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About a year ago I’ve written a blog post about how nice it would be if Nokia N-series phones with 3G and Wifi could be used as a Wifi access point. The post keeps getting a lot of hits via search engines and a lot of comments have been left until the comments section was closed automatically to reduce comment spam. Looks like I am not the only one thinking about such a feature. A year later a solution or rather workaround seems to have surfaced at least for some Windows Mobile devices. These days I am wondering if Google’s Android platform for mobile devices might be the choice for some people to really implement such a feature!?

So why on Android? The answer is Open Source! Windows Mobile, S60 and other mobile phone operating systems are closed source. Application developers can only use the Application Programming Interface (API) of the operating system which simply does not allow programmers to do such low layer things as reconfiguring the Wifi chip, setting up a system wide DHCP and DNS proxy and to interconnect the Wifi interface with the 3.5G interface. But with Android, things are different. The operating system is Linux so the source code and programing tools to modify the operating system are available. So as they say in the video below at the end, "start composing"!

Oh, by the way, there are already some open source mobile devices out there, the Nokia Internet Tablets (N770, N800, N810). Their operating system called Memo is also based on Linux and there is lots of activity in the filed. The latest version of the software even ships with an Xterm so deep diving without installing additional software is possible. There are even some tools ported from mainstream Linux to tweak the Wifi chip. Won’t help much on these devices for a Wifi/3.5G access point since the Internet tablets do not have a 3.5G Interface. Nevertheless it shows the possibilities.

Let’s see who gets there first, closed source or open source. Where do you place your bets?

As both my private and my business life is pretty international I would estimate that 80% of my calls are international these days. Most of these calls are carried over VoIP for some of the distance. Interestingly, that has some strange consequences for the phone number that the other end is shown. Some examples:

Business calls: I use a SIP VoIP client on the PC and the SIP network of my company for most business calls. To reduce cost, my company has a lot of voice gateways deployed in different countries. The IP network thus transports the VoIP call to the closest media gateway and then releases the call to the public circuit switched network. As a result the caller always sees a local number instead of my real number. Nice to hide the fact that you are not actually in the country. However, the number can not be called back.

For private calls I use Skype a lot. Skype does similar things and has gateways in many countries to release the call to the public telephone network as close to the destination as possible. Again a mysterious local number is shown (e.g. +491234). Most people are quite surprised to see such a number.

When I am in Germany and have to call a mobile phone abroad I use one of the many alternative PSTN operators. Again the number that is shown looks funny and has nothing to do with my real number.

And when I am out and about and want to call abroad from the mobile I use the services of Rebtel which lets me call a national number and then forwards the call internationally at a fraction of the cost of a direct call from the mobile. Again, same story with the calling number being displayed on the other end.

So why is there a number displayed at all at the other end if it is just fictuous? Nobody ever heard of CLIR?

P.S.: I wonder if there is a law prohibiting media gateways in a country to send the international number from a different country!?

P.P.S.: For the moment I seem to be the exception. So most people these days pick up the phone and say: “The number looks funny, this must be you, Martin!”. Sort of an alternative caller ID…

It’s the last Carnival of the Mobilists for this year and Enrique C. Ortiz over at ‘About Mobility’ has again done a great job at covering the latest news on mobile of the previous week. I feel honored that my entry was selected as entry of the week. Riding the long tail… So without further ado, I hand over to Enrique. Have fun!

This week the Carnival of the Mobilists has stoped at Judy Breck’s Golden Swamp blog. Just had a quick look before posting and already saw interesting entries on Ovi, Mobile Ajax, Google Maps and lots of other stuff I need to take a closer look at. So for the state of affairs in the wireless domain this week head over to the Carnival and enjoy!

Every now and then I get an eMail from someone asking me for advice on how to best hook up to the Internet from that little cottage they have bought in a remote place in Italy. Not quite sure why it’s always Italy, seems to be a nice place for a cottage. If 3G is not available their best chance so far was to buy a prepaid SIM card from TIM and use their nationwide EDGE network. But it seems there is no an affordable alternative available.

SES Astra has started their broadband Internet satellite service that does not require a phone line for the return path. The receiver/transmitter requires a satellite dish or, in case a satellite dish is already installed for reception of TV programs from the Astra satellite, the receiver/transmitter can be installed alongside the TV receiver module.

It seems the service is not sold directly by Astra but via national resellers. In Germany, Filiago is the reseller. A flatrate with 1 MBit/s downlink and 128 kbit/s uplink is available for around 40 euros a month.

According to Astra the service is available throughout Europe. Very nice!

An interesting technical detail came to my attention today concerning Time Division Duplex (TDD) wireless systems such as WiMAX: Since uplink and downlink transmission is done in the same frequency band, uplink and downlink capacity can be adjusted based on demand. In theory this is an advantage over FDD (Frquency Division Duplex), used by most cellular 2G and 3G systems today. Here, uplink transmissions use a seperate frequency band which is just as large as the downlink frequency band (e.g. 5 MHz for UMTS). This means that FDD systems always have a 1:1 ratio between uplink and downlink. With TDD systems, this ratio can be changed, for example to 2:1, 3:1, etc. to give more capacity to the downlink. But there is one important thing to remember: The efficiency of uplink transmissions is much lower than in the downlink due to the lower transmission power and small antennas of the mobile device. Thus, even with a 1:1 ratio, uplink data rates are far lower than data rates in the downlink despite the using the same amount of bandwidth. I estimate that the maximum overall speed achieved in uplink direction is only 1/3 or 1/4 of the downlink. With rising uplink requirements of web 2.0 applications (picture, video uploads for example) I wonder if it will even make sense in practice to configure a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio in TDD systems as the uplink capacity would then be only a tenth of that of the downlink!? Opinions, anyone?

Not much news from NokiaWorld which took place this week in Amsterdam concerning the hardware side. No cool N95 successor announced, no mind blowing N93+++ in the pipe. I am a bit disappointed. But the presentations of the guest speakers made up for it a bit. A lot of videos of what happened can be found here. I’ll surely take a look at most of them in the next couple of days. I’ve watched Chris Anderson’s presentation today on the impact of things that almost become free. For a minute he speculated what would happen if Nokia gave away the phone for free and charged for services. Well, I would "buy" a new phone instantly 🙂

After having had the pleasure of hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists last week, it has moved on this week to  Tarek Ghazali in Egypt and his Symbiano-Tek blog. As always great insight and many entries which require some more contemplation. Here’s the link so go and check it out!

I don’t search a lot on the net from my N93 as I don’t really feel the need for discovering new information sources while on the go. Today, however, I had to do a quick search as I had forgotten the exact address of a café in Paris I was going to. So I used Mowser for the search since it would also format any pages it would find in a mobile friendly way. To my great surprise it found the address right away and displayed it as part of the search results. Great stuff, so mobile search is useful for me afterall.

It is said that all good things are three and I feel greatly honored to host the Carnival of the Mobilists for the third time now. The mobile ecosphere is moving at an astounding pace and it becomes quite obvious when I look back to when I first hosted the Carnival early 2006: The first usable 3G phones slowly coming to market, Nseries in it’s infancy, no iPhone, not a lot of talk then about mobile web 2.0 applications. Today, all of this is in full swing and this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is the proof:

Kindle: Starting off with Michael Mace’s analysis of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader. I like Michael’s drill down approach of looking at new products and services including their impact on the industry. He always goes far beyond ordinary device reviews. He writes to the point: "Kindle makes the wireless network do what it should do: Disappear". True words of what should happen, not only for the Kindle. Vero over at Taptu has also taken a look at Kindle and shares her thoughts whether this will be the future device for book reading.

Education: Judy Breck over at the Golden Swamp writes about the "The Million" program which is an initiative considered in New York to give mobile phones to school students with on board learning software. Students get rewarded when using the software by additional voice minutes, SMS messages, etc. Great stuff!

More Education: Judy is not the only one writing about education this week. Mark van ‘t Hooft has attended Handheld learning 2007 in London and gives us his impression from the exhibition/conference.

Mobile News From China: To most non-Chinese the Chinese mobile market is a big mystery especially due to the total absence of 3G because no licenses have been given out yet. Paul Ruppert gives some insight in his post on Mobile Point View about a Chineese future of Vodafone.

Mobile and Africa: I think Tomi Ahonen and his Communities Dominate Brands blog needs no further introduction here. This
week, Tomi has written about short wave transmissions of SW Radio
Africa being blocked by the Zimbabwean government and what the radio
station does about it: To bring uncensored news to the people in
Zimbabwe, they have started using SMS messages. 8000 people have
already signed up with 100 additions daily. A great service and let’s
hope that those who have figured out how to block radio waves don’t
also figure out how to stop SMS messages.

The Real Web on the Mobile: Dennis Bournique over at Wap review has written a pretty extensive article on the “real” web on phones and what it means for designers. A very difficult topic and I am still waiting for a one approach does it all as everything he mentions in his article has happened to me in the past.

Missing Local Wifi Apps: Dean Bubley over at Disruptive Wireless is also somebody to whom you should listen closely when he’s got something to say. This week he joins the Carnival with an analysis of why Wifi now built into many cellular mobile devices have not yet started a revolution in the local network.

More Android: Andreas Constantinou of the VisionMobile forum has written a great piece about the significance of Google’s Android – A long, analytical thought piece on why Android is different to every other OS out there. Definitely worth to be checked out!

Battery Life: Staying in the mobile device area for another moment, Amir has analyzed battery capacity enhancements in Nokia’s N95 evolution to see what effect the larger batteries and new hardware have on the latest N95 versions.

IMS and fixed/wireless convergence: And finally, here’s my contribution to this week’s Carnival: I guess there’s not a lot that can be found on YouTube today. So I am not sure why I was a bit surprised to see Telecom vendors such as Ericsson, Nortel, Nokia-Siemens-Networks and Alcatel-Lucent spreading the word there, too. The mobile world from the vendors perspective!

Next week, the Carnival goes to to Symbiano-Tek in Egypt. I wished I could go there fore a little vacation, too 🙂