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The first highlight of my 3GSM experience yesterday were the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards. Lots of people showed up and it was very much a Web 2.0 / Conference 2.0 feeling. Many people knew many people from their blogs and other activities on the net.

Rudy de Waele of m-trends and founder of Momo Barcelona did a great job to bring everyone together: A first class jury for the awards with people like Carlo Longino of MobHappy, Russell Buckley of AdMob, and Daniel Applequist of Momo London just to name a few. Next to the jury there was a first class audience, first class networking during the breaks and first class sponsors like Telefonica and Reitek without whom something of this dimension with several hundred people attending would not have been possible.

To the hard facts now: 24 (!) Mobile Monday chapters have sent their best startup to Barcelona to present. I was quite impressed with the AsiaPac Region with India having had at least three cities presenting as well as several chapters from China. My personal favorites for the best startup idea were PartyStrands of Barcelona with their interactive party music system, the people from the chapter in Ukraine with their online game (sorry, I forgot your company name…), the people from MoMo Paris with their browser scrolling idea, the mobile payment solution from the Bangalore chapter and the S60 MMS and SMS encryption and security solution from the Bangkok chapter. I was also quite fascinated by the Wifi positioning presentation, of which I have heard before but never quite understood the concept until yesterday. Very cool stuff!

In the end, the jury award went to Plazes, quite known already in the blog sphere for their mobile social location service. Another award went to the guys from the MoMo Paris chapter with their innovative scrolling solution about which I have to find out more and about which I will write separately. Finally, Rudy de Waele got the award for the best Carnival of the Mobilist post of last year. All very deserved!

To close this post in Techdirt fashion, I have to note that I did not see a single Blackberry user at the event. Nokia Eseries and Nseries devices on the other hand were everywhere. I leave it to you to figure this one out 😉

For pictures, head over to Flickr.

So it is finally Monday morning and the exhibition has opened it’s doors. It’s still rather quiet here no queues and shoving scenes at the entrance and inside the halls yet. It’s not going to last. This morning is my free morning, no appointments to run to, just walking through the exhibition halls to discover new things.

Some people are saying that the most important thing about 3GSM is not the Congress itself but what happens around it. I tend to agree. Last night I went to the Mobile Sunday Barcelona, organized by Stuart Mudie and Rudy de Waele. Lot’s of people came who I knew, who knew me and lot’s of people I haven’t met before. William probably got the prize for coming from the most distant place, the Philippines. Rafe of AllAboutSymbian.com had difficulties making sure his N95 prototype didn’t get lost while wandering through many hands 😉

To make it a real mobile party, MyStrands was there with their PartyStrands (http://mystrands.com) music system which lets people influence the choice of music that is played via SMS, or via the Internet either via GPRS/UMTS or over the free Wifi which was in place last night. The system also allowed party goes to send text messages and pictures which were then displayed on the big screens.  A truly enjoyable evening. Thanks to the organizers and a hello to all people I met last night.

Zooming back to today: This is going to be a short exhibition day for me as the Mobile Monday Peer Awards will take place this afternoon starting at three. 700+ people have registered and it’s going to be a monumental event. Looking forward very much to it.

So, before I sign off for the moment, here’s a link to Flickr where you will find the images I take during the week: http://flickr.com/tags/mtrends

I am feverishly looking forward to my departure to Barcelona for the 3GSMWorldCongress. Day to day work will come to a halt and I can’t wait to meet a lot of people for interesting conversations. Web 2.0 has definitely transformed my 3GSM Congress experience and I hope I can help to transform the experience a bit for you as well if are not able to attend in person.

As you can see in this blog post from last year, I’ve upgraded my mobile kit to stay in touch and to blog from the congress from a Nokia 6680 to an N93 this year. Freddy and Montserrat now have a premium place on the phone’s memory card while the paper notebook and city guide are still with me. Again, I will use eMail and Lifeblog to post directly to this blog, so watch this space for the latest and greatest from the congress.

Shozu will help me to post pictures and short comments to flickr. Rudy over at m-trends.org and I will tag our pictures and short comments with ‘mtrends‘ and you can find them easily via this link.

Another thing you might want to watch closely are the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards on Monday afternoon (12 February 2007). There will be a life webcast of the event via comvu. Should be a lot of fun!

A while back I ran a little mini-series on different 4G network technologies like LTE, EVDO Rev C. and WiMAX. I concluded that at least two of those technologies will establish themselves and that they will compete with each other fiercely. Unlike in the early days of the CDMA vs. GSM competition in the Americas, however, this competition will be quite fruitful.

To see why let’s go back for a second to the epic struggle of CDMA vs. GSM. Users and operators did not benefit greatly from this competition because networks and applications where both in the hands of the operators. This created a lot of incompatibility from the users point of view. An example is text messaging. While in Europe text messaging has been flourishing for a long time it has only recently become a bit more popular in the U.S. The main reason for this was that for a long time it was not possible for users of different networks to exchange text messages. Thus, the service did not take off until interoperability was finally introduced.

In 4G networks, however, it looks like things will go down a different path. Here, the network and applications running on it are separated and do not depend on each other. Applications are based on the Internet Protocol (IP) and just use whatever network there is available. IP applications don’t care if their data is sent back or forth via UMTS, HSDPA, LTE, EVDO, WiMAX, etc. This allows people to develop applications independently from the underlying network infrastructure. Some applications will still be developed by operators but the vast majority will come from talented people working directly in the internet crowd. For them and for the end users competing wireless technologies is very beneficial as it spurs network roll outs, offers possibility for new players in the market and creates competition between device manufacturers. Also, new applications will be introduced much easier and much more quickly as they are no longer forced into a tight framework that takes forever to develop and from which it never gets out again.

I
didn’t get much sleep last night because I stumbled over this post over at Symbian-Freak just before midnight which proclaimed that software updates are available again for the Nokia N93 on the Nokia software update site. As the software on my N93 was quite dated (V 10.0.025, 12.07.2006) and had a few irritating bugs, I was more than happy to update right away instead of sleeping it over first. As can be seen on the picture on the left, the software version to which my N93 is now upgraded is V 20.0.058.

The software update itself took about 30 minutes as the software first updated itself (20MB) and then downloaded the almost 80 MB image file for the phone. Quite amazing how much firmware fits into a small phone these days. I made a backup of my data before the the update and restored it after the update was complete. While calendar entries and most settings were properly restored I had to reinstall all 3rd party applications. This took quite some time as I use about a dozen of them. On the good side, most applications detected their previous settings which were stored on the memory card so I didn’t have to reconfigure Profimail, RescoNews, the Nokia Podcast catcher and Handysafe. Together with ensuring that all applications still run as desired the whole process took about one and a half hours. As I said, not much sleep last night 😉 But it was worth it because I immediately noticed a number of great improvements and new features:

• The camera application has been improved. Once you swivel the phone back into closed or phone position, the camera app closes instead of staying open and using the internal camera;

• There seems to be slightly more available program memory as the S60 browser and Profimail were able to co-exist simultaneously despite some serious web surfing;

• Browser stability seems to have improved. It didn’t crash since I made the update;

• The long awaited Wifi Overview on the idle screen is finally here (see picture);

• RescoNews and Handy Weather make use of big lists. With the old software version it took quite a long time (10-15 seconds) for these lists to be generated. With the new software version, these programs are a lot faster now;

• The new software version allows the user to lock to phone to the UMTS to prevent fall-backs to GSM. This is quite handy as there are still operators around who can’t set their network parameters correctly and make my Nokia mobiles switch to GSM while UMTS coverage is still good. While that doesn’t matter much for making phone calls it’s quite irritating when using the phone as a ‘modem’ for the notebook.

One thing I haven’t figured out quite yet is how to get rid of the message I get now every time I start the phone that untrusted applications have been found on the memory card and that I should go to the application manager to fix this. The application manager shows three applications with cryptic names and says they not installed but I can’t delete them or do anything else with them (see second picture)!? Time will tell. So all in all, I am quite happy about the improvements I got but still wished the update process would be a bit more seamless. No problem for me but I wouldn’t let my girlfriend perform this procedure on her own.

A Carnival of the Mobilists of its own kind this week at the Wireless World Japan blog of Jan Kuczynski. It’s the first time I’ve visited his blog so the Carnival, which contains links to the best of what people in the blog sphere wrote about mobile in the past week, was not the only gem I found. In addition, his blog also has a lot of interesting information about what’s happening in the Japanese mobile sector. For example: It looks like Nokia is selling Nseries  and Eseries phones under different names to Softbank (e.g. N73 = 705NK or E61 = X01NK). So head over and enjoy!

The air interface of next generation wireless networks such as WiMAX is based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). This technology divides a channel into many sub-channels which can be used by several terminals independently at the same time. Fractional frequency re-use, which I describe in more detail below, can reduce interference caused by neighboring base stations using the same frequency block and can thus help to increase user throughput and  overall network capacity.

Due to the limited frequency bands available and the high bandwidth per cell (e.g. 5 or 10 MHz) of future wireless broadband networks, base stations of an operator use the same frequency band. Using the same frequency band for all base stations, however, creates interference for subscriber terminals when they receive signals from more than one base station at a time. This is the case for example for a subscriber located just in the middle between base station A and base station B. If the subscriber listens to base station A, the signal of base station B is seen as unwanted interference. Thus, from the point of view of the subscriber, the output power of base station B should be as low as possible in order to create as little interference as possible. For another subscriber in a similar location but listening to base station B the situation is just the opposite. Thus, a compromise has to be found to adjust the output power of the base stations to a value which enables subscribers at the cell edge to still communicate at a decent speed while not creating too much interference in neighboring cells.

For distant subscribers a base station has to use more transmission power in order to reach them. Subscribers close to the base station on the other hand require much less transmission power to receive the signal. As client devices only transmit and receive on some but not all sub-channels of the frequency band, transmission power of sub-channels used by clients close to a base station can be lower than the transmission power of sub-channels used by clients at the cell edge. In practice, the reduced transmission power for sub-channels used by clients close to a base station thus creates less interference for users close to other base stations.

Using a combination of high and low power sub-channels can be exploited to increase the overall capacity of the network compared to networks which use the same transmission power for all sub-channels. Base stations can be organized in a way to use the same set of sub-channels to serve subscribers close to them with a low transmission power. The rest of the sub-channels are used with a higher transmission power and can be used by both distant and close subscribers. To minimize interference of high power sub-channels for clients of neighboring base stations the cells are further organized in a way that two adjacent cells do not use the same high power sub-channels. Thus, both close and distant clients of a base station will not see the high power sub-channels of a neighboring base station as interference. This approach is known as “fractional frequency re-use” (FFR) as all base stations use the same frequency band, the same low power sub-channels, but only a fraction of the high power sub-channels.

It is worth to note that fractional frequency re-use can not be used in UMTS, as all subscribers use the complete bandwidth instead of sub-channels. Thus, OFDMA networks implementing FFR suffer less from interference problems which translates into higher spectral efficiency compared to UMTS, i.e. the overall bandwidth available in the network is higher.

Currently the only indication the 802.16e WiMAX networks will use this technique is a whitepaper written by the WiMAX forum (changes place frequently so no link given here). I performed a search on the net but found no vendor who is talking about it yet. A bit strange as FFR seems to be an interesting technology.

Further information on next generation wireless networks such as LTE, WiMAX and EVDO Rev C can be found here.

In just about a week the 3GSMWorldCongress 2007 will open its doors for a week of excitement, fun, new ideas, challenges and good discussions in Barcelona. I’ll be there all week enjoying both the congress and all Barcelona has to offer. I am also looking forward to meeting friends again. If you would like to catch up send me an eMail to gsmumts@gmx.de and propose a spot and date. Viva Barcelona!

One of the great things about blogging and book writing is to make the acquaintance of inspired people working on wireless and other hot topics. Due to recent events, let me introduce you to two of them:

Right in time for the release of Windows Vista, "The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista" co-written by Stuart Mudie, a friend of mine, has hit the book stores. Very well done Stuart, looking forward to buying a copy at the Wiley booth at the 3GSMWorldCongress in Barcelona. Once I am in Paris, I’ll come by to get a dedication!

And while I am already at it, take a look at Gabe Frost’s new blog about Windows Vista. Gabe, working with Microsoft has already written a lot of interesting articles on Vista’s wireless capabilities on the official Microsoft blog which have greatly helped me greatly in my own research. Now it looks like he thought it was time to additionally start a personal blog to discuss his own view on Vista. A treasure chest of tips and tricks around Vista.

Great stuff guys, hope to see you again soon somewhere!

I am sitting in a train right now with some time to spare to write five things about me now that it’s been kindly requested by three people. So here we go:

1. I used a mobile phone for the first time in 1996 (wow, only eleven years ago) while I was living in Los Angeles. At the time I was working for a small computer company. Every now and then I had to go to clients to install some software and hardware. To keep in touch with the ‘mother ship’ I was given a mobile phone. It was already quite small but still one of those analogue cellular phones already long forgotten today. I was amazed at the time but as these things were still quite expensive and I was still a student I didn’t see the immediate benefit for my personal life. I hardly had enough money to buy food and keep the car running (indispensable in L.A.)

2. People in my previous company back in 2000 speculated if I quit my job and went to a new company because I was tired of being ridiculed for having more than one mobile phone lying on my desk (see the radical change from 1996…?). While quite normal today, 6 years ago a mobile phone was still a novelty and having two almost bordered insanity. 

3. Italy and nordic countries hold a special attraction for me. Italy because I like the people, I like the language, the food, the cafe and Don Camillo and Peppone. Not sure what fascinates me about nordic countries, but when I hear Stockholm or Helsinki I feel a desire to go on an adventure immediately. Quite strange as it is quite cold and dark there in winter, two things I don’t really like at all. So where does the attraction come from? No idea, really.

4. I like Opera very much and take every opportunity to go. I already reserved tickets for Don Carlos at the Liceu in Barcelona, where I will be for the upcoming 3GSMWorldCongress. A perfect combination of technology and culture during that week.

5. I’d like to work for the multimedia division of Nokia or S60 one day. In my opinion they are working on the best products for my very mobile lifestyle and working and contributing my ideas to these products should be a lot of fun.

At this point I should name another five people for their turn to tell five things about them. However, most people in my bloggroll have already done so. So  instead I recommend to read Tommi’s five things on his S60 blog, they are truly the strangest and craziest ones I have read so far!

Oh yes, and just as Tommi, ‘I demand my cup full’ as well 😉