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I am a bit late to the Carnival of the Mobilists this week, probably because of some violent stomach problems and night shifts to get some equipment running in a wireless network in Italy. Anyway, here’s the link to this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Mobilists, this time hosted by Xen Mendelsohn. Great job I very much enjoyed reading it and many of the articles you point to. Next week, I’ll have the honor of hosting the Carnival, so stay tuned here!

Here’s a picture of an Orange France advertisement for their UMA service called "Unik" for which they now also offer a Nokia 6086. I like advertisement that is clear, easy to understand, that makes me want something and that gives me all the facts. But this one!? It tells people nothing… How should people know that this panel promotes a fixed/mobile convergence product and that you need a France Telecom DSL connection and Wifi access point to use it? Why should people want to buy this phone after seeing the pannel? There are so many other 1 Euro (with a * to the fine print) ads out there. I am really puzzled. Maybe my French readers can enlighten me?

Another week another Carnival of the Mobilists, this time written by Steve Litchfield over at 3-Lib. In case you haven’t heard of the Carnival of the Mobilists before it’s the collection of the best blog entries of the previous week from the world of wireless. So don’t hesitate, head over and enjoy.

Ricky Cadden lists a number of good points when it comes to why Music Phones still have some way to go before they reach the same usability as Apple’s iPod. Nevertheless, people have definitely started to use their phones for listening to music. There’s no better proof than to take a ride in the Paris metro these days. Today, I took the metro twice and each time I was in a carriage in which a person listened to the music on his phone without headphones.I am slightly annoyed at this behavior. I hope this will not become a new trend…

Ever thought file sharing of others could have an impact on your mobile device’s runtime on a battery charge? If not, read on:

For DSL connections I think it is quite the norm rather than the exception that subscribers are assigned a public IP address. In wireless networks things are a bit different. While some operators also assign public IP addresses when customers establish a connection to the Internet from their mobile device, others use a pool of private IP addresses. When private IP addresses are used, which is similar to the way a DSL router at home maps several PCs and notebooks to a single public IP address, wireless clients are not directly reachable from the outside world. Thus, packets destined to ports from which a subscriber has not originated a connection are rejected. In networks that assign a public IP address, however, all packets are delivered.

From a technical point of view using public IP addresses rather than private ones for mobile terminals is the right thing to do. However, there is a big practical disadvantage: If the IP address assigned to a mobile terminal was previously used by somebody for file sharing, other hosts keep sending packets to that IP address as they are not aware the IP address is now used by someone else. In terms of bandwidth usage this is not a problem as the packets are small and only occur every couple of seconds. For mobile terminals however, this means radio resources are kept assigned instead of being removed during times of inactivity (e.g. reading a web page or simply doing nothing with the device for some time). This in turn has a drastic impact on how long the device can run with a single battery charge.

I’ve seen this happening several times now while being connected via a 3G network and running Wireshark on the PC. In addition I can also see Internet worms banging on my door every now and then trying to send messages to the Windows Messaging Service (a bug closed several years ago…)

Do We Have To Use Private IP Addresses With Future Always On Devices?

Today, this behavior is probably not an issue for most people as Internet sessions tend to be brief. In next generation wireless networks, however, mobile devices will always have an IP connection to the network because voice calls will use the IP network rather than a circuit connection like today. Further down the road when not only a few users but most will use SIP/IMS etc. clients, end user devices should be able to connect with each other without the need for a gateway. With private IP addresses and NAT (Network Address Translation) this will be rather difficult to do.

With IPv6, Network address translation, private addresses and dynamically allocated public IP addresses should hopefully be a thing of the past. So will IPv6 with static IP addresses be the solution to the problem or the beginning of the next one?

Public Transportation – I like it when there is a bus every 5 minutes. But every now and then you end up in places with less frequent service. So how long to wait for the next bus? Dennis over at Wap review describes a couple of interesting projects that bring the information right to your mobile phone – in some cities at least.

Dean Bubley over at Disruptive Wireless has written an interesting article describing why applications running on multi bearer mobile handsets (read GSM, UMTS, HSDPA, Wifi, UMA, Femtocells) must be aware of  which networks are available and react accordingly:

• Some bearers are not terminated in the operator network: Think local network, phones interact with local equipment such as PCs, VCRs and home appliances in general.

• Different bearer characteristics. Some bearers are fast, some are slow, some are cheap others are expensive. Applications should adapt to this.

• To access web pages and services outside the operator’s domain it’s not necessary to tunnel the IP traffic through its backbone in case several bearers are available and one gives direct access to the Internet.

A well researched article, I fully recommend to read the full piece. And a quote from it to finish:

"A lot of people don’t understand all this [the points above], particularly if they work at a mobile operator and still fervently believe that anything you do on a handset is "a service", rather than understanding that sometimes you want to do non-service activities as well."

Another week, another Carnival! This time the Carnival has stopped over at Wap Review and Denis has done an outstanding job to give an overview of the best people in the blog sphere have written on mobile topics in the past week. So if you haven’t done already, head over and enjoy!

This week, the Carnival of the Mobilists has arrived at All About Symbian. In it’s 66th edition, it’s as always a great roundup of what mobile bloggers had to say in the past week. Great job, Rafe, thanks a lot! So don’t wait and head over!

This year has started with a lot of positive creativity on the operator side in Germany and elsewhere. Examples: Affordable prepaid mobile data is now available in a number of countries (Germany, Austria, Italy for example). Also, Vodafone has introduced a €15 euro a day roaming for data on prepaid SIMs and Three has even scrapped roaming charges for mobile voice and data altogether. It seems, however, that there is also some anti-creativity on the operator side these days when it comes to inventing new fees for so far free services. As reported by Teltarif in this article, Arcor and 1&1, two Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) of Vodafone Germany, have silently put fees for incoming SMS message while roaming into their fine print. Prices for incoming SMS messages are foreseen to range between 59 cents and 1.49 euros depending on the country. Charging for incoming SMS messages will start by mid of this year.

The problem with charging for incoming SMS messages is that the user can not stop receiving SMS messages while roaming today. So if these MVNO’s really start doing this, then the least I would expect of them is to offer the possibility for the user to block incoming SMS while roaming. Also, I would expect them not to charge users for sending SMS messages which are then blocked by the receiver. Well, let’s see what happens, I am still not convinced that they will prevail with this.

I am not sure yet if this is a move intended as a threat against current activities of the EU to lower roaming charges or if this will be another nail in the roaming coffin which will inflame decision makers in the EU even more and push them to reduce roaming charges even further.

More Anti-Creativity Suggestions

It seems some operators are getting desperate these days to compensate for falling prices for voice minutes. Here are some suggestions from my side in case you need more destructive ideas for your business:

• Charge users for switching their mobiles on and off
• Charge users making a call which is never answered
• Charge users for switching voice mail or call forwarding on and off.
• Charge users for the time their mobile is switched on per day
• Charge users for mobility, i.e. charge them when they don’t leave the phone at home but instead carry it in the pocket while roaming out and about.

All these events require network interaction and all of them are recorded. No problem to forward these records to the billing server. I am getting goose bumps…

So all jokes aside dear operators. Instead of this roaming SMS anti-creativity why are you not considering some positive creativity like your competitors as shown at the beginning of this entry to increase your revenue by offering interesting services at affordable prices?