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You might have noticed that I am blogging a bit less at the moment than normal. Among other things it’s got something to do with that I am currently on vacation traveling through Europe. Staying connected has become much easier in recent years but still requires a fair amount of self organization, a bag full of SIM cards and willingness to spend a certain amount of money. So how much do I spend for Internet connectivity during my 3 weeks vacation?

Things are complicated since I spend my vacation in four countries: Austria, Italy, southern France and Spain. For Austria I’ve bought a prepaid SIM from ‘3’ for eMail and Web access via my Nokia N93. Works well and details will follow in a seperate blog entry. Cost: 20 Euros for the SIM card and credit which lasted me for the time I spent in Austria. During 3 days I required full Internet access so in addition I used two Vodafone Web Sessions for 15 Euros each. Total amount spent in Austria: 50 Euros.

Next stop Italy. Here, things are simple. I already have a TIM prepaid SIM and use it for notebook and phone web access. 20 Euros buy me 500 MB. That’s good enough for the 5 days I am staying in ‘Bella Italia’.

Next, the south of France is on my agenda for about 10 days. I’ll use Orange’s prepaid SIM for eMail and web access via the mobile phone. That’s 6 euros. In addition I will probably need full Internet access during 4 days. That’s four Vodafone Websessions that add up to 60 Euros.

Final Stop: Spain. Just a weekend but it’s unlikely that I want to spend them disconnected. Maybe I will find enough open Wifi Access Points in the street. An alternative is a Yoigo prepaid SIM with web access for a euro a day. The SIM will cost a couple of Euros, too. Well, we’ll see.

Altogether, that’s going to be around 150 Euros. Definitely not on the cheap side. I wished ‘3’ would be present in all countries I (live and) travel to since they don’t charge extra for data roaming in their networks.

For the details on the prepaid SIMs I use, take a look on the left side on the blog for the link to the Prepaid SIM Internet Access Wiki.

Just read on Teltarif today that Vodafone Germany has launched a new product called "Visual Mailbox". Instead of saving voice mail messages on a central server the visual mailbox feature forwards voice mail messages via MMS to the subscriber. MMS is the multimedia cousin of the SMS message and can carry text, pictures and, quite useful for this service in particular, audio files. The advantage: The user does not have to call the voice mail system anymore but listen to voice messages by selecting an MMS message in the incoming messages folder of the mobile phone. Reminds me of the voice mail functionality of the iPhone.

Vodafone Germany offers the service for no additional charge. How nice 🙂

Today I saw reports for example here and here that Illiad has brought forward the necessary papers to get the fourth and final batch of France’s 3G licenses in the 2.1GHz UMTS band before the deadline expired yesterday.

Illiad is the mother company of ADSL Internet provider "Free", certainly one of the most aggressive players in the French ADSL market. That gives me some hope that in case their bid is accepted and they are ready to go for it there might finally be reason for hope that competition could finally arrive in the French 3G market. Also, Free might have more of an Internet and IP angle than the local 3G incumbents so they might be more inclined to finally let customers use their network for Internet services for an attractive price rather than to let base stations sit around only producing hot air.

According to the report of Les Echos linked above the stock market was not quite happy to hear that Illiad has put their name in the hat. They see mobile as a risk rather than an opportunity. Short sighted bunch…

I have to admit I had William Webb’s latest book „Wireless Communications – The Future“ at home for a couple of months before I finally came around to read it back to back. A mistake, as it turned out, to wait that long. As title suggests, the book deals with the future of wireless telecommunications, over a period of the next 20 years.

Webb, working for Ofcom and a newly appointed fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers draws an interesting picture of how he sees wireless technology evolving. His drastic conclusion is that fourth generation wireless will not make it off the ground. His main reasons for this are that he sees no need for systems that go beyond what’s possible in terms of data rates with 3.5G and the evolution these systems will undergo in the future. Note that he also counts LTE and similar technologies as 3G+ technologies. The second main reason at arriving at his conclusion is that today’s wireless technologies are already close to natural boundaries in terms of available frequency bands and efficiency. In short he sees continuous evolution of existing wireless systems rather than a new radio technology beyond OFDM revolutionizing wireless telecommunication in the next two decades.

Throughout the book the author discusses his own predictions such as how fixed and wireless networks will converge, industry inflection points where current vertical wireless vs. fixed network operator / content provider silos break up and new business models are required around horizontal structures with companies dealing with the network, companies dealing with the service and companies dealing with the applications on top. Also, Mr. Webb has invited a number of outstanding industry members to share their visions of the wireless future and discusses how these views integrate with his visions.

For every statement I agree with in the book there is at least another prediction which I vehemently disagree with. But I guess that’s just natural when trying to predict the future. Here are some statements which I found of particular interest and fully agree with:

• “The concept of lengthening time between generations of cellular technology being bridged through evolution of standards is now becoming increasingly accepted. This has the implications that moving to a new generation is not as urgent a need as it has been in the past […]”

• “Some [DSL] users […] are unlikely to achieve data rates above 1 MBit/s [in the future] unless there is a substantial infrastructure upgrade”

• “… a new service or product might take anything between four and ten years to reach mass adoption…”

• “Once almost all users have access almost everywhere to average data rates of several hundred megabits per second in active periods, their senses are no longer able to make use of more data and higher data rates become irrelevant” (Simon Saunders)

• “Some data measured by a large European ISP on their broadband customer base in 2005 showed that 50% of their customers were shipping less than 600 Mbytes per month” (Stephen Temple)

• “Video calls will become increasingly attractive as the ‘Metcalfe rule’ applies…”

• “The extent to which these services actually emerge will be set by industry structure and the ‘boldness’ of the strategies deployed by the key players”

• “Users will have found that the combination of 3G with its falling costs and improving data rates, and nomadic W-LAN coverage when static provides the best combination of cost and utility.”

These quotes are just the tip of the iceberg and although I do not agree with everything in the book I can say it is a real page turner and well worth a read. I learnt a great deal, I scribbled a lot of notes into the book so I can compare in 5 or 10 years from now and the book has definitely inspired a lot of new thoughts.

For those who are interested here’s a link to book’s page on the publisher’s website.

Enrique seems to have had a tough time lately when changing his blogging software. Thus, it has taken a bit longer than normal for the carnival to open its doors this week. As always, the carnival is the place to go to find out what has been written by bloggers on mobile topics in the past week. So go over and check it out.

Back in 2002 the verdict on GSM from most was pretty clear. GSM just celebrated it’s 10th birthday in the real world, UMTS was at the doorstep and looking at lifetimes of analog wireless system it seemed certain that in another ten years (2012) GSM would be a thing of the past. Well, today 2012 is just 5 years away and I think GSM in Europe will stay much longer than that.

So what has changed then since 2002? I think quite a number of things:

Equipment Refresh: In 2002, GSM equipment started to age a bit as the hardware used in the network did not change a whole lot. But since then virtually all network vendors have completely refreshed their network equipment from base station to core network router. This was not only a desire but a straight forward necessity as the parts for aging designs (e.g. 486 processors) were no longer available at reasonable cost. Hardware evolution also meant lower prices. GSM Base Station Controllers sold today, for example, are no less capable than the latest 3G Radio Network Controllers in terms of processing power, memory or storage capacity. GSM Base Station prices and sizes also keep shrinking and shrinking so networks become cheaper and cheaper.

New Entrants: Another reason for refreshing aging hardware designs were surely also Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE entering the GSM and 3G market with new hardware and lower prices so established vendors could not afford to continue selling expensive hardware.

New Markets: I think only back in 2002 it was not clear to most that GSM would have such a tremendous success in emerging economies in Asia, India and Africa. Compared to the 2.5 billion or so GSM subscribers there are today, the few (hundred million) 3G subscribers almost seem like a single drop of water in the ocean. This created economies of scale beyond anything imagined at first.

Continuous Evolution: Back in 2002, it was assumed that most R&D would be put into the development of 3G networks. This has been true to a certain extent but instead of being dormant, GSM has continued to evolve. Compared to 2002, GSM hardware is much more efficient due the technical and economical hardware refresh described above and new features such as EDGE for higher packet switched data rates have pushed the GSM standard far beyond the circuit switched network it was once designed as.

Network Refresh: Just like the PC at a consumers desk, network equipment such as base stations, controllers, switches and routers have a limited lifetime and need to be replaced. The cycle is a bit longer than the 2 or 3 years for consumer PCs but after 10 years or so, base stations have to be replaced because of aging components or due to their inability to support new features such as EDGE. Also, their power consumption is much higher than that of new base stations so at some point the price of replacing a base station is absorbed quickly by reduced operational costs.

3G Networks Coverage: Even in the most advanced 3G countries such as Italy, Austria, Germany and the U.K., 3G network coverage is nowhere near the almost countrywide GSM coverage. This is different from the 1990’s where GSM coverage quickly came close coverage levels of the analog networks.

Roaming: In analog days, there was no roaming. With GSM, international roaming is a major benefit. Even in the future the majority of roamers will still have a GSM only phone. Switching off GSM networks makes no sense as revenue from roaming customers is substantial.

So what are we going to see in Europe by 2012 then?

In five years from now I expect the majority of subscribers in Europe to have a 3G compatible phone that is backwards compatible to 2G. In urban areas, operators might decide do downscale their GSM deployment a bit as most people now use the 3G instead of the 2G network for voice calls. Cities will still be covered by GSM but maybe with fewer number of available channels / bandwidth.

Such a scenario could come in combination with yet another equipment refresh which some operators require by then for both their 2G and 3G networks. At that time, base station equipment that integrates 2G, 3G and beyond 3G radios such as LTE could become very attractive. The motto of the hour could be "Replace your aging 2G and 3G equipment with a new base station that can do both plus LTE on top!"

I wonder if it is possible by then to only use one set of antennas for all three radio technologies!? If not, adding yet another set of antennas on top of an already crowded mast is not simple from both a technological and psychological point of view.

Once upon a time the wireless world was a happy and simple place for bean counters to put together their statistics. The Average Revenue Per User, or ARPU, was invented as a measure of how profitable and successful a network was operated and marketed. Back then, things were simple, one SIM card per user and only two services: Voice and SMS. In this environment, looking at the ARPU made sense. Today, however, the world looks much different and ARPU is quickly becoming an irrelevant key figure.

Use of several SIM cards

There are several reasons for this. First, people in many countries have started using several SIM cards because each SIM card offers an advantage the other doesn’t. The average revenue per user is now split between two SIM cards. Is the business less profitable because of this? Probably not, but the revenue of that user is now split over two SIM cards and that looks quite bad on the ARPU scale.

Same thing for business users: Many of them these days use a SIM card for their mobile phone and a second SIM card for the 3G data card that connects their notebooks to the Internet. The Average Revenue Per User should contain the sum of both. In practice that’s difficult to do because there is usually no way of knowing that both SIM cards belong to the same user, especially if the SIM cards were bought by a company.

Subsidies and Prepaid:

Second, MVNO’s (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) in some countries have started to offer cheap voice minutes but sell SIM cards without phones. So which ARPU is better, 30 euros a month generated with a contract which required a 300 euro subsidize for a cool phone which spread over  24 months reduces the real revenues achieved to €17.50, or 20 euros a month generated via a prepaid SIM without subsidies? Surely the €30.- ARPU looks nicer on the paper but the operator probably makes more money with the prepaid customer and a €20.- ARPU.

Wide Range of Services

Third, mobile networks offer a wide range of services today from voice calls to high speed Internet access. So which customer is more profitable for the operator?: A customer that spends 30 euros a month on voice calls or a customer that spends 30 euros a month for Internet access? In most cases the voice ARPU is probably more profitable than the data ARPU. However, prices for voice minutes keep falling and falling except in countries where there is no real competition among operators (n’est-ce pas? 🙂 So in the end the data customer could eventually become more profitable.

Alternatives

On the long run I guess ARPU has to be replaced by some other, more meaningful key figure adapted to the continuing changes. Maybe it would be a good idea have a range of key figures such as:

• Average revenue for a voice minute, based on all voice minutes sold in the network over the period of a month.
• Average revenue per megabyte for mobile services, i.e. web surfing and other Internet activities from mobile phones
• Average revenue per megabyte achieved with high speed Internet access from notebooks
• SMS and MMS should also be treated in the same manner.

I wonder if operators would be willing to go down that route!? In the end, these number would give a lot of insight… Also, compared to calculating the ARPU as done today, getting to these numbers would be a bit more difficult. However, if network operators have problems getting this information out of the call data records, they could ask Google or Yahoo to do it for them. They know how to process terabytes of information.

Alternatives, thoughts, anyone?

It’s summer time in the northern hemisphere and I keep getting eMails from people asking for my advice on how to access the Internet in countries to which they intend to travel. In the past I’ve reported on quite a number of 3G prepaid wireless Internet access offers mostly of operators in Europe. Prepaid is the important word in the previous sentence as travelers can not get postpaid contracts even if they are without a minimum subscription time or monthly fee.

Over time, these reports have become a bit difficult to find on the blog. Those that dig a bit eventually end up with this summary. However, it’s still not ideal to search through the collection of articles in the hope to find the right piece of information. Thus, I’ve decided to open a Wiki for everyone to participate and share information! All the information I have collected so far on how to wirelessly access the Internet with a prepaid SIM card can be found there now.

One person can not do it alone! So if you have additional information, please consider updating the pages or to create new ones. No login required, just hit the edit button. If you think this information is useful for others please consider linking to the Wiki or writing a blog entry about it! That’s the only way people will eventually find the information when searching on Google, Yahoo, etc.

UMTS Femto cell solutions are being announced lately by both startups and established players such as Nokia Siemens Networks. Leaving aside the question of whether femto’s make sense or not I tried to find out how femto’s can be integrated with the macro layer of the network. It seems not to much information is available about the technical part on the net. So here are my questions, maybe some of you know more. If so please consider leaving a comment.

Basically I’ve seen two approaches to femto. For both cases, the cells are connected to the network via DSL or cable:

Pure Base Station Approach

In this approach the femto cell is included as part of the overall radio network. This should require configuration of both the femto cell and the macro cell layer for handovers and cell reselection. I’ve seen some patent applications from Ericsson which describe that the pico cell is equipped with a receiver that can scan the environment for neighboring cells. The result is then reported to the network which in turn sends the required neighboring cell lists to the femto for broadcast. Nothing is mentioned, however, of how the macro layer is configured. If this is not done, I wonder how a mobile in idle mode can change to the femto cell.

Also, I wonder if it is foreseen to restrict access to a femto cell to the owner of the cell? After all, if I had a femto cell at home, would I want my 25 neighbors to also use it for free? If access can be restricted how is that done? Should the macro layer broadcast the cell info for my femto cell, others will see it as well. And if it doesn’t, how can my own mobile detect the femto cell once I arrive home and still have coverage from the outdoor macro cell?

Speculation: While a mobile has a connection established to the network it can be asked to report cells which are not in the cell info list (the so called "detected cells" broadcasting on the same frequency as the current cell). This could then be used by the RNC in combination with with my user ID to decide whether to hand over the connection to the femto cell, in case the owner of the mobile is the owner of the femto or to leave the call on the macro layer. This does not work when the mobile looses connection to the macro cell layer, however. In this case the network search of the mobile will detect the femto and the mobile will try to attach. How can this be gracefully prevented in case the femto only allows a select few users?

Scalability: If it can be avoided that the macro cell layer has to broadcast information about the femto cell layer then I don’t see scalability issues on the Node-B side. If it can’t be avoided then I wonder how the solution scales. A macro layer cell is usually designed for about 2000 users. If ‘only’ 50 of them use a femto cell at home I wonder how this can be accommodated for in the neighboring cell list!?

The Network In A Bottle Approach

Another femto approach used for example by 3WayNetworks is to combine the complete functionality of the network from base station to MSC into the femto base station. On their web site, 3WayNetworks mentions that the femto base station can use a different Mobile Country Code and Mobile Network Code and thus runs completely independent from the macro layer. This might make rejecting unauthorized users a bit simpler than in the approach above but still leaves open the question of how authorized mobiles find and use the cell in the first place in case the macro layer is still strong enough where the femto cell is to be used (e.g. to increase overall network bandwidth).

Speculation: Here, an old GSM trick could help which probably still exists for UMTS: For national roaming the mobile can be instructed to scan for the home network every couple of minutes. Femto subscribers could be given a SIM card which the femto’s MCC/MNC as home network. Thus, femto subscriber mobiles would keep looking for femto cells while other subscribers could automatically be barred. UMTS also knows the concept of equivalent network which might also help here (see 3GPP TS 22.011 chapter 3.2.2.5).

A lot of questions… If you have an answer, please leave a comment.

Carlo Longino points out on his blog that Steve Jobs has said battery capacities and immature 3G chipsets that take too much power are the reason the iPhone doesn’t have any 3G capabilities. If you want to build a phone these days that is designed for only being used for a two minute voice call once or twice a week, using a 2G chipsets is surely the right thing to do as standby power consumption is definitely lower than what 3G chipsets can do today. However, the iPhone is a multimedia device and is built for being used throughout the day for a myriad of purposes. Therefore 3G chipset power consumption is the least of your worries.

Compared to what the processor, display, background illumination, camera and memory consume during intensive use during the day, the additional power required for a 3G chipset while in standby is not worth mentioning. Even without a lot of network use my battery on the N93 is flat in the evening when I heavily use my phone during the day for taking pictures, navigating (NokiaMaps), taking notes, checking and responding to eMails, playing games, reading documents, etc. etc. All of this requires little to no network interaction. On days without a lot of activity the battery is still almost full in the evening, despite having been attached to a 3G network all day long. So 3G chipset idle mode power consumption is definitely not an issue if the phone / multimedia device is used heavily during the day.

But once you use the cellular network it doesn’t really matter if you use a 2G or 3G network. In both cases the battery is flat after two to three hours if I use the phone together with a notebook to access the Internet. I don’t think the iPhone is designed to do this but the same is true for using the network with the built in browser.

I wonder if Apple’s decision not to include 3G has more to do with the fact that you can count the number of 3G or 3.5G capable mobile phones (not datacards) in the U.S. on one hand these days. Compare that to Europe where 3G in mobile phones are already mainstream technology. If Apple had been a European company it could well be their decision would have been different.