Category: Uncategorized

Every now and then I just wonder why Nokia just can’t their feet on the ground in the U.S. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that there is only T-Mobile and AT&T as GSM operators (plus a few small ones) and no direct sales channels or service providers like in many countries in Europe!? While the U.S. market is certainly big in terms of number of people, Nokia’s opportunities via only two carriers are rather small. Even if both worked with Nokia they can only address half the population, as the other half is with CDMA carriers. And if only one of those two doesn’t like Nokia (anymore), the opportunity is instantly cut in half. Compare that to markets such as Europe where there are at least 3 to 4 operators in each country. If Nokia falls out of favor with one of them, that’s not really a problem, there are so many more operators in so many more countries to do business with. O.k., it’s a lot of work to talk with so many operators but in the end it might greatly reduce their risk. And then there are the service providers in many countries or even laws that mobile phones must be sold independently from subscriptions. In countries where this is the case, Nokia depends even less on carriers.

Last year, people said the University of Oxford’s Future Technology conference was THE wireless event to attend in 2007 and I was sad to have missed it. Not so this year, as my ticket is booked and I am looking forward very much to an exciting conference day on the 18th of April.

In case you haven’t heard of the event yet, take a look at the official web site here. At last, I will meet Dean Bubley, Ajit Jaokar, Tomi Ahonen and Christian Lindholm in person, all speakers at the conference. Topics on the agenda range from Mobile Social Networking, iPhone Applications, user-generated content and advertising, mobile web 2.0 applications, mobile browser extensions, mobile search, etc., etc. I know Tomi and Dean sometimes have different opinions on a topic so I am especially looking forward to their debate 🙂

If you are reading this and planning to go to Oxford for the event as well, I am looking forward very much to meet you there!

In case you have to miss this opportunity, there are also a number of interesting telecom courses at the beginning of summer at the university which you might be interested in. In case you are in the WiMAX business, have a closer look at the 2 day WiMAX course that I will present together with John Edwards of Picochip and Chris Beardsmore of Intel.

Carlo Longino, probably known by many from his musings at Mobhappy, has recently started blogging for Nortel on the Hyperconnectivity blog. His topics are WiMAX and 40G optical. I just stumbled over it by accident and quite like what I have seen. Seems like a good move from Nortel to find some bloggers from outside the company to push their ideas in addition to blogs such as those from Nortel’s CTO John Roese and Phil Edholm.

Interesting also to see and to compare the approaches of different companies. Nokia’s S60, for example, is also doing lots of different blogs to reach out. Their approach is not from the top level or from the outside but from the people actually working on the products.

If you have recommendations of good blogs from people of other wireless companies please leave a comment.

I almost made it to the Plug.eu conference in Brussels last week but had to change my plans on short notice. Too bad, hopefully next year. One of the reasons I wanted to go was because Rudy de Waele of m-trends was talking about Mobile 2.0. He was already giving a similar presentation a couple of months ago at another conference and I found it very interesting and inspiring. Looks like he continued to keep his eyes and ears open in the meantime since his latest presentation contains a full update. Lots has happened in the past months! For all who are interested, here’s a link to the presentation. Don’t be afraid by the number of pages, it’s definitely worth the time!

Quite often I am using my N95 and a Bluetooth keyboard to respond to eMails and to write a blog entry such as this one. While it works quite well, I am really missing a good spell checking feature. I don’t think that’s to difficult since the dictionary for it is already in the phone for the T-9 functionality. Is this only a nice to have feature desired by few? What do you think?

In the future, we might see cellular networks tightly integrated into an overall fixed/wireless network concept and it won’t matter anymore whether a device uses Wifi or cellular network access. But this is definitely not the case today so bearer awareness in applications is a concept that remains neccessary for the foreseeable future. While I have already speculated about this concept in the past it is good to see that it is becoming reality. Let’s take some very data hungry applications I usually only use via Wifi on my Nokia N95 as an example. When I come home the phone automatically detects that my Wifi network is available which triggers a number of applications to jump into action. The SIP VoIP client automatically connects to the Internet and my phone becomes a Wireless/Cordless phone. Shozu connects to the Internet to upload the pictures I have taken to Flickr. And the podcasting application also detects that contact to the network has been reestablished and automatically checks for new podcasts in my favourite streams and downloads them automatically so I can listen to them next time I am out and about. And it all happens automatically. Depending on the country where I am at a particular time, I allow some of these applications to use the cellular network as well. That really depends on how far mobile network operators allow prepaid users to venture out into the Internet, both in terms of price and access restrictions.

Here’s a question for LTE Radio designers both on the network and the terminal side that I can’t find a good answer for in the documents I have read on LTE so far: In the 3GPP E-UTRAN standards documents, both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) is defined. It is often said that the implementation of the two different modes is very similar. Other sources point out that LTE will first be deployed in bands assigned for use with FDD. So I wonder if TDD will have a similar fate as UMTS TDD, which was specified, but never used on a large scale!? From my point of view, LTE TDD will only get a real chance if it is part of the first release of base stations and terminals. So here is my question: Does anyone know if TDD mode is part of mobile devices from day 1 and if so which market TDD mode addresses?

Recently I stumbled over this article on the web which says that SIM cards used in GSM and UMTS phones today might soon be extended with a USB interface. Two so far unused pins will be used for the purpose and make the enhancement fully backwards compatible.

A subsequent discussion with a SIM card expert revealed that the new USB 1.1 interface (up to 12 MBit/s transfer rate) can be used in three interface modes:

• Mass Storage: Despite their size, SIM cards can include several megabytes and potentially even gigabytes of flash memory today. In this mode, the mobile device can access the flash memory just like an external memory card today.

• Ethernet Emulation Mode (EEM): In this mode, the SIM card is accessed like a device on an Ethernet (i.e. via IP) and a web server could for example serve local content to the web browser running on the mobile device. Interesting for network operators to deploy SIM cards with content that can be accessed from the device with links to their offerings on the web.

• ICCD: In this mode, all files which are required for GSM/UMTS/IMS/LTE operation can be accessed as over the legacy interface.

For some strange reason, Orange France uses a transparent proxy server for mobile Internet access. Not sure what the proxy is good for but it has the nasty habit to block access to the mobile version of "Spiegel Online", a German news magazine. This is the only site that I access regularly that seems to be blocked and I am not sure why!? But now I’ve returned to France with Opera Mini and since it uses an encrypted socket connection, I can now read Spiegel online again. Thanks Opera!

The picture on the left shows that Opera Mini supports both socket connections and standard HTTP connections (probably for web only offers that block all other access). The socket interface is selected by default and apart from being encrypted and bypassing proxies, Opera says it is also faster than HTTP connections.

P.S.: You might have noted that this is the third post about Opera mini in a short time. The reason is simple: I am simply amazed by this program and it’s lightning speed and usability.

Time for another Carnival of the Mobilits, this time hosted by Andrew Grill and again packed with all the latest people have written on wireless topics on their blogs in the past week. So don’t hesitate, head over and enjoy!