WirelessMoves

It has been good to meet with John Edwards of picoChip at congress with whom I’ll be holding the WiMAX course at the University of Oxford later this year together with Chris Beardsmore of Intel. Since my scope of interest in wireless ranges from layer one to the application on the top I very much enjoyed to see picoChip’s latest chip for LTE and WiMAX base stations in action. While others use Asics for the lower layer protocol handling and decoding, picoChip has designed their own chip with an ARM 9 processor and their own DSP to do the job more flexibly. The ARM processor used for the higher levels of the protocol stack runs Linux and the chip is used both for WiMAX and LTE. Looks like their solution has become quite popular as their WiMAX implementation has been chosen by testing houses as the reference design all other WiMAX companies have to test against. Chris allowed me to take a picture of their base station reference board and you can find it in my 3GSM Flickr stream on the right of the page.

It looks like somebody at HP has noticed that I think and write a lot about mobile network infrastructure so I was invited to a number of interviews with key people managing HP products for mobile network operators. One striking thought I had during the discussion with Peter Dragunas of HP was that I need to turn my view on how telcom operators and web 2.0 companies could work together totally upside down. So far I was always arguing that the relationship between the two parties is difficult at best as Web 2.0 companies go for the global audience while network operators usually only have a national view. Dealing with hundreds of mobile network operators to bring their applications to mobile is a difficult task at best that few Internet companies will try to undertake. But what if the network operators went out and created services to link their assets to Web 2.0 applications instead of the other way around? Peter gave me a practical example: Telecom Italia Mobile has created an application with HP’s help that allows people in SecondLife to get a virtual mobile phone in their virtual TIM store and then send and receive SMS and potentially also voice calls between virtual phones and phones in the real world. Quite a fascianting applicatio and it’s easy to see how TIM can make revenue with the service. Peter could not say whether the idea came from TIM or SecondLife in the first place but I think it’s a good role model for other wireless operators to think about (mobile) web 2.0.

Anyone out there with other examples of how mobile operators reach out to the web 2.0 world?

Things happen fast here in Barcelona. The Mobile Jam Session was just over and I was already on the bus to spend the evening with friends and fellow bloggers at the S60 reception in the evening. Thanks to Jan Bonnevier to talk with me about Ovi, I am going to check out the first fruits of your work at the Nokia booth today. It was also great to meet a couple of fellow bloggers from the U.S. who’ve made it to 3GSM for the first time this year, in particular Amir and Darla Mack. Lots of good discussions around mobiles, blogging and U.S. customs. Stefan, great to meet you there two, let’s increase the word count beyond 5 the next time 😉 A perfect event for relaxing after a busy day. A big thanks to the S60 team!

A bit of self advertising today as it`s always good to meet with Wiley, my publisher, at the congress to see how the book sales are doing and to take a look at the latest titles that have just been released. If you need to get an overview of different wireless technologies then I of course recommend you to pick up a copy of my book in the local book store, at Amazon or in any other online book store. To find out about the details of a specific system such as WiMAX or LTE there are a number of specialized books on these topics now. The book on LTE is written by Pierre Lescuyer whom I have known for a long time since we`ve been working in the same company for some time and it`s great to see Pierre has come up with another book.

I haven’t seen a lot of the 3GSM exhibition itself yet because there are a lot of things happening besides the congress and there are lots of interesting people to meet. Tuesday afternoon was the Mobile Jam Session and I am really glad I went to the event. Targeted at mobile developers the format was great to discuss the latest and greatest ideas and problems of mobile developers alike. I got many of my questions answered and got lots of good input.

One interesting thought I took away from the session which developed while we were discussing different User Interface approaches of Apple and the rest of the mobile industry is the relationship between operators and Apple vs. operators and Nokia: The Apple brand has a lot of marketing power and Appel had nothing to loose in the mobile space. This way they have managed nugging network operators into becoming a bit pipe for them and on top even share the revenue they make as a bit pipe with them. Nokia on the other hand is also a powerful brand but they make their money with selling handsets to operators and not so much by directly selling them to the customer. Consequently their handle on operators to do something new and bold was pretty much restricted. So it was good Apple came in and broke the ice.

But maybe mobile network operators felt that the iPhone was good for them because of it’s restrictions. Think what the data consumption with a Nokia Nseries phone would be if it were sold at the same conditions by mobile operators as the iPhone. Suddenly you have all those cool applications in addition to browsing and eMailing…

Anyway, just one of many interesting thoughts developing during the event. Thanks to Caroline and Rudy for organizing the event, I very much enjoyed it.

Also thanks to Peter for explaining soviet style tactics of mobile operators. Well, that’s for another post.

While at last years show HSPA functionality was not to be found on handsets except for the very high end mobile phones such as the N95, 3.5G connectivity has made it to mainstream handsets this year. A good example is the very small and light Sony-Ericssons K660 phone which is definitely targeted at the mass market.

Wifi still seems to be in the domain of high end handsets but it’s moving down the chain, too as it’s now being incuded in all Nokia Nseries handsets appearing on the market.

The 3GSM has it’s own television channel here at the fair. One of their programs, the CTO pannel caught my attention since it featured the CTOs of HP, Telefonica and Nortel and I find technical discussions a lot more interesting than CEOs talking about numbers. John Roese, CTO of Nortel said that CAPEX and OPEX are not half as important today than speed. If you are late with a product by 12 months, he said, it doesn’t matter how cheap it is, it’s already too late. Good point. The other CTO’s agreed and the HP CTO called this ‘moving at web speed’. Interesting picture he draws there, I like the comparison. From my point of view turning companies with tens of thousands of employees into a different direction at web speed requires a lot of power. Imagine how a turn of a supertanker looks like vs. the agility of a yacht.

I fell being set back in time at least 6 or 7 years these days as far as wireless data connectivity is concerned. Last year I picked up a Yoigo prepaid SIM in Madrid as they offer an affordable daily rate for data connectivity with their 3G network. Even back then I noticed that the network is quite slow and a high packet drop rate was greatly impacting web browsing experience. Now, half a year later and back in Barcelona things have even gotten worse. Since I arrived last Thursday the network keeps crashing and is unavailable for hours. How is this possible? What kind of gear are they using? What kind of service agreement do they have? Note that this is not a NETWORK TECHNOLOGY issue as other networks keep performing fine. This is purely a Yoigo thing. If coverage is not back within the hour I’ll put my Vodafone SIM card back in the mobile and life with the 15 euros a day rate for Internet access. Let’s hope that nobody with a Yoigo SIM card reports that the 3G networks in Barcelona are not capable of handling the load because one company can’t get it right.

It’s good to see Intel being so outspoken about WiMAX and the mobile Internet this year. Their booth in the main hall has a lot of WiMAX demos and they have a working multi base station network deploayed in Barcelona for demos. Looking forward to test the network with some real devices on Thursday. At the Intel party last night I had the opportunity to talk to Chris Beardsmore of Intel with whom I will hold the WiMAX course at Oxford university later this year. He says that in the last 18 months, he’s been super busy flying to all those future WiMAX operators in Europe to discuss Intel’s plans for WiMAX with them. He told me that he finds it very statisfactory to see WiMAX growing up from infancy to the launches that are happening now. During the event, an Intel VP also showed the combined Wifi / WiMAX chip for notebooks. Good stuff, hope they’ll put that into lots of notebooks soon to create a critical mass.

So here I am at the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards listening to 3 minute presentations of startups being selected in a lot of different Mobile Monday cities around the world to present their idea here in Barcelona.

To me, most concepts seem to be too complex to be understandably presented in 3 minutes as I have difficulties following some concepts let alone become excited about them. But there are some exceptions which I can connect with instantly. My favourite startup idea of the afternoon is from Sentry Wireless in Ireland. They have developed a SIM card application called KidSafe which screens incoming SMS and voice calls and only allows those to go through that have been preapproved before. This way parents can protect their kids from unsolicited SMS and phone calls from strangers who have picked up their kids phone number from who knows where. A great extension to products for kids to safely surf the web on PCs. Since the solution is SIM card based it will work with any phone. The approval process is done directly via the phone ‘s menu so no complex web setup or over the air provisioning is required. Good news for parents who at some point have to give that mobile phone to their youngsters.

For pictures of the event click on the Flickr bar on the right of the page.