A note today for those who wonder what kind of chipset is working in their Nokia Nseries or Internet Tablet. According to here and here, Nokia uses th Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 platform for a wide variety of their high end devices. The specs of the chipset are quite impressive. An ARM-11 CPU clocked at 330+ MHz, 2D/3G graphics booster, built in MPEG en/decoder and direct external interfaces for just about any functionality you could wish for on a mobile device. And the next generation of OMAP chipsets is just around the corner. OMAP 34xx chipsets will push beyond clock rates of 500 MHz with a processor speedup due to enhanced superscalarity of 2-3 times compared to the current generation, support cameras of up to 12 megapixels, hardware support for full DVD video quality en/decoding, etc. etc. Now translate that into next generation Nokia devices and you get a feeling for what you will have in your hands in 2 years time.
TWIN: Neuf Starts Voice Service over GSM / Wifi
Neuf Telecom, an ADSL and fiber Internet service provider in France has started a fixed line voice service replacement offer via GSM and Wifi enabled phones. The difference to UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Acccess) services that use Wifi/ADSL to connect back to the wireless network, their solution is a true VoIP over Wifi solution, (probably) using naked SIP over Wifi. For the GSM part of their service they use SFR’s mobile network. For them, UMA does not make sense as they are a fixed line operator and do not have a mobile network. According to their FAQ, voice calls initiated over a Wifi network to fixed line numbers in France and a number of other countries are included in the monthly subscription fee. Further, the FAQ says the mobile can be reached both at home and outside via it’s mobile number but doesn’t mention anything about being reachable with a fixed line number while attached to Wifi. So it looks like VoIP over Wifi is only used for outgoing calls for the moment. Let’s see if they are bold enough to add Voice Call Continuity (VCC) to their offer to allow seamless roaming between GSM and Wifi and a fixed line number to be reachable for an acceptable price. Unlike most UMA services that can just make use of Wifi access points allowed by the network operator this solution works over any Wifi access point that has been configured in the phone, i.e. also from abroad. Very nice! I’d like to get one of those phones into my hands to see how well the integration of the service has been made into the GSM phones they offer for the service.
Current LTE Mobile Device Form Factor
Last year, LTE mobile devices where still the of the size of a cabinet. At this year’s 3GSM / Mobile World Congress the hardware has now shrunken to the size of a PC motherboard. The picture on the left shows a LTE mobile with 2×2 MIMO from LTE which was used to stream several videos at a speed of 30+ MBit/s via a LTE prototype base station supplied by Nortel. So by next year we should see first PC-card prototypes. Things are moving ahead.
TelecomTV coverage of the Mobile World Congress
In case you haven’t made it to Barcelona for this year’s 3GSM / Mobile World Congress or in case you would like to see what you have not seen while being there, Telecom TV has put the shows they produced during the event on the web. Here’s the wrap up of day four:
As reported last week I also very much enjoyed the CTO panel which I watched live. For all their other productions during the MWC take a look here.
The 3GSM Gem in Barcelona: Intel and Motorola’s Live WiMAX network
I had to hold back with this blog entry a bit because I wanted to get permission first to write about what I would say was the most interesting demo I’ve been invited to during the 3GSM / Mobile World Congress:
Lots of WiMAX demos where shown at this years congress and it’s good to see that 802.16e mobile devices have now reached PC-card card sizes and are close to general availability. It’s also nice to see that when the antenna is just a couple of meters away you can see data rates beyond 10 MBit/s. However, that tells you only little about how the system performs in practice when the base station antenna is a couple of blocks away on top of a building and there is interference from neighboring base stations. To go the extra step, Intel and Motorola have teamed up to show how their kit works in a real environment during this years show.
Network Setup
In just a few days, Intel has put up four Motorola WiMAX base stations on rooftops in central Barcelona which were connected to the core network via 50 MBit/s microwave backhaul equipment from Dragonwave. Each base station was equipped with 3 sectors, each on its own 10 MHz channel in the 2.5 GHz band. In total they had three channels available for the network so each base station used the same set of frequencies. The distance between the base stations was about 2 kilometers which is a bit more then what you would see in an inner city network deployment. They couldn’t choose the sites themselves and had to be happy with what they got. On the upside, there is less interference from neighboring cells then there would be in a public network since there were only 4 cells and thus there is no interference from cells further away.
Indoor Experience
Sitting comfortably in the lobby of a hotel in Central Barcelona, I first had a chat with the technical project manager responsible for the network setup. Very good to have somebody with a technical background to talk to. During our discussion I got a first impression of the network performance as there were two notebooks connected to the network, one via a WiMAX PC-card adapter and the other via a CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) box the size of a DSL or cable modem. Despite sitting in the ground floor lobby, the base station being a couple of rooftops away on the other side of the hotel, the probably heat insulated and RF absorbing windows and just using the built in antennas of the devices we still got a data rate exceeding 2 MBit/s via both the CPE and the PC-card adapter. Note that both were SISO (Single Input Single Output) devices. As even this speed is far beyond what you can make use of while surfing the web we streamed a couple of video streams being sent live from WiMAX connected vehicles touring the city. The resolution of the stream was around 320×240 pixels and with a frame rate of 30 fps and the video streams were crisp and clear. One of the notebooks also had an engineering monitor software package on it to observe lower layer performance of the PC card and it was interesting to see how the card goes through the different modulation and coding schemes from QPSK to 64-QAM as reception conditions changed.
Outdoor Experience
Later on we went outside and used Segways to speed up and down the streets with a notebook attached to it to see how the network copes with mobility. Again the video stream performance was flawless and we streamed a U.S. TV station over the Internet which is quite bandwidth hungry. But even this does not require a bandwidth beyond 5 MBit/s which was obviously not the limit of the network. When asked what the highest throughput is that can be observed in the network I was told that it is around 13 MBit/s with 64-QAM and about 1.5 MBit/s at the cell edge with QPSK ½ modulation and coding despite the fact that the cells are too far away from each other. Interesting numbers showing the direction in which we are headed once 2×2 MIMO is added and proper cell sizes are used.
Here’s a video taken and produced by Marc Wallis and Michael Ambjorn of Intel/Motorola respectively:
(copyright by M. Wallis / M. Ambjorn of Intel/Motorola)
Conclusion
I came away very impressed from the demo as the speeds were amazing. We didn’t loose the connection to the network even once during the one and a half hours sitting in the hotel and touring the city. That says a lot about the software stability of the PC-card and the network. Thanks a lot to Intel for the VIP tour invitation it was definitely the best demo I have seen during the Congress.
3GSM / MWC : That’s it for this year
After four days of hyper-blogging from the Mobile World Congress I am both sad and happy that the show is over now. Well, at least for this year. Time to take a break. I hope you enjoyed the posts. Normal programming resumes over the weekend.
3GSM / MWC : Ovi Share
Ovi’s going to be a lot of things for Nokia in the future. During the congress, I’ve been looking at Ovi Share, one of the first Ovi applications, to see what the difference is to using Shozu to upload to Flickr, YouTube, etc. What Ovi does is to combine all of those services as it let’s you upload all kinds of content from pictures, videos to PDF files to Ovi to share with others. The S60 Ovi client syncs with the portal and knows the groups that have previsously been created to share content with predefined user groups or the public. Also, the client can grab recent uploads of friends and show thumbnails of their new pictures, etc. right on the phone. Very nice integration into the S60 platform. I was also quite impressed with the AJAX implementation on the desktop. Very smooth user interface to view pictures and videos and add information to uploaded material. Forwading content to other people via eMail and the like is also possible. If the Ovi Share client runs on my N93 I’ll create an account once I am back home. Could become my new content home.
3GSM / MWC : Quad Band HSPA is no longer enough
I’ll leave it up for others to judge if it has been a smart move of Sony-Ericsson to use Microsoft Mobile along UIQ as an OS for their high end phones. So I have a different pitch for this story: When browsing the specs of their new Windows OS Experia X1 phone I noticed that it will come in two hardware versions: One supporting HSPA in the 850/1700/1900/2100 MHz bands and another one in the 900/1700/1900/2100 bands. The first variant is probably targeted at the US and Australian market since they have networks in the 850 and 1900 MHz bands and that one odd HSPA network of T-Mobile in 1700 MHz. The 2100 Mhz is for roaming. The second variant seems to address the European market where we might see UMTS migrating to the 900 Mhz band soon beyond the first network in Finland using this frequency. So while I am happy to see quad band HSPA support coming soon I have the feeling that the story does not end here.
3GSM / MWC : HP integrates Gobi Chipset for Worldwide Roaming
I am an international traveler so Internet access anytime anywhere no matter where I am is of grate importance to me. I am glad to see that there are now chipset solutions on the market which integrate CDMA and UMTS in a single chip for notebooks. I’ve spoken to Regine Pohl of HP during the congress about this as HP has integrated Qualcomm’s Gobi platform in some of their business notebooks. For HP the advantage is that they can use the same chipset for all their notebooks worldwide while the user benefits from global seamless access no matter of the network technology. The chipset, however, is only one part of the equation, roaming agreements and affordable roaming tarrifs another. To this end, Regine said that HP is in contact with mobile operators to not only offer notebooks to their customers but also customized global access solutions. I am looking forward to this initiative to bear fruits.
3GSM / MWC : The Position of the Phone has Changed
Today I noticed an interesting shift in mobile phone usage behavior at the congress. Despite the mobile Internet being evangelized in the past years by many, most people still had their phone at their ears for making phone calls. This year when I look around the majority of people at the event have the phone in their hands to check eMail and browse the web. Good to see that it’s finally happening on a larger scale.