandboxie, you can put programs like web browsers, e-mail clients, instant messengers, etc. in a sandbox that redirects write access to files and the registry to a copy instead of to the original. This way should you catch a virus via a web page or via that attached power point file of an e-mail from a trusted friend, all the malicious code can do is harm a copy of the file and the registry. It can still steal data as it has standard read access to all other files but it can't harm the machine anymore. As soon as the last program in the sandbox ends, the files in the sandbox are deleted and gone is the threat.

It's even possible to install programs in the sandbox. They just run just fine afterward, but only in the Sandbox of course. Once you are done with testing, delete the sandbox and you can start from scratch. No orphan files remaining, no extra clutter in the already fat registry. So the concept of Sandboxie is quite similar to that of a virtual machine except that the applications have read access to the outside. The big advantages are that it requires no extra memory and processor resources, it just adds a shell of protection around those programs so they can't do any harm.

Completely blocking write access has it's drawbacks, too, of course. With a complete isolation, it's not possible to permanently store bookmarks for example and you will also loose your e-mail that is stored in local files once the sandbox is deleted. But the author has thought about that as well and it's possible to activate exceptions for the most well known programs so that their configuration and data files are not sandboxed. For less well known programs, it's possible to configure files or directories that are excluded from the sandbox manually. And, with the registered version, it's even possible to define programs which are automatically run in the sandbox when they are started. Great for an installation for less computer savy users to make the sandbox almost transparent for them.

So while it's not the purpose of Sandboxie to replace an anti-virus scanner it's a great tool to add another layer of protection. It takes some knowledge to configure it for individual purposes but once done, even less computer savvy users should not have a problem with it. So while the proof for that is still outstanding, I'll install it on a normob notebook soon 🙂

I love it how one gets from A to B on the web, I would never have heard of it would I not have blogged about the Wi-Fi WPA attack, if someone would not have commented and left a link and if someone else hadn't bothered to do a great podcast every week I listened to on my mobile phone during a long car trip. In this way, it is actually a mobile story after all.

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists has stopped over at Tsahi Levent-Levi's blog, aka the VoIP survivor for an as usual impressive roundup of what's been happening in the mobile blogging sphere over the past week. To my great pleasure and surprise, my entry on the use of Wi-Fi in mobile devices has been voted for being the best post of the week. Thanks for that, I really appreciate it! So for all the best from the mobile blogging sphere, don't hesitate, head over and enjoy!