The Nokia N95 8GB: 18 Months Of ‘Naked-SIP’ Improvement

Back in 2006, I reported about my pretty modest VoIP over Wifi experience with the UTStarcom F1000G. At the time, I had four major issues which is why the phone went right back into the box and hasn’t left it since:

  • Voice quality was bad.
  • It would only work with some Wifi access points.
  • Voice quality started to deteriorate quickly when moving away from the Wifi access point. Practical use of the phone was limited to a few meters around the access point.
  • The software was not very stable and the device frequently lost the network and didn’t log back on.

Now, one and a half years later, I have picked up a Nokia N95 to replace my N93, mainly because the N93’s amount of memory can no longer handle the myriad of applications I use. There are many nice extras I have discovered since and one of the major ones is the integrated VoIP client. I have to admit that I was not expecting too much due to my prior experience. However, after testing it out I have to say I am very impressed!

The Good Things

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As I am already using VoIP with Internet based VoIP provider SIPgate and a Siemens Gigaset DECT to IP phone, the SIP configuration wasn’t very difficult for me and SIPgate has a very detailed description on how to configure the N95. After exiting the configuration dialog the phone automatically establishes a Wifi connection and registers with the SIP server on the Internet. Once registration is successful, a little telephone receiver icon above a globe is shown on the right of the idle screen (see Figure 1).

Once the VoIP client is registered, the user has the choice to place a standard cellular call or the use the VoIP functionality whenever dialing a phone number or when selecting a contact from the address book. In both cases, the call is established over VoIP by selecting ‘Internet Call’ in the options menu instead of "Voice Call"(see Figure 2).

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In terms of voice quality I am very impressed, it is the best I have experienced so far  and I am not able to tell the difference between a VoIP and a cellular call to a fixed line phone. Very impressive! Also, the stability of the implementation is great. The longest call I have used the phone for so far was 90 minutes and I can not recall a single glitch during the time. The handset gets slightly warm over time but that is not really a problem.

Another nice and very important feature is that when you leave the coverage area of the Wifi access point and later come back, the SIP client detects that the Wifi network is available again and automatically re-connects to the SIP server. That’s great since I, and probably most other people , would be too lazy to manually restart the VoIP client when coming home. I have used the SIP client for about 2 weeks now and during that time I have extensively tested incoming and outgoing calls. Both work flawlessly and the N95 has now fully replaced my DECT phone. Also, Wifi sensitivity is a lot better compared to the N93 and especially to the F1000G. Voice quality is still excellent in neighboring rooms where both the N93 and the F1000G have given up before.

Sipcall
Being connected to the Wifi hotspot all day long must have some impact on the battery, or so I thought. In practice, however, it doesn’t seem to be much, the battery easily lasts a full day no matter whether the phone is connected to Wifi all day or not. Talk time is also acceptable. After a 90 minutes phone call, the battery was still about half full which is good enough for my purposes. Figure 3 on the left shows how a VoIP call is indicated to the user during the call establishment phase. The little "open lock" probably indicates that the call is not encrypted, which is the default with SIP. I tried activating security in the configuration but my SIP provider does not seem to support this on his voice gateway.

Some Things That Still Need Some Improvement

Nothing is perfect in this world so there are also few things in the N95’s SIP implementation which could be improved in the next software release. Since I am a bit of a traveler I split my time between Germany and France. In both places I have a Siemens Gigaset Access Point but with different software versions since France and Germany use different annexes of the ADSL standard. Strangely enough, the N95’s SIP client works great in Germany but always delays outgoing calls by exactly 30 seconds in France. After those 30 seconds everything works all right and voice quality is excellent. All that is different is the software version of the access point. I still can’t explain why this is happening but it is reproducible. It can’t be the DSL provider since my DECT to SIP phone works fine with the same SIP provider. Incoming calls work flawlessly.

Some minor details which could also be improved is the seamless integration with the rest of the phone functionality. A call received over Wifi can not be returned over the cellular network straight from the menu. Instead, the number has to be dialed manually or taken out of the address book. Also, the VoIP functionality is not yet fully integrated into the profiles functionality yet. I have a profile which only lets the phone ring when certain people call. This works well when I receive such calls via the cellular network. When I receive them over the Internet though, the calls are are only silently alerted when in this mode. Small details I can live with for the moment.

Summary

I think the N95 8GB shows very impressively where VoIP over Wifi is headed. In day to day use, VoIP calls don’t feel any different compared to standard cellular calls, while, of course, the Wifi coverage area is not left. Potentially, the VoIP client can also be used over a 3G connection but I haven’t tried that yet. Maturing VoIP integration in 3G handsets is also good news for LTE and WiMAX which both require some form of VoIP on mobile devices since there is no longer a circuit switched core network dedicated to voice calls. Nokia shows impressively that the software stack is ready.

Intel Announces Centrino 2 With Optional WiMAX Support

According to Teltarif and the Intel website, Intel will soon launch a new version of their Centrino notebook chipset under the name of "Centrino 2". The Centrino 2 platform will be sold with two different wireless chips: "Shirley Peak" will be the default standard 802.11agn Wifi module. Alternatively a combined Wifi / WiMAX chip named "Echo Peak" brings WiMAX connectivity as part of the chipset but will likely be a bit more expensive than the Wifi only module.

I am a bit disappointed that Intel didn’t have the guts to ship WiMAX as a standard feature with their next generation notebook chipset. It would surely have helped to push WiMAX a lot more. So the question is now how much the price difference is between Shirely and Echo. Let’s hope it is small enough to encourage companies to use it as a differentiator.

Location: Another Diminishing Opportunity for Mobile Operators

Location based services have been the holy grail in mobile for at least half a decade now and I wonder what hasn’t been proposed to mobile operators over the past years from standardized Mobile Location Centers to A-GPS assistance their network could supply to mobile devices? Yet, they haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it, or more precisely how to monetize it, except for a applications such as location based pricing of voice calls, which do not require interaction with any equipment outside their own network.

When looking at current high end mobile devices from Nokia and others on the market, they all include GPS chips now and thus no longer require network operators for acquiring location information for them. The current generation of GPS chips require about 20 seconds to get a first position fix which is already good enough for many applications. With a server in the Internet that supplies the location of all GPS satellites to the GPS chip, this time is reduced to around 5 seconds, which is almost instantaneous from a user perspective. The only piece in the value chain the mobile operator is thus still required for is to connect the device to the server on the Internet.

According to a Sirf representative at the recent Mobile World Congress, the mobile only requests satellite position information from the network without sending any information such as a cell-id that could give away the approximate location of the device. Further according to Sirf, network based A-GPS assistance that sends satellite position information to a device could speed up the process to reach first time to fix times of less than a second. However, I think it is unlikely that mobile network operators will ever do this and a delay of around 5 seconds is short enough for a good user experience anyway.

So the room to maneuver for mobile operators in the location domain is getting small these days. But would it have made a difference if they’ve had another 5 years of time to work on this topic? Outside players on the other hand already put the emerging GPS capabilities to good use. Nokia Maps, Google Maps, etc. etc. have come from nowhere in the past 12 months and now offer positioning, car and pedestrian navigation, recommendation, finding point of interests, city guides, location dependent search, etc. etc.

Another holy grail, location based mobile advertising, however, is still a niche that offers lots of opportunities for network operators as network based location information is an important key. A company active in this space is Seekerwireless, and I leave you with a link to their site to explore further.

Java and BREW

Every now and then I stumble over BREW, an API for third party applicatins on mobile phones. Since it seems to be mostly implementend in CDMA phones in the U.S., I haven’t come into personal contact with it and thus always wondered what the difference is to Java ME. After doing some research it looks to me like they have one thing in common: They both offer a cross device environment to programs. Apart from this, however, there don’t seem to be many similarities. BREW supports several programing languages including Java (but with a different API from Jave ME) and C++. While programs developed with Java ME can be distributed without the consent of the operator, BREW applications need to be certified and can only be distributed by the operator. So the business model for developers is quite different since they need to make a deal with each network operator they want to deploy their application with. In addition, network operators have no obligation to distribute a program, so developers and users are at the full mercy of the operator. To me that does not only look like a walled garden but more like a closed fortress. An environment with a future?

Vodafone To Trial Image Recognition Search

While waiting for the train this morning I read on Intomobile (sorry, can’t provide the link when moblogging) that Vodafone Germany will start an image recognition search trial in cooperation with news tabloid “Bild”. Readers can get more information on specially tagged articles (and maybe advertisments) by taking a picture and sending it to a Vodafone image recognition server. The server analyzes the picture and returns the requested information (I assume by MMS). That sounds very much like the technology from Barcelona based company DAEM Interactive. If that’s you, well done and lots of success! For the sake of the project I hope Vodafone thinks a bit about pricing before launching the project. The standard price of 39 euro cents for an MMS would be a major showstopper.

The “Battle” Between WiMAX and LTE is Overhyped

Lately, analysts and tech news web sites race to publish posts about WiMAX quickly loosing ground to LTE, as vendors seem to increase their efforts to push LTE out the door sooner. I have to admit I am a bit puzzled as I don’t see anything like that happening .

Here’s why:

Time to market advantage: It is claimed that the WiMAX time to market advantage is fading since efforts for LTE are stepped up. That’s a typical Gartner’s hype cycle curve thing. About a year or two ago, WiMAX was the hype and nobody cared that no matter what the marketing people said it’s normal for a system to take several years from hype to actual deployment. When it came to delivering on the promises it happened what always happens, they had to admit they were not ready yet. It has happened with GSM, it has happened with GPRS, it has happened with UMTS and it will happen again with LTE. Now LTE has hit that spot in the curve and everybody is predicting the same thing as for WiMAX: Trials and deployments are imminent. Give it another 6 months and everybody suddenly sees that marketing and reality are, as always, far apart from each other. And if you don’t believe it yet, take a look at current LTE "mobiles" and compare that to available WiMAX PC-cards and existing networks.

Different markets: The markets for LTE and WiMAX are very different. No GSM/UMTS operator has ever seriously considered going to WiMAX, despite ramblings by Arun Sarin and a few others which in my opinion were only made to push LTE vendors a bit to speed up standards work. The only serious competition WiMAX can create for LTE with established network operators is in the CDMA arena were operators,such as Sprint, that haven’t decided to go to HSPA and are thus in need of a 4G system. In my opinion, WiMAX is the choice for new network operators to challenge the incumbents. And there is not much of a chance such new operators would start with LTE, that turf is in the hand of WiMAX.

Market size: I think most analysts have agreed for quite a while now that the market size for LTE is bigger than that for WiMAX. Not much of a surprise here either.

So I really don’t quite understand the fuzz. What do you think?

T-Mobile And The Asus eeePC

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At the CeBIT kick-off press conference today, T-Mobile Germany and Asus announced an interesting cooperation: T-Mobile will start selling the eeePC in Germany and Austria with access to their Wifi and 3G networks. The 3G offer will include an HSPA USB stick. I’ve just recently bought an eeePC myself and time will tell how often it will be preferred over taking a full notebook with me. But I think chances are fairly high since it nicely fits into a bag and weighs almost nothing compared to the notebook.

For those who prefer using their mobile phone as a 3G "modem" for the eeePC (like me) instead of being locked to a single operator, here’s a link that explains how to do this as well. I tried with an N95, a Nokia 6680 and a Motorola V3xx and they all worked fine.

Opera Mini Statistics

Interesting numbers I’ve been given during the MWC in Barcelona last week: To date, the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones has been download 35 million times. Currently, the browser is downloaded 100.000 times a day! According to Opera, their Transcoding Servers for Opera Mini serves about 1.5 billion pages a month. They estimate that the total traffic going to their servers represents around 25% of the total Internet traffic of Norway, the home country of opera. Despite Norway only being a small country it says a lot about the quick evolution of accessing the web from mobile devices.

The Dangers of Going SIM-Less

Dean Bubley over at the Disruptive Analysis Blog has published an interesting post about the advantages of going SIM-less for next generation connected mobile devices. In essence he argues that today, SIM cards lock users to a single operator and complicate using the device in other networks, locally or abroad. He comes to the conclusion that SIM-less mobile devices are better because users then have control which networks they want to use. While I agree with his arguments, I think there are many ways for operators to deal with SIM-less devices today. It is therefore by no means certain that a device without a SIM gives a greater choice to the user.

When I look at the status quo, SIM-less devices give users much less freedom of choice than devices with SIM cards. The best example are CDMA networks, mostly used in the U.S. Here, devices have no SIM cards and are locked by default to a single operator. Using the device with other networks is not possible and when roaming, users can not use a local SIM card to reduce their costs. Switching local operators is also not possible with the device since it can only be used in one network. And finally, mobile phones can only be bought directly from an operator, so there is no competition and hence prices are unlikely to be very competitive. This approach also gives mobile operators a great degree of freedom to lock handsets down by removing VoIP, Bluetooth and Wifi capabilities that have become very popular on devices which are not locked down to the operator. In short, such a SIM-less world is far from desirable.

So while I think Dean makes some important points I am actually quite happy that the GSM standard uses SIM cards. Here are some examples of what is possible if only the SIM card belongs to an operator while the mobile device belongs to the user:

  • Voice Competition: Germany, for example, has become a very competitive MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) market and prices for prepaid communication have come down over the past two years from 60 Euro cents a minute down to 9 cents or even less. MVNOs basically only sell a SIM card and users just put them into the phone they already have. If there is a better offer and the current MVNO does not adapt, his SIM card is quickly replaced. Great for competition!
  • Data Competition: The same applies for prepaid mobile data. If the network coverage is bad or if prices are not competitive, the device can be quickly used with another operator or network by simply exchanging the SIM card.
  • Roaming: When I go abroad I usually use a local SIM card because data charges when roaming are still ridiculously expensive. Granted, it is sometimes not convenient to get a local SIM card but if you stay abroad for more than just a day there is a quick return on investment.
  • Handset prices: Today I have several choices when I want to buy a new phone: I go to the operator to get a bundle, I go to an electronics store and get a bundle, or I go to one of many online stores and just get a phone. Then I go to the next supermarket, buy a SIM card and I am set. This has had a significant effect on handset prices. Let me give you a recent example: In operator shops, an N95 is currently available for 250 Euros if taken with a 24 month subscription with a basic fee between 10 and 20 Euros a month. I can get the same mobile with the same terms and conditions for 1 euro in most electronic stores today which are not related with the network operator. In addition, the phone is usually not locked down to an operator specific software version with crippeld VoIP and other niceties. And if I don’t want it with a SIM card at all I buy it for 450 euros but without a 10-20 euros a month fee and it becomes even cheaper if you calculate the costs over 2 years. There’s no way of doing that with a SIM-less device with the current model.

So in order for users to benefit from SIM-less devices, a number of additional things need to be in place:

  • Location of the certificate server: WiMAX devices are unlikely to use SIM cards from what I hear at the moment. Instead they will use built in or user loadable certificates. The important point is who issues those certificates. If they are issued by a mobile operator, then the user is stuck to one network. This is the same as the current CDMA approach. Therefore, I hope that there will also be certificates issued by an independent certificate authority. When establishing a connection the network would then have to verify the user’s credential with an external certificate authority.
  • Networks using external certificate servers: The best external certificate server is of no use if networks only use internal servers. Hopefully competition will prevent this scenario as most network operators are probably happy to get additional revenue from national and international roamers.

In practice I can see networks using both internal and external certificate servers. This would allow the operator to sell devices which are locked to his network and to his control while roaming in exchange for a device subsidy. At the same time users would have the freedom to buy a device with an "open" certificate they could use in any network. They would then have the choice to pay per use, similar to the hotspot model today, or to get a subscription with an operator without being locked in.

Summary

Going SIM-less with WiMAX and other systems is a double bladed sword. If authentication is not "open", we will end up in a situation similarly to what we can observe with CDMA operators today: Users and devices are locked to a single network instead of having a greater choice. While some operators would surely prefer a "closed" authentication solution I think it would do great harm not only to users but also to the industry as it reduces competition among network operators, keeps prices up, and reduces attractiveness for users to go wireless.