WirelessMoves

One of the things the original UMTS did not take into account were mechanisms to allow mobile devices to reduce their power consumption when they come to the conclusion that for the moment, physical connectivity to the network is no longer required. This has led to a significant reduction of battery autonomy with the rise of bursty applications such as push email. As a result, device manufacturers started to become creative with the 3GPP specs and used a mechanism referred to "Signaling Connection Release Indication" not quite as it was originally intended to cut the physical connection to the network. 3GPP then caught up and specified an enhancement of this procedure in 3GPP Release 8, which brings improvements for both mobile devices and networks over the initial non standardized solution.

So what are those enhancements and what are the benefits? I've discussed this topic at length over quite some time on this blog such as here, and I think that in combination with the Continuous Packet Connectivity features as described here, battery performance, network signaling and network capacity can be improved significantly today and in the future. As the topic is quite hotly discussed in the industry from various points of view, the GSM Association has set out to assemble a freely available technical white paper that contains a consolidated view of both network operators and manufacturers on the topic. In the 23 pages of the white paper that can be found on the GSMA website in the technical documents section, the technical background is explained in depth including the impact of other features and settings on mobile power consumption. An interesting read no matter whether you work on the mobile device side or the network side of things.

And a small disclaimer at the end: I was part of the team working on the paper and I am happy to recommend it as I in my opinion it contains a fair and balanced view in addition to all the technical details that can be found in it. Enjoy!

It's amazing at how many places I go where 3G coverage is barely available at the window of a room but not inside. The situation hasn't really changed all that much in many years. And every time I am glad I have that USB extension cable with me to put the 3G USB stick at the window while working somewhere else. Or, in case I have several devices with me requiring Internet access, the same trick helps with a 3G/Wi-Fi bridge such as this one when the power plug and the window are not in the same place…

One of the things I noted on a recent vacation was not only how many people these days use their camera phones to take pictures but also how many people are now carrying dedicated cameras again. No, not the small point and shoot ones, the big SLR type cameras, heavy as they are. Interesting that now that camera optics and software have become so good on mobile phones to replace an extra camera people are willing to carry heavy and big cameras for the extra quality (or just for the zoom and night shot capabilities?). Agreed, SLR cameras are now cheaper than ever but it doesn't make them any lighter to carry.

I've been in Rome recently for a week and I noticed that on Vodafone and TIM's 3G networks the experience on my mobile phone was quite bad. Quite often when clicking on a link the page would not load in any reasonable amount of time. When switching to their GPRS networks page load times with Opera Mini where good so my problem likely resulted from some air interface issues. On Tre's 3G network, my device performed flawlessly so they must do something different to Vodafone and TIM. To see where my problems came from I therefore decided to take a closer look at how the radio network state changes where configured. Here's the result:

TIM:

DCH timer: < 5 s
FACH timer: 75 s
Final state: idle

Vodafone:

DCH timer: < 10 s
FACH timer: 45 s
Final state: cell-pch

Wind:

DCH timer: < 3 s
FACH timer: 75 s
Final state: idle

Tre (3IT):

DCH timer: < 5 s
FACH timer: 60 s
Final state: idle

When compared to network settings in other countries such as Germany, for example, I was quite surprised about the very long FACH timers. In Germany, those timers are much shorter, and in the range of 15-20 seconds to conserve battery power in mobile devices. Beyond 30 seconds, they are a huge energy drain and really, Fast Dormancy is a mandatory self defense mechanism against such settings…

Concerning Fast Dormany, I am at a loss when it comes to Vodafone Italy's settings. Why is there a 45 seconds Cell-FACH phase when the network then transitions to Cell-PCH instead of Idle. Cell-PCH combines the advantages of low battery consumption with fast data transfer resumption with less signaling in the network to reestablish the connection so such a long Cell-FACH phase seems very unnecessary (for details see the Fast Dormancy link above).

On Wind's network I found the Cell-DCH timer of 3 seconds or perhaps even a bit less quite surprising. In practice this means that the connection frequently changes between DCH and FACH, resulting in an inferior web browsing experience, as each time the state is changed, the transmission is interrupted and packets have to be queued. I noticed this when surfing on my pad as pages loaded much slower than they usually do, especially if they contained content that took a bit of time to be downloaded. Wind as furthermore set the thresholds in a way that the DCH is not kept if only little data flows. So a default "ping" will not keep the connection in DCH state. Only a ping packet size of around 500 bytes had the desired effect. Again, I am wondering why they are doing this!? Are they having problems with the number of concurrent connections in DCH state? It surely can't be to conserve power on the UE side. Time to buy some more DCH licenses guys instead of crippling the performance of your network!

While all of this is very interesting it does not explain why web pages are often not correctly loading after pressing a link on Vodafone and TIM. I therefore suspect that it has something to do with the UE and networks having an interoperability issue when changing between the different states and/or perhaps carrier frequencies, since both have two 5 MHz carriers deployed. Difficult to tell without a deep drill down. So during my stay, Tre.it became my favorite roaming network in Italy and I am glad about manual network selection.

Quick tip of the day: If you are into classic books and want to read them on a tablet/pad/mobile you can of course always download them via one of the dedicated ebook stores and use their proprietary reader apps. But there's also an open alternative, as many of those classics are available for free in PDF or ePub format due to the expired copyright via the Project Gutenberg website. And with reader apps such as "Cool Reader" for example, I find the reading experience quite enjoyable.

A couple of weeks ago, first reports emerged that Google is in the process of offering an offline component for their great maps application. This was at first great news to me as one of the things that keeps me with Symbian is the availability of Nokia Maps and navigation that can be used in full offline mode with maps of full countries and continents downloaded to the device in advance. Anything else is simply not affordable with steep data roaming tariffs. After Google's latest maps release with offline capabilities, however, I am quite disappointed. Only strips of 10 by 10 miles can be downloaded for offline use and no car navigation is possible even within this limited area as reported by the NY times here. No good for me.

Unwired Insight recently reported about interesting projects going on at the moment for the crowd to report on cellular network coverage:

The first one is a project by the BBC to get an independent view on the network coverage of the networks in the UK. It's based on an Android App that takes coverage readings in the background and reports them back to a central server in the network.

The second project is more global in nature and is called Open Signals Maps and aims at mapping wireless coverage globally. Like the BBC approach it also uses an Android app that runs in the background. The results can be seen immediately on their website. I had a go for a number of places all over Europe I am about to go to in the next weeks and found that for each, data already exists. A great tool for travelers, especially when visiting small towns in the countryside to see if there is good 3G coverage available or only 2G and from which network operator.  Also it spares one the trouble of looking for coverage maps on individual network operator web sites, if they are available there at all.

What both approaches are not saying, however, is who the collected data belongs to? To the community reporting in or to the companies running the project?

If the data behind the maps frontend is available it might also be an interesting pool of information for national telecum regulation bodies and IT/consumer publications to compare different national networks with each other, to compare network deployments of different countries with each other, etc. etc. 

Back in 2009 I was doing a post in three parts on the LTE core network and noted that so far I did not look into the details of "Idle State Signaling Reduction (ISR)" which sounded interesting but was optional. Now it looks like Zahid over at the 3G4G wireless blog has done it for me and has produced a great writeup of how the tracking and routing area updates that happen when the UE switches from LTE to UMTS or GPRS can be reduced. Also, have a look here at what Santosh from over at "Wired and Wireless" has written about it some time ago.

ISR is good for both the UE and the network as the former does not need to spend power on location updating and the later has a reduced signaling load. In summary, ISR is activated the first time the UE moves from LTE to UMTS or GPRS and performs a routing area update. If the network is ISR capable, the context in the LTE network with the MME is kept and a new context in the UMTS/GPRS is created. Paging for incoming packets while the UE is in idle is then performed in both radio networks.

One thing I haven't yet figured out from the description is if ISR also has a CS fallback component, i.e. whether an incoming call or SMS is also paged in LTE and GPRS/UMTS. Again, something that remains to be investigated when time allows.

It's a bit strange but lately I seem to select hotels that do not have power plugs close to the bedside. Even newly renovated ones!? Another one of those must have's in hotels these days for people owning smartphones that need to be recharged over night due to constant use during daytime. My Nokia N8 has a built-in battery so I had to get an external rechargeable battery for days with heavy use while on the go. I seldom use it for this purpose as the battery usually lasts and I always saw it as a disadvantage to just carrying a spare battery to be inserted when the need arose. But lately, with no power socket being found close by over night, the external rechargeable battery has become the ideal solution. Recharge the phone with the external battery over night and recharge the external battery somewhere else during daytime. Interesting lesson that what is first perceived as a disadvantage can turn into the opposite.