MY REVEAL - CELLULAR

Everything to play for

2008-03-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

By Mike Hibberd

Head to head technology battles are familiar territory in the wireless industry. Even today, if you listen carefully, you can still hear voices expounding the technical benefits of CDMA over GSM. Never mind that GSM (and its ‘family’ of standards) enjoys around 80 per cent of the world market, rendering the rallying cry futile – competing technologies are lobbied for at great expense and with considerable passion.

The great GSM/CDMA battle may have died out now – not least because the GSM community’s evolutionary process took it onto a variant of CDMA anyway – but that doesn’t mean the industry has seen its last technology tussle.

Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin was trying to motivate both the operator and vendor community during his speech at the 3GSM World Congress a year ago, when he warned that LTE (The 3GPP’s Long Term Evolution plan for cellular access) risked losing a time to market battle with mobile WiMAX. “LTE is still at the standards stage, while WiMAX is a commercial reality,” said Sarin. Whatever his motivation, Sarin framed the situation in competitive terms.

WiMAX has emerged as a fixed wireless solution but the companies behind the technology – represented by the WiMAX Forum – are keen to push the 802.16e mobile version of the standard. Cellular players may have their data demand covered with HSPA or EVDO (depending on their location) for now. But the time will come when some will have to upgrade to an OFDM technology, which will involve a new network deployment. And then they will be faced with options.

For every industry voice that talks up the face off between technologies, though, there is usually a counterpoint. These solutions are complementary, not competitive, according to this alternative perspective. And this is the first problem in trying to ascertain how WiMAX and LTE might fare relative to one another: not everybody wants to see the situation defined as a choice between the two.

Kerl Haslam, chairman of the Mobile WiMAX Acceleration Group – a UK collaboration founded by Nortel – sits squarely in this category. “Everybody within the action group’s view is that the two technologies are complementary,” he says. Margaret Rice-Jones, chief executive officer of Aircom is not alone, meanwhile, when she says “yes and no” when asked if the two technologies are in competition.

Steve Pusey, global CTO of Vodafone, which plays in more markets than any other mobile operator, believes the two technologies will ultimately converge. “If you look at it, they’re basically the same,” he says. “What’s the foundation of LTE and WiMAX? OFDM as a modulation technique is the biggest step, and the use of MIMO antennas. More likely than competition, you’ll see convergence.”

The two technologies do have separate conceptual beginnings. LTE is designed to offer a cellular service with great enhanced data rates, while WiMAX is a broadband technology looking for an inroad to mobility. It had to be conceived differently to LTE, according to its proponents, because it needed its own USP.

The WiMAX Forum’s world view sees WiMAX as much more than just a way for people to access the internet. Intel’s vision is that there will be a WiMAX chip in all manner of consumer devices: cameras, camcorders, games consoles, mp3 players, cars, pretty much anything one might think of. From this perspective, and by comparison, LTE is anchored in the handset play that has been the mobile industry’s historical sphere of operation.

But the two technologies are destined for competition in one sense because each is being positioned to move into the other’s space. Just as it is hoped that WiMAX can deliver enhanced mobility, LTE is envisioned as a means of broadband access provision as well as a mobile technology.

Paul Senior, CTO of Airspan Networks, was a founder member of the WiMAX Forum, and still participates as a member of the organisation’s Marketing Working Group. While he says that Airspan will respond to market demand in terms of technology, the firm is a big backer of WiMAX technology. “This is definitely a competitive technology to LTE,” he says.

What WiMAX clearly is not, however, is a competitor to HSPA. One of its proponents’ favoured campaign cries is that it has a time to market advantage over LTE. But even the evangelists concede that there’s no turning the head of the GSM-family players just yet. “Everybody that jumped on the [WCDMA] 3G bandwagon has HSPA in front of them,” says Senior. “They’ve made too much investment to make the switch from CDMA in 2008.”

So, what is the timeframe? The WiMAX community suffered a blow last year when its flagship deployment – planned as a joint effort by US carriers Sprint and Clearwire – stalled when the two firms parted company. Gary Forsee, Sprint’s CEO and a major champion of the firm’s plans for Xohm, its mobile WiMAX offering, left the company in the wake of these developments. What was supposed to have been the whole community’s triumphal moment of 2007 was put on hold.

This year will therefore be crucial for the WiMAX camp. Both Sprint and Clearwire have indicated they are keen to continue developing services based on the technology and the success of Sprint in particular will be scrutinised as bellwether. Sprint recently claimed it was on track to launch commercial services in April this year [2008].

Elsewhere, the Forum estimates that some 300 operators in 65 countries have run – or are running – pilots and trials of mobile WiMAX. As 2007 drew to a close, a consortium led by carrier KDDI won one of two Japanese 2.5GHz licences and plans to operate mobile WiMAX, launching in 2009. The other licence went to PHS service provider Willcom, which is planning a next generation PHS service.

Informa Telecom & Media expects there to be fewer than ten million WiMAX subscribers (fixed wireless and mobile) globally by the end of 2008, growing to 65.6 million in 2012. The WiMAX Forum estimates that there will be 410,000 mobile WiMAX subscribers by the end of this year [2008].

Othmar Kyas, director of strategic marketing, network diagnostic, at test and measurement house Tektronix, provides more information on the lead time that WiMAX enjoys. “With LTE we are just in the phase where proprietary demo systems are being phased out and the first pre-commercial LTE gear is being made ready for 3GSM this February.” Kerl Haslam’s assessment is that mobile WiMAX has a two-year lead on LTE.

A time to market advantage, though, is only as good as what is done with it. One popular assessment is that mobile operators that evolved along the CDMA2000 route – and are therefore unlikely to want to adopt a technology from the GSM family – will represent a prime market for WiMAX.

“These are the people who have a choice,” says Airspan’s Paul Senior. “Almost all of those players say that what they need is something that does mobile broadband very well, and that mobile WiMAX is the best for that,” he adds. Clearly Sprint is one of those carriers. KDDI and SK Telecom are others.

There is one glaring exception to Senior’s trend, however. Verizon Wireless, the US carrier CDMA jointly owned by Vodafone and Verizon, last year committed publicly to LTE – a strategy that will almost certainly see it make a long awaited move into Vodafone’s technological fold. This declaration was seen by some as having taken the wind out of the WiMAX Forum’s sales somewhat, after the coup of landing Vodafone as a key member.

Othmar Kyas expects LTE and WiMAX to split the market along similar lines to GSM and CDMA, with an 80/20 divide in favour of the 3GPP’s solution, indicating that he shares Senior’s outlook for the CDMA camp.

Another means by which WiMAX might become established is as a data add-on to existing voice services. “Even in developed countries there are relatively small numbers of operators with UMTS licences,” says Kyas. “There are a number of scenarios where two or three operators are planning to acquire inexpensive GSM licences for voice and build a WiMAX network for data. UMTS licences were sold for billions of dollars. The relatively inexpensive WiMAX infrastructure in combination with inexpensive GSM voice costs might create a business case for a number of operators out there.”

These are business models and concepts that generate debate. There is more consensus around the chances that WiMAX has for success in emerging markets. In these countries, fixed infrastructure is often found wanting and broadband internet access is sorely needed. “Where you’ve got a situation with very little DSL penetration and you want to provide a much more basic level of data connectivity,” says Aircom’s Margaret Rice-Jones, “then I think WiMAX is a technology that can do very well. That is the early market for WiMAX; nomadic rather than mobile.”

Non-GSM cellular players, a modular data offering for mobile operators and nomadic wireless broadband access in emerging markets: the business models differ but the overall purpose is the same. Each of these options allows WiMAX to be seeded in the market so that it can evolve technologically and strategically to the point when GSM family cellular carriers may begin to look at their options for the fourth generation.

“That,” says Paul Senior, “is when we’re going to see defection. Because WCDMA is pretty much finished in a couple of years’ time in terms of its roadmap. It will be out there forever, of course, but in terms of what operators then install, the choice is much more interesting.”

Not everybody would agree that the end of the WCDMA line (including the HSPA upgrades) is quite so imminent, however. “We’ve got a few years’ of legs ahead of us,” says Vodafone’s Steve Pusey. “I can sense peak speeds of 28.8Mbps in the not too distant future. And that’s quite a head of steam to offer our customers. There’s an awful lot you can do with that for consumer and business services before you need to worry about upgrade. We’ve got a nice path for the next few years.” If this is the case, and LTE matures concurrently, the WiMAX time to market advantage could be negated.

Pusey’s view on the headroom afforded by HSPA is shared by many WCDMA operators, but not by Paul Senior. “That’s just not true,” he says, continuing: “If you look at how much spectrum they’ve got and the spectral efficiencies of those technologies, and the lack of smarts, it’s simply not going to be enough. Go to Tokyo and use HSDPA on your laptop. You’ll get 2 – 300 kbps because there are too many people trying to share too small a resource.”

If LTE requires a couple of years to mature before it is ready for deployment, then so does mobile WiMAX – certainly if the companies behind it want to see it evolve into a technology that can take on cellular standards. And this is something that the WiMAX community does not seek to hide. “WiMAX today is more of a broadband technology than a mobile technology,” says Senior. “We call it mobile WiMAX and, yes, you can drive round and do handovers. But it’s not really architected for mobility first. It will always be about broadband capacity – whether you could do that while travelling on an TGV through France is going to be a secondary concern, I think.”

This will change, he says, as the technology evolves to the next iteration, 802.16m, where mobility will be the trust of development work. Even so, it’s a fact that could lend a feeling of security to the LTE camp.

The voice legacy of this camp is important to LTE. Voice revenues are still the major breadwinner for cellular players and WiMAX is a data technology. As the Forum itself says, “WiMAX technology is designed to supply data bandwidth only, increasing the bandwidth without compromising voice service quality, since voice services are not operating on WiMAX bandwidth.”

Othmar Kyas sees this as a potential drawback for WiMAX. “Nobody really knows how well voice services are going to work over WiMAX. This is the biggest unknown and the biggest limitation. At the moment, the large operators deploying mobile WiMAX plan to only launch data services, which implies that, in any case, for mobile voice you’ll have to have another technology.”

Spectrum is another point of contention, one that Vodafone’s Steve Pusey sees as a potential obstacle for WiMAX. “WiMAX uses TDD spectrum primarily, while LTE is FDD. Most of the operators that are looking at these technologies have an FDD footprint, like us,” he says. “There is a natural choice for us and it’s difficult to see, because of spectrum, how WiMAX could play for us in our Western European footprint. The spectrum we have naturally lends itself to an evolution towards LTE.”

Vodafone is in both camps, though, and committed to pushing both standards; a point Pusey is keen to stress, although he won’t give a view on which is the better technology. He also points out that LTE could be delivered in a TDD flavour, and that an FDD WiMAX could also be developed.”

Exactly when that will happen is a matter for some debate. “The WiMAX Forum will have an FDD profile for mobile WiMAX inside six months,” Paul Senior says. “We’ve been working on it for the last 12 months. We’ve been a bit quiet about it because we wanted to get the IMT 2000 decision. And if we had gone to IMT with an FDD profile, we probably couldn’t have got it through. We decide to go for something that was a little less threatening, which was a TDD profile.

“There will be an FDD profile, it will sit at 2.5GHz FDD allocations just as well as any other technology. And in terms of implementation, we’re only 12 months away from products. If our competitors are betting on [the FDD/TDD issue] then they’re going to be quite surprised,” he says. This could be big news and, arguably, gives the strongest indication yet that WiMAX is indeed going to be positioned as a serious competitor to LTE.

But when these comments were run in MCI’s weekly email newsletter, A Week in Wireless, the resulting attention drew the following from WiMAX Forum chairman, Ron Resnick: “Contrary to any of the unofficial statements made recently, the WiMAX Forum has not made any Board approved policy or determination of when FDD mobile WiMAX system or certification profiles will be created. All profiles will be determined by the WiMAX Forum, driven by market demand, and the WiMAX Forum is exploring mobile profiles for FDD certification and is defining a network architecture to support FDD. However, no decision has yet been made when to propose an FDD evolution of the ‘WiMAX’ IMT-2000 air interface to the ITU, nor has it been decided what specific profile might be proposed by WiMAX Forum in the future.”

Spectrum is a crucial issue, as is technical performance. Time to market advantage cannot be underestimated. But in all probability, each of these will be trumped by cost. In this industry lower cost comes with scale and the perceived enthusiasm among the operator community for each of these technologies will play a part in setting the vendors’ pricing strategies.

Othmar Kyas reveals that the engineering budgets of the major vendors reveal “a clear preference” for LTE. The leading vendor in the mobile space, Ericsson, is a very visible absentee at the WiMAX Forum, while its competitors are all members.

Cost is a serious issue for the vendors too, of course. And that’s why Steve Pusey reckons the two technologies really will converge in the end. “The vendors themselves will look at the two portfolios and say that, basically, the ingredients are very similar. The only difference will be addressing different spectrum needs so they’ll just aim for one solution with different spectrum,” he says.

Obviously vendors will do what their customers ask of them. But by the time LTE is being deployed, and 802.16m (which Paul Senior promises will do everything that LTE will do) is ready, the respective roles of operator and vendor may have changed significantly. Perhaps by then, the operators will be increasingly prepared to outsource decisions as to which technologies are best to the vendors that are running the networks day by day.

Mobile WiMAX Will Grab a Significant Market Share in 2012

2007-06-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

US : Mobile WiMAX will connect 8% of the world’s 1.1 billion mobile broadband subscribers by 2012, accounting for nearly 88 million users worldwide, according to Mobile Broadband Wireless: Path toward 4G. This new report from Parks Associates forecasts 52% of these subscribers will be from Asian countries while North and South America will account for another 28%.

“Today, most existing WiMAX deployments are the province of aspiring start-up service providers or incumbent telecom carriers looking to fill coverage gaps,” said Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, Director of Broadband and Gaming, Parks Associates. “The imminent availability of commercial products and increasing availability of spectrum around the world will change the market for mobile WiMAX and make it viable among major service providers. Taiwan alone will have eight million mobile WiMAX subscribers by 2012.”

According to Mobile Broadband Wireless: Path toward 4G, approximately 160 million cellular subscribers, 6% of all cellular subscribers, were using a mobile broadband service at the end of 2006. Two-thirds of these mobile broadband subscribers used UMTS technology, and the remainder used CDMA EVDO.

“Both mobile WiMAX and UMTS/HSDPA technologies will gain market share in the next several years, at the expense of CDMA EVDO,” Cai said, “TD-SCDMA will also have a meaningful market share due to its strong foothold in China, the largest mobile market in the world.”

Mobile Broadband Wireless: Path toward 4G examines next-generation mobile broadband wireless solutions, including 801.16e/WiBro, FLASH-OFDM, and cellular solutions. It analyzes potential market opportunities, examines the competitive equipment and service industry landscape, shares consumer perspectives on mobile broadband wireless solutions, and provides market-sizing information.

About Parks Associates: Parks Associates is a market research and consulting firm focused on all product and service segments that are “digital” or provide connectivity within the home. The company's expertise includes home networks, digital entertainment, consumer electronics, broadband and Internet services, and home systems.

Founded in 1986, Parks Associates creates research capital for companies ranging from Fortune 500 to small start-ups through market reports, multiclient studies, consumer research, workshops, executive conferences, and custom-tailored client solutions. Parks Associates is also a reliable resource for industry, local, national and international press, providing data, analysis, and insight on all aspects of the “digital living” markets.

Parks Associates hosts several fall events and co-hosts CONNECTIONS™ and CONNECTIONS™ Europe (in partnership with the Consumer Electronics Association) each year. In addition, Parks Associates produces the publication Industry Insights two times per year in conjunction with the CONNECTIONS™ Conference series.

IMT-2000 Radio Interface Expanded with OFDMA Technology

2007-06-07T17:25:00.000-07:00

Europe : The 22nd meeting of the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) Working Party 8F (WP 8F) in Kyoto, Japan reached a significant milestone in its work when it forwarded for approval a new terrestrial radio interface for IMT-2000, "OFDMA TDD WMAN" as a specific subset of WiMAX. This new terrestrial radio interface complements the existing family of IMT-2000 radio interfaces and is in direct response to the demands of ITU Members to address the continuously growing wireless marketplace.

WP 8F has delivered a number of key Recommendations and Reports that update and expand the family of IMT-2000 radio interfaces, establish the foundation for IMT-Advanced, and call for additional spectrum for IMT. It has woven together a definition, a recipe, and a roadmap foreseeing the future beyond 3G that is comprised of a balance between a market and services view, a technology view, and a spectrum view. Along with regulatory aspects, these are the key elements for business success in the wireless industry, and ITU-R continues to deliver value to industry and government.

Working under a mandate to address "systems beyond 3G", WP 8F progressed from delivering an initial vision to establishing a name for the future (IMT-Advanced) and set out principles for the process of development of IMT-Advanced. These deliverables stimulated research and development activities worldwide, spawned ideas on potential technologies, and promoted views on spectrum required to address a rapidly growing wireless world.

ITU is the internationally recognized entity chartered to produce an official definition of the next generation of wireless technologies. A full set of documentation for this definition will be released shortly. During 2008 and 2009, there will be an open call for candidates for IMT-Advanced to be submitted to ITU, as well as the start of assessment activities of candidate technologies and systems. Services provided using IMT-Advanced could be commercially available as early as 2011 subject to market demand.

About ITU

ITU is the leading United Nations agency for information and communication technology issues, and the global focal point for governments and the private sector in developing networks and services. For more than 140 years, ITU has coordinated the shared global use of the radio spectrum, promoted international cooperation in assigning satellite orbits, worked to improve telecommunication infrastructure in the developing world, and established the worldwide standards that foster seamless interconnection of a vast range of communications systems.

Design Center in Taiwan to Drive Development of 3G Windows Mobile Smart Phones

2007-06-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

ASIA Taiwan : Broadcom Corporation announced a significant expansion of its cellular design center in Taiwan that will help to drive development of a new generation of Microsoft(R) Windows Mobile(R) smart phones based on Broadcom's highly integrated 3G cellular chipsets.

Inset is the reception area of the expanded design centre.

"We expect smart phones to capture increasing market share as optimized silicon solutions drive handset costs lower," said Jim Tran, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Mobile Communications line of business. "By expanding our Windows Mobile engineering team with local Microsoft development expertise in Taiwan, we have created a true Microsoft-based design center of excellence that will help our customers bring to market innovative new smart phone products based on Windows Mobile."

As the 3G cellular market evolves towards higher speed connections such as high-speed packet access (HSPA), mobile operators and handset manufacturers are demanding advanced, open operating systems (such as Windows Mobile) and affordable hardware platforms to deliver high quality multimedia and other advanced features to consumers. The Broadcom(R) BCM2153 HSPA processor (announced in February 2007) uniquely integrates powerful applications, multimedia and 3G modem processing on a single chip to enable a powerful smart phone platform at feature phone prices. The Taiwan design center expansion will support the development of advanced applications that the BCM2153 enables, with a particular focus on Windows Mobile devices.

"This initiative from Broadcom underscores the momentum and rapid adoption we are seeing for the Windows Mobile platform," said Eddie Wu, Senior Director of Device Solutions Sales Asia & WW ODM Ecosystems, Microsoft Corp. "Our partner ecosystem today includes a strong cadre of developer partners, leading mobile operators and 48 device makers shipping over 140 different phones worldwide. Windows Mobile enables partners to stay on the cutting edge of device innovation and roll out new services and applications to the market quickly. We look forward to continuing our strong relationship with Broadcom and supporting its expanded resources in Taiwan."

The Broadcom Taiwan Design Center is located in the Xin-Yi district of Taipei City, and employs a sizable team of software development engineers focused on smart phone software and the integration of Microsoft Windows Mobile applications with Broadcom cellular hardware and software platforms.

The BCM2153 is the industry's first solution for mobile handsets that integrates an HSPA baseband modem with world-class applications, audio and multimedia processors on a single monolithic chip. The new mixed-signal device is the first developed completely in a 65 nanometer CMOS process and integrates a Category 8 HSDPA modem that delivers 7.2 Mbps (megabits per second) third generation (3G) connectivity for advanced applications. With this level of integration, smart phones utilizing the new HSPA processor require less board space, cost and power than competing solutions, significantly reducing the cost premium associated with smart phones today.

Mobile Phones No Longer Need External Memory Card

2007-06-07T17:21:00.001-07:00

ASIA Korea : Samsung Electronics announced that it has developed a four gigabyte (GB) MCP (multi-chip package) for mobile phones that for the first time forgoes the need for an external memory card slot and also eliminates having to develop interface software for all types of NAND memory.

Samsung’s new moviMCP is a multi-chip package carrying an embedded (moviNAND™) memory solution, which provides a simple-to-design memory package that satisfies the high-speed data transmission needs of mobile phones, while fully supporting the communication features within the handset.

“We’ve now perfected a memory chip that allows handset manufacturers to significantly reduce development time while deploying an extremely robust design that will result in higher performance for smaller phones, with higher storage capacities,” said Jim Elliott, director, flash marketing director, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

The new moviMCP combines a 4GB embedded memory card, which consists of two 16Gb (gigabit) NAND flash chips and a controller, together with a 1Gb mobile DRAM chip to support the processor and a 2Gb NAND flash chip for general handset operations. This provides a total memory capacity of 35Gbs.

Samsung's use of an eMMC interface, the MultiMediaCard Association (MMCA) standard for embedded memory, resolves the design complexity inherent in the functional differences of the various types of NAND flash, by integrating an embedded controller, into the moviMCP. This removes the need to develop interface software for each type of NAND flash.

The new moviMCP stacks several memory functions vertically to enable a small footprint. Its high density eliminates the need for having to also provide an external expansion slot.

Samsung’s moviMCP is currently available for OEM sampling.

According to market research firm iSuppli, the 3G mobile phone market – which is the main target for Samsung’s new moviMCP – is expected to reach 392 million units in 2007 and show an approximately 40 percent compounded annual growth rate from 2007 through 2010.

i-level and Smartwin to Explore 3G Technology for Next Generation Mobile Media Platform

2007-06-07T17:18:00.001-07:00

ASIA China : i-level Media Group and its technology partner, Smartwin Technology Ltd., announced they have agreed to begin working together on researching applications of 3G communication technologies suitable for mobile digital media networks, in anticipation of China's launch of TD-SCDMA late this year.

Inset shows i-level Mobile Media Network which is China's premier in-taxi digital advertising network, consisting of high-quality LCD displays mounted inside the passenger compartments of taxis.

The adoption of 3G communication technology is expected to create numerous new opportunities in the wireless and digital media sectors through its increased data transmission rates and breadth of services. i-level expects that this will eventually allow for multiple new functions and applications to be developed and added to its current media platform.

Ian Sullivan, Vice-President and COO of i-level, commented on the announcement, saying, "We look forward to deepening our relationship with Smartwin Technology-an important partner and a truly innovative industry leader-and developing exciting, next-generation digital media solutions for i-level and our partners."

i-level and Smartwin have been working together for more than 2 years on digital media solutions for the transportation industry. Together they designed and developed i-level's multimedia advertising display units ("ADUs"), which are currently in operation in more than 3000 taxis in Shanghai. As i-level expands its network of taxi-based ADUs across China, the Company plans to continue looking for technological improvements that could better the viewing experience for passengers or facilitate the management of media networks.

"Smartwin is committed to developing cutting edge solutions for our clients in the digital media and transportation space," commented Smartwin Technology's President, David Leung. "China is working on its own 3G network standard and we intend on being ready to take advantage of this new technology and the opportunities it will present."

Comsys baseband processor is first WiMAX multi-technology

2007-06-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

ComMAX is first baseband to support expanded WiMAX TDD profile within IMT-2000 radio interface

Herzelia, Israel -- June 7, 2007– Comsys Communication and Signal Processing, a leader in wireless baseband solutions, is pleased to announce that its ComMAX™ CM1125 is the first multimode baseband processor to comply with the newly announced terrestrial OFDMA radio interface for IMT-2000. The recent meeting in Kyoto, Japan of the ITU Radio communication Sector (ITU-R) Working Party 8F (WP 8F), which concluded with the forwarding of key recommendations and reports for the expansion of the IMT-2000 radio interface standard to include OFDMA technology, has brought WiMAX under the umbrella of this new extensive standard. The Comsys CM1125 is the first IMT-2000 baseband to support the WiMAX TDD profile, and Comsys is the only company that has currently announced it is working on multimode GSM/EDGE/WiMAX baseband processors for mobile phones and terminals.

The new interface, OFDMA TDD WMAN, is a specific subset of WiMAX that complements the existing family of IMT-2000 radio interfaces. The WP 8F proposals update and expand the family of IMT-2000 radio interfaces, establishing a foundation for a ‘beyond 3G’ standard named IMT-Advanced, and at the same time call for the provision of additional spectrum for IMT, with the aim of securing a forward path beyond 3G that balances the market and services expectations with the constraints of technology and available spectrum.

“At Comsys we share the bold vision of the ITU-R WP 8F in addressing systems beyond 3G,” commented Ehud Reshef, Product Manager at Comsys. “A year ago we announced our commitment to addressing the convergence of 3GSM and WiMAX. While ITU-R has been working on setting out the principles and promoting a spectrum strategy to meet the needs of a rapidly growing wireless market, we have been concentrating on developing the baseband technology to address the same aims, with the development of advanced processors supporting current and future profiles. Our roadmap includes devices that will support
W-CDMA and 3GPP-LTE with WiMAX, enabling the full range of possibilities for GSM evolution with WiMAX”

The leadership and innovation of Comsys has been recognized with a string of recent industry awards for ComMAX, including ‘Best Chip Design’ at the Best of WiMAX World Awards 2006, 'Best WIMAX Product or Service' at the 2007 Wireless Broadband Innovation Awards, and Runner-Up in ‘Best Chip Design’ at the Best of WiMAX World Europe 2007.

The ComMAX CM1125 is a flexible multimode OFDMA baseband processor that enables service continuity between cellular and Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) networks. ComMAX provides manufacturers of multimode mobile WiMAX terminals with a comprehensive and flexible broadband solution fully compliant with WiMAX Forum Wave 2 requirements, offering MIMO capability, which can operate over multiple bands. Featuring service continuity support between Mobile WiMAX and legacy GSM/EDGE networks, ComMAX provides best-in-class performance and offers substantial cost and power savings.

In the past four months Comsys has announced deals with two leading Taiwanese companies that will use its technology in their devices: dmedia is using ComMAX for its new Advanced Personal Navigation Devices (PND), and Infomax is utilizing baseband silicon IP from Comsys in its next generation of cellular handset chips.

About Comsys
Comsys Communication and Signal Processing Ltd. develops the industry's leading integrated digital baseband solutions for Mobile WiMAX, UMTS, EGPRS (EDGE), GPRS and GSM networks.

Comsys' offerings range from system IP for multimode 3G cellular terminals to a fully mobile WiMAX baseband processor (802.16e), offered to silicon and handset manufacturers. Comsys' evolution to 4G includes an OFDM/A baseband processor with a flexible architecture and low power consumption, designed to support current and future mobile WiMAX profiles and future 3GPP-LTE. Companies such as Texas Instruments, Quanta Computers and Datang Microelectronics choose Comsys to benefit excellent performance, accelerated time-to-market and reduced silicon costs. For further information, please visit our website at www.comsysmobile.com

WiMAX Forum(R) Certified Training Program Launches

2007-06-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

PORTLAND, OR -- 06/07/07 -- The WiMAX Forum®, together with DoceoTech, Inc. and Informa Telecoms & Media, today announced the formal launch of the WiMAX Forum Certified Training Program, a broad range of WiMAX Forum-branded education programs to serve the global WiMAX industry. This exclusive program is comprised of a suite of courses designed for both business and highly technical audiences, providing offerings ranging from introductory technology content to in-depth cellular planning and methodologies to ensure quality assurance. Developed in conjunction with and endorsed by the WiMAX Forum, the industry association responsible for certification of WiMAX products and promoting WiMAX industry growth and development, the WiMAX Forum Certified Training Program courses will be taught in all regions of the world.

The WiMAX Forum Certified Training programs will be delivered by DoceoTech and Informa training specialists during WiMAX Forum-sponsored trade shows, member conferences, on-site training, and in numerous other regional venues. Companies interested in receiving the professional certification may do so by purchasing available program bundles from DoceoTech and Informa. For more information about the WiMAX Forum Certified Training Program course offerings or to learn how to attend or schedule an upcoming training, visit: http://www.wimaxforum.org/technology/training/.

"The WiMAX Forum Certified Training Program brings together the industry's most knowledgeable training experts in DoceoTech and Informa to offer WiMAX Forum members and other ecosystem providers the industry's only WiMAX Forum Certified Training curriculum that will equip industry professionals with the necessary knowledge for successful WiMAX network implementations," said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMAX Forum. "A quality education program of WiMAX technology is essential to its commercialization and success as the global choice for delivery of wireless broadband services."

Initially several course offerings are available to WiMAX Forum members and other WiMAX technology providers, including: WiMAX Explained; WiMAX Technology and Applications; WiMAX 802.16e: Broadband Wireless Standards; and RF Network Engineer Certification Boot Camp.

About the WiMAX Forum

The WiMAX Forum® is an industry-led, not-for-profit organization formed to certify and promote the compatibility and interoperability of broadband wireless products based upon the harmonized IEEE 802.16/ETSI HiperMAN standard. A WiMAX Forum goal is to accelerate the introduction of these systems into the marketplace. WiMAX Forum Certified(TM) products are interoperable and support broadband fixed, nomadic, portable and mobile services. Along these lines, the WiMAX Forum works closely with service providers and regulators to ensure that WiMAX Forum Certified systems meet customer and government requirements. Through the WiMAX Forum Global Congress Events Series of premier trade shows and conferences, the WiMAX Forum is committed to offering a hands-on business and education experience with meaningful networking opportunities to drive worldwide adoption of WiMAX technology and deliver wireless broadband Internet services anytime, anywhere.

"WiMAX Forum" is a registered trademark of the WiMAX Forum. "WiMAX," the WiMAX Forum logo, "WiMAX Forum Certified," and the WiMAX Forum Certified logo are trademarks of the WiMAX Forum. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

About DoceoTech, Inc.

DoceoTech, Incorporated is a Danville, California provider of technical knowledge-transfer solutions on wireless broadband topics. DoceoTech creates and distributes practical wireless certification courses, including the WiMAX Forum® Certified Training program, as well as courses on IEEE® 802.xx wireless standards, and custom training solutions. DoceoTech distributes classroom and e-learning programs in the Americas, Europe and Asia through a network of resellers and training delivery partners. DoceoTech's faculty are listed authors of 55 patents, have written five IEEE Press reference books, and are principal creators and authors of the technologies and standards in their fields of concentration. For more information, see www.doceotech.com.

About Informa Telecoms & Media

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Agilent Announces 3GPP LTE Signal-Creation Software

2007-06-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

To provide a framework for the evolution of 3G toward a high-data-rate, low-latency and packet-optimised radio-access technology, thereby enabling significant new opportunities in mobile TV and video.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007: Agilent Technologies Inc. has announced the availability of its Signal Studio for 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) software. Designed to work with Agilent's N5182A MXG and E4438C ESG vector signal generators, Signal Studio software helps wireless R&D and manufacturing engineers create Agilent-validated and performance-optimised signals to design and test evolving 3GPP LTE products for the next generation of mobile communications.

Agilent's Signal Studio is PC-based software for creating standards-based LTE signals. Signal Studio provides spectrally correct signals tailored for testing and evaluating components such as power amplifiers used in LTE mobile handsets and base transceiver stations. Because the signals are spectrally correct, they emulate real-world signals (e.g., having the proper bandwidth, peak-to-average ratio and spectral shape, etc). The software also supports importing a user file with data that has been pre-coded to simulate transport layer coding, enabling early receiver design and test.

The new software features the ability to adjust LTE parameters to fine-tune signal characteristics for specific applications. Some of the key parameters that can be adjusted include bandwidth (1.25, 2.5, 5, 10, 15 or 20 MHz), modulation type (QPSK, 16QAM or 64QAM), number of channels, type of channels (e.g., data or control), channel power level, payload data, and resource block allocation, amongst others.

With this flexibility, the engineer can test and optimise component performance over a wide range of operating conditions, including situations with few users or many users transferring data at different rates. Signals can even be configured to simulate worst-case scenarios, revealing component deficiencies before they are deployed. A graphical user interface simplifies signal configuration while the .NET API enables integration into a test executive.

Signal Studio for 3GPP LTE software is specifically designed to work with Agilent's MXG and ESG vector signal generators.

Europe Spain : Agilent Technologies announced the availability of its Signal Studio ( screenshot above ) for 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) software. Designed to work with Agilent's N5182A MXG and E4438C ESG vector signal generators, Signal Studio software helps wireless R&D and manufacturing engineers create Agilent-validated and performance-optimized signals to design and test evolving 3GPP LTE products for the next generation of mobile communications. The 3GPP LTE standard is intended to provide a framework for the evolution of 3G toward a high-data-rate, low-latency and packet-optimized radio-access technology, thereby enabling significant new opportunities in mobile TV and video.

Agilent's Signal Studio is powerful, PC-based software for creating standards-based LTE signals. An easy-to-use user interface simplifies signal creation via familiar tree-style navigation of the signal structure. Before releasing its software, Agilent validates the signals generated by the software with industry experts to ensure they are correct, even in situations where the standards are not yet clearly defined. Used with Agilent's vector signal generators, these signals help engineers better characterize, evaluate and fine-tune their designs under parametric and functional test conditions.

Signal Studio provides spectrally correct signals tailored for testing and evaluating components such as power amplifiers used in LTE mobile handsets and base transceiver stations. Because the signals are spectrally correct, they emulate real-world signals (e.g., having the proper bandwidth, peak-to-average ratio and spectral shape, etc.). The software also supports importing a user file with data that has been pre-coded to simulate transport layer coding, enabling early receiver design and test.

The new software features the ability to adjust LTE parameters to fine-tune signal characteristics for specific applications. Some of the key parameters that can be adjusted include bandwidth (1.25, 2.5, 5, 10, 15 or 20 MHz), modulation type (QPSK, 16QAM or 64QAM), number of channels, type of channels (e.g., data or control), channel power level, payload data, and resource block allocation, among others. With this flexibility, the engineer can test and optimize component performance over a wide range of operating conditions, including situations with few users or many users transferring data at different rates. Signals can even be configured to simulate worst-case scenarios, revealing component deficiencies before they are deployed. A graphical user interface simplifies signal configuration while the .NET API enables integration into a test executive.

"As a leader in the measurement industry, Agilent is fully committed to providing today's engineers with the resources they need to efficiently and effectively create the next generation of mobile communication based on 3GPP LTE," said Gregg Peters, vice president of Agilent's Signal Sources Division. "Our new Signal Studio software, with its ability to create industry-validated, spectrally correct signals, is a prime example of that leadership. As the 3GPP LTE standard matures and LTE infrastructure is deployed, that commitment will continue with enhancements for the Signal Studio 3GPP LTE solution to keep our customers at the forefront of this technology."

Signal Studio for 3GPP LTE software is specifically designed to work with Agilent's MXG and ESG vector signal generators. The Agilent N5182A MXG offers industry-best adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) performance and switching speeds, coupled with simplified self-maintenance to maximize uptime. It is ideal for design and manufacturing teams producing components for communications systems, including high-performance, base station MCPAs (multi-carrier power amplifiers). The E4438C ESG provides lower phase noise, higher output power, and excellent level accuracy. It features advanced baseband capabilities including digital inputs/outputs and fading, making it better suited for early LTE receiver evaluation.

ITC Imposes Ban on Importation of New 3G Mobile Phones in US

2007-06-07T16:44:00.000-07:00

By Michael Oryl

Today (June 07, 2007) the US government's International Trade Commission issued a ban on certain Qualcomm 3G chipsets that it finds are in violation of certain Broadcom patents pertaining to power management and mobile device management. The ITC states that the ban will also prohibit the importation of new models of mobile phones that make use of these chipsets.

The ban on 3G mobile phones that use Qualcomm's chipsets is limited to new models of devices only. Current models that are already on sale in the USA fall under a grandfather clause in the ban that allows them to continue to be imported in spite of their containing chipsets that infringe on the Broadcom patents. This means that the 3G devices that are on store shelves today may stay on the market much longer than the carriers and the phone manufacturers had intended, since they will be unable to bring in many future, and patent infringing, handset models that are not already on sale.

Since we do not yet know which phone handset manufacturers are using the prohibited Qualcomm chipsets, we can not state with any certainty which manufacturers will be able to import new models of handsets. It seems likely that Samsung and LG, both strong in the CDMA 3G world that is dominated by Qualcomm chips, will run afoul of this ban and might have trouble getting newly announced and future 3G devices on the US market.

Samsung USA's Kim Titus, Director of Public Relations, spoke with us over the phone regarding the ban. Mr Titus told us that Samsung has been working with its suppliers and customers to ensure that there will be an uninterrupted supply of future Samsung products and that the company is confident that it will be able to continue to provide handsets to customers.

This story is sure to make big waves in the mobile industry.

First TD-SCDMA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE Automatic Handover Achieved

2007-06-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

ASIA / Europe : Beijing T3G Technology Co., Ltd. (T3G) and NXP Semiconductors made an announcement of the world’s first voice automatic handover of multi-mode TD-SCDMA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE in a handset. This breakthrough handset enables seamless usage for end-users by providing bi-directional on-the-fly automatic handover between TD-SCDMA and GSM networks. NXP and T3G powered multi-mode handsets can automatically scan for available networks and smoothly switch to between TD-SCDMA and GSM networks ensuring the best quality of service and high user satisfaction.

The automatic handover feature has been achieved and validated successfully on T3G’s TD-SCDMA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE dual mode handset reference design platform in multiple network environments built by all major Chinese infrastructure vendors including Datang Mobile, ZTE and TD-Tech. Seamless automatic handover of voice calls between 3G TD-SCDMA R4 wireless network and 2.5G GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile networks are supported.

Even while a call is being placed, a TD-SCDMA/GSM phone equipped with the automatic handover feature moving out of TD-SCDMA network coverage will automatically switch the user onto the existing GSM network, without any adverse effects such as call drop. Because the network selection and transition are done by the phone automatically, TD-SCDMA subscribers will not have to make any manual selection of service, and thus will be able to enjoy a true “seamless” multi-mode experience.

Currently, TD-SCDMA networks are being rolled out in 10 Chinese cities including 6 host cities of Beijing Olympics by China Mobile and other Chinese operators. Automatic handover TD-SCDMA phones not only facilitate the provision of advanced TD-SCDMA 3G services to interested audiences at these Olympic host cities, but also allow the continued use of existing 2.5G network infrastructure.

Mr. Daijun Zhang, CTO of T3G said, “With the realization of TD-SCDMA and GSM/GPRS/EDGE automatic handover feature thus ensuring great backward compatibility with 2.5G networks, the most challenging technological hurdle facing the TD-SCDMA handsets at the initial commercial stage has been cleared. The addition of the TD-SCDMA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE automatic handover feature to the T3G reference design platform will give our handset maker customers an advantage in creating a rich variety of competitive TD-SCDMA mobile handsets that meet the demands of the China market.”

Mr. Dan Rabinovitsj, Senior Vice President for Cellular Systems of NXP said, “NXP has been cooperating closely with T3G and has made substantial investment in the China 3G standard from the very start. By leveraging NXP’s EDGE leadership and system maturity and T3G’s cutting-edge R&D capabilities, NXP and T3G achieved the first TD-SCDMA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE automatic handover. Working closely with local handset manufacturers, NXP and T3G have contributed substantially to creating a local ecosystem driving towards wide deployment of next generation 3G services in China. The industry’s first achievement of automatic handover is testimony of our preemptive strategy to gain a leading position in the Chinese market.”

This automatic handover is enabled by the Nexperia cellular system solution T3G 7208 GSM/GPRS/EDGE/TD-SCDMA reference design. Based on NXP's leading EDGE system solution, the design full meets China major operators’ plan to upgrade theirs 2G network to EDGE to offer fallback of data services. By keeping the same baseband, 2G chipset and application software interfaces for both standards, the reference design enables handset manufactures to maximize their R&D investment in both TD-SCDMA and WCDMA.

T3G and NXP have been providing comprehensive technical support and key technology and products to its customers in order to promote the speedy ramp-up of the TD-SCDMA handset market.

T3G Technology Co., LTD.

T3G is a joint venture between NXP Semiconductors, Datang Mobile, Samsung Electronics and Motorola. As a market leading TD-SCDMA terminal system solution provider, T3G Technology specializes in providing TD-SCDMA terminal manufacturers and design houses with a complete system solution that includes handset chipset, software protocol, system reference design and customized technical support. A joint venture that combines NXP's cutting-edge semiconductor design and fab capability, Datang Mobile's TD-SCDMA expertise, and Samsung and Motorola’s leadership in mobile handset creation, T3G will boost the cost effective introduction of 3G TD-SCDMA dual mode commercial handsets in China.

What a long neck you have…

2007-05-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

What a long neck you have…

Does anyone really want to pay the mobile internet or are they just browsing?

All the better to browse the treetops, as the giraffe said, more and more attention in mobile software is going into the browser, and it’s increasingly coming to take over the user interface. Of course, this trend is not entirely new on the desktop – the move towards so-called Web 2.0 applications, and more importantly the underlying AJAX middleware, has led to a huge expansion of the functions carried out in a browser window rather than a desktop GUI.

First, the science bit, as they say in the hairspray ads. The key technical development was the introduction of the XmlHttpRequest object into the JavaScript specification, which permitted a script running in the user’s browser to package an arbitrary XML object as an HTTP GET or POST message. At the far end, an application that can accept and produce data in XML format could catch the HTTP request, unpack the XML object, and do something useful, then reverse the procedure to send back the result.

It sounds recondite, but the results are important. Before this, a web page was essentially static, and anything that involved using it as a client-server interface would require the page to be reloaded every time anything changed, any scripts executing as the page loaded. If the communication could be carried out from within a loop on the page, though, processing can be asynchronous and the page can behave like an application. Hence the term AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

As well as doing highly interactive user interfaces, AJAX also permits the inclusion of complex server-side applications in a web page. The canonical example is Google Maps. A wide range of desktop-like applications are now available as web services, and it’s also noticeable that some desktop user interfaces (especially Microsoft ones) have begun to share features with browsers.

So what does it mean for mobiles? Good mobile web browsers are difficult. Starting off with the screen constraint, there is also the problem that doing a basic HTTP browser now renders useless any site that contains JavaScript or Flash, but making this work on mobile devices is a problem.

But the good news is that a web interface with a lot of programmability is, by definition, capable of being reprogrammed. Perhaps fancy web UIs might turn out to be easier to rework for mobile use? Another important point is that, if you’re going to build web pages with lots of function call to applications, why not do the device user interface in the same way? It could make programming it much simpler.

All this to get to the point – Nokia is keen on using its browser to access both local and network resources. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the adverts for the E65 – it looks remarkably browseresque. It’s also been talking AJAX for mobiles. RIM this April announced a whole wedge of APIs for various features of its devices and servers, and Microsoft recently showed off its new DeepFish device browser. DeepFish is intended to provide a sophisticated zoom function that will let you focus on part of a web page (or anything else) without mangling the layout. So far, the demonstration version doesn’t handle cookies, JavaScript, or even HTTP POST, so it’s fairly useless. But once it’s fully featured, it could be very different.

This kind of user interface could have much deeper consequences for the devices and systems behind it. Consider Openwave Systems’ Mobile Widgets, which are AJAXy objects that sit on the device idle screen and pull information over the network as required. If you’re doing AJAX, you must be breaking down services into autonomous components with open, standardized interfaces, which means you must be doing service-oriented architecture at the back end. And if it’s going to be useful, you’ve got to let your users tinker with it.

Googlization marches on

2007-05-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

Googlization marches on

By Alexander Harrowell

The trend towards modular infrastructure, virtualization, and service-oriented architecture is underway, with or without IMS.

One of the biggest hopes for IMS has been that it could generate a big cut in the cost of telco infrastructure by transferring functions from hardware into software. That would mean that, rather than a small of large, expensive, and task-specific machines; operators could run the software on a large number of cheap, general-purpose IT machines.

Techniques like distributed processing an virtualization mean that very high volume, high availability computing tasks can now be spread over arbitrarily large number of servers, which no longer need to be rated for carrier-grade reliability if the system can failover without end-user noticing anything. Therefore, they can be dramatically cheaper, and the system can be dramatically easier to scale up or down.

The undisputed master of these techniques is Google, a company built essentially on two things, one well-know and one rather less well-know. Everyone has heard of the pageRank search algorithm Sergey Brin invented as a graduate student at Stanford, but the Google Platform, as the firm terms its IT infrastructure, is less famous.

As the search engine grew, its infrastructure needs exploded. The cope with this, the Google engineers adopted a dramatic, new policy-rather that installing big, specialized servers, they instead used very large number of PC-based boxed, mostly home-made.

To stitch them together, they made a major development effort to virtualize their search applications, so that they could run concurrently across many machines and tolerate failures. When a server failed, it would be left in the rack until the system administrator did a regular round of the data center. The other machines grouped under its logical location would preserve state so that the application would continue to run.

Related techniques have been used to improve the internet’s reliability since a massive distributed denial-of-service attack on the rootzone DNS servers in 2002. When a similar attack was stages this year, the system shrugged it off without difficulty, which should come as no surprise. After all, f.root-servers.net now refers to any one of 32 logical machines scattered around the world, some of which are themselves multiple load-balanced physical computers. Using the IP Anycast technique defined in RFC1546, when a request to F root is made, the first of the 32 machines to answer handles it.

The only root servers to suffer degradation of service during the 2007 root DDOS event were those operated by the US Department of Defence and ICANN, neither of which are anycasted.

So-what does Googlization mean for telcos? The technical elements required are required are essentially that everything possible should be implements in software, that independent functions should be autonomous modules, that in the interface between them must be standardized, and that layers should be distinct. For example, routing should no be coupled with application-level processing, and databases should not be specifically coupled to routing.

This is very similar to requirements of another current IT trend, service –oriented architecture. SOA requires that business processes be broken down into specific services, mutually independent, with standardized interfaces and some form of middleware so that applications can be created by assembling existing service components at a high level.

In fast, doing SOA will usually require something similar to Googlization, and Googlization your infrastructure will, by definition, be a good moments to implement SOA. IMS has often been described as an enabling technology for the first, and as a telecoms SOA in itself. But is it really so important?

Going by actual products and deployments, no so much. Where these principles are being put in practice, IMS tends to take a beck seat. There’s no reason, for example, why different functions in an SMSC cannot be disaggregated, so long as they have a common interface with each other and the network entities. It doesn’t need IMS, either. After all, even if you are using SS7, SS7 messages can be carried over IP, and the function only needs to speak SS7 to other devices that explicitly require it.”

Hence, products like Airwide Solutions’ AirMessenger Store. Very simply, it’s a big storage tank for SMS messages in transit, uncoupled from the SMS routing function. It’s the uncoupling, though, not the storage, that is interesting. Now, a carrier can install more SMS delivery capacity without also installing more storage, which depending on the efficiency of their network they may not need. Or, of course, they could install more storage, without more delivery capacity.

“One alternative would be to go out and buy a new SMSC”, says Jay Seaton, CMO of Airwide. “But that’s overkill, because it includes a lot of storage. And this is a product an operator can buy whether they’re an existing Airwide, Comverse or whatever customer or not”.

Disaggregation means adaptability. But it still doesn’t require IMS. According to Seaton, “it’s consistent with the IMS architecture, but we wouldn’t say more than that. It’s too fixed-line-the problem with IMS, our customers say, is that it isn’t actionable in terms of mobile infrastructure”.

“It’s a practical step towards IMS and OMA, but no more,” he said. Like other Airwide SMS products, it supports SMPP over IP, so it could be implemented as part of an IP-based service delivery platform in a non-IMS network.

Google and LG team up

2007-05-11T09:58:00.001-07:00

Google and LG team up

Internet search giant Google has inked a deal with Korea’s LG Electronics, to put its software on LG’s mobile phones.

The move came days after Yahoo had announced its ‘oneSearch’ service – hailed by some analysts and industry observers as having leap-frogged Google’s existing mobile technology.

LG, maker of the high-end Shine and the Chocolate handsets said it will begin shipping devices equipped with Google software, including Maps, Blogger Mobile and Gmail, during Q2 of this year.

“LG’s mobile devices, combined with Google, will provide consumers with easy access to their favorite internet services even without a PC, and make it easy for them to stay connected while in motion,” said Paul Bae, VP of product planning at LG in a statement.

Google said the deal was similar to ones it had already struck with Motorola and Samsung, and did not involve the rumored ‘Google phone’ product.

Deep Nishar, Google’s director of product management, said: “We are pleased to work with LG to make it easier than ever for mobile internet users to have powerful applications and personalized information at their fingertips.”

Linux set to soar, says ABI

2007-05-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

Linux set to soar, says ABI

A study released this April by ABI research forecast that 127 million mobile handsets will have a commercial Linux operating system by 2012, up from 8.1 million in 2007. In addition, the number of devices shipped with a Linux real-time operating system (RTOS) is set to hit 76 million by the same point, from a standing start in 2007.

“Linux in the phone is not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when’,” said Stuart Carlaw, research director at ABI. The firm suggests that the primary barrier to growth in commercial Linux in the mobile space, “vertical and horizontal market fragmentation,” is being overcome by industry initiatives and “by the introduction of complete solutions such as the Trolltech-led GreenSuit, and ALP from Access.”

In RTOS functions, latency issues have hobbled Linux so far.

Carlaw said: “Innovative solutions such as PREEMPT_RT, the VirtualLogic virtual operating environment, and the use of RTOS executives over Linux kernels, look set to deal with latency issues. However, the industry still needs to understand the total cost of ownership for Linux solutions, and it must create a common set of APIs to enable economies of scale for third-party developers.”

Femtocells

2007-05-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

Femtocells

Drive Fixed Mobile Substitution

Small indoor basestations – femtocells and picocells – will be the driving force behind fixed mobile substitution, according to research from industry experts, Analysys.

The analyst group believes that femtocells will spur the migration of voice traffic from fixed to mobile networks, until 3G networks carry the majority of voice traffic.

Femtocells will also undermine the case for converged cellular-wifi services, said Analysys, by enabling very similar tariffs without the need for dedicated handsets.

German carrier Deutsche Telekom quietly pulled the plug on its domestic fixed mobile convergence (FMC) service, T-One, in March. T-One fell victim to Deutsche Telekom’s own FMS (Fixed Mobile Substitution) service, @Home, which has experienced explosive growth as German mobile users move to adopt home zone services.

In the UK, meanwhile, O2 has been making encouraging noises about picocells and femtocells recently. Where many of its peers are opting to do Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) via wifi, using UMA or SIP-enable phones, O2 looks to be favoring small indoor GSM base stations to do the same job.

Femtocells can be applied to a number of wireless technologies, including 2G, 3G, 3G LTE, WiMAX and WiBro, but 3G presents the greatest opportunity.

“The potential of femtocells is substantial for mobile operators, but critical implementation and performance issues need to be resolved before they can be deployed widely”, said Mark Heath, an analyst at Analysys. “These include interference, range, performance, network integration and management, handover, billing and security.”

Qualcomm polishes up Rev. B

2007-05-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

Qualcomm polishes up Rev. B

Qualcomm has taken the wraps off a Mobile Station Modem chipset that supports CDMA2000 1x EV-DO Revision B.

Rev. B is set to deliver advanced capabilities for next generation data and multimedia services, with recent field tests boasting average data rates of 9.3Mbit/s on the downlink over 5MHz of spectrum.

The MSM7850 chipset is the first device to support Rev. B.

“The evolution of CDMA2000 networks from EV-DO Rev. A to EV-DO Rev. B allows network operators to remain leading-edge in their service and performance offerings without the need for any infrastructure hardware changes,” said Sanjay Jha, chief operating officer at Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.

The CDMA pioneer said that Rev. B would enable applications such as mobile TV or streaming music with a concurrent voice call, or a VoIP conversation while simultaneously browsing the internet.

Future high performance devices could support forward link data rates of up to 73.5Mbps, while lower cost or pre existing devices could support 4.9 Mbps.

The chipset is scheduled to sample this year.

In other news, Qualcomm also introduced a low cost Revision A chipset, the QSC6085, designed to drive down the cost of CDMA-based 3G services already available.

Nokia Siemens warns

2007-05-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

Nokia Siemens warns

Of Market Slowdown

Super vendor Nokia Siemens Networks, which started operations as a merged entity on April 1^st, has warned of a slowdown in growth of the infrastructure market.

The Finnish-German joint venture said that “over the last couple of months there has been a narrowing of visibility and indications of a slowdown in spending in some regions”.

Updating its outlook for the mobile and fixed services infrastructure market this year, the equipment manufacturer now expects only “very slight” market growth for the mobile and fixed infrastructure and related services market.

In preparation for the slowdown in growth, Nokia Siemens has already said that a substantial portion of cost reductions are expected to be realized via a reduction of 10 to 15 per cent of the initial combined staff base of approximately 60,000 – or 6,000 to 9,000 over the next four years.

Estimated cost synergies of €1.5bn annually by 2010 are expected to come primarily from the elimination of overlapping functions, consolidation and better utilization of sales and marketing organizations, reduction of overhead costs, sourcing benefits, and greater efficiencies in R&D, the companies said.

Virgin US in deal

2007-05-11T09:32:00.000-07:00

Virgin US in deal

With Yahoo

Virgin Mobile USA has revealed its intention to make Yahoo’s mobile services available to its 4.6 million subscribers.

The announcement came as Yahoo’s rival Google said it had inked deal with handset maker LG. Both Yahoo and Google are vying for position, not only as the consumer’s preferred search brand but also for favorable deals with operators and manufacturers alike.

Virgin said in a statement that, beginning this month, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger will be available for download onto several existing handsets. Going forward, Virgin said, the software will be pre-installed.

In the UK, mobile operator 3 has already shipped Yahoo Go, on its X-Series. Virgin said further announcements on additional Yahoo services would be made in the coming months, including a range of SMS services such as search.

Mexico City Mayor

2007-05-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

Mexico City Mayor

Wants Wireless For All

Mexico City authorities have signed an agreement with Chinese manufacturer ZTE Corp to set up hotspots across the metropolis as part of a plan to provide wireless to its 8.7 million residents.

Marcelo Ebrard, elected in December as Mexico City’s latest mayor, said the push to make the city wireless was being given the “highest priority”. ZTE will be tasked with linking the city’s schools and government buildings as well as its network of around 4000 security cameras.

According to the Mayor, the project “will accelerate the technological development of the city”.

Since winning office Ebrard has embarked on an ambitious plan to haul Mexico City up to the same technological level as much wealthier locations, even though many residents do not have basic utilities.

ZTE will establish a subsidiary office in Mexico City for the project, the company said.

Mobile WiMAX is go, but going where?

2007-04-21T10:09:00.000-07:00

Mobile WiMAX is go, but going where?

By Tammy Parker

Certifications of mobile WiMAX products this year will jumpstart expansion of the technology. Whether it will expand beyond delivering basic broadband access and VoIP is still moot.

Analyst predictions vary regarding the impending market for mobile WiMAX, though they all agree it will be big. Monica Paolini, analyst with Senza Fili, said there will be 15.4 million WiMAX subscribers by 2010, 57 per cent of which will use 802.16e-2005 mobile WiMAX.

Yankee Group recently forecast that there will be some 28 million mobile WiMAX subscribers worldwide by 2011. Although North America has been the focus of mobile WiMAX developments, thanks to Sprint Nextel and Clearwire’s plans to deploy the technology in the US, the region will only account for about a quarter of the global mobile WiMAX market in 2011.

Considerable interest in mobile WiMAX is expected to come from developing markets. Early signs of this can be seen in two contracts signed recently by Alcatel-Lucent, which will supply 802.16e mobile WiMAX infrastructure to Dominican Republic startup Onemax and Telmex Chile. Both networks will use 802.16e in the 3.5GHz band, will become operational in H207 and will enable broadband wireless applications such as high-speed internet, video streaming and VoIP using laptops, computers, modems or wireless handheld terminals.

Bruno Potdevin, vice president of business development for Alcatel-Lucent’s WiMAX activities, said mobile WiMAX will flourish due to the ability of 802.16e to serve mobile and fixed applications – termed universal WiMAX. He noted 802.16e will foster widespread use of lower-cost, self-installable CPEs (customer premises equipment) that can be used in fixed applications.

Though early purveyors of WiMAX are still pushing 802.16d fixed WiMAX, particularly in developing markets where operators may not be willing to pay a premium for 802.16e mobile WiMAX, Potdevin asserted that the market for 802.16d is drying up quickly. “2007 is the year where people will shift from d to e definitely. If you are really looking and are serious about the mass market, the only way to go is e; it’s definitely not d,” he said.

Potdevin splits the market for mobile WiMAX into four segments:

users in un-served and underserved areas who need basic broadband access;
business users who require widespread broadband access, including wireless VoIP in areas where there is no cellular coverage;
small and medium size enterprises, often located in the fastest-growing countries, that need high-speed internet connections;
consumers who demand connected entertainment devices.

Not surprisingly, operators in developing countries are focused on using mobile WiMAX to ease the digital divide for consumers and enterprises and to deliver VoIP.

What might be surprising, however, is that Craig McCaw’s Clearwire is initially following that line of thinking as well, rather than focusing on entertainment opportunities. Thanks to a $600m investment from Intel Capital, Clearwire intends to transition its proprietary wireless broadband networks to mobile WiMAX in the US as well as in Brussels and Dublin. The company reported 184,400 US subscribers and 21,800 international subscribers as of December 31^st, 2006.

The business that Clearwire ultimately builds could have global implications for the take-up of mobile WiMAX. In addition to its international operations in Brussels and Dublin, Clearwire also holds minority interests in operators in Denmark and Mexico and has spectrum in Spain, Poland and Romania. In addition, the company secured a winning $25m bid during last fall’s 3.5GHz spectrum auction in Germany.

Furthermore, Clearwire has the second largest spectrum position in the 2.5GHz band in the US, just behind Sprint Nextel, with spectrum rights covering 214 million people. The company is also paying $300m for the 2.5GHz spectrum held by AT&T in the south eastern US.

But while Intel, and its minion Sprint Nextel, have lately emphasized mobile WiMAX’s role in a new category of ultra-mobile devices powering new applications in consumer electronics, Clearwire indicates it will stay true to its main business of providing a wireless broadband alternative to traditional DSL and cable-based networks and delivering VoIP services. In a recent filing for an initial public offering on NASDAQ, through which it hopes to raise $575m, Clearwire explained that it hopes to continue its existing business while possibly expanding into: “Premium services and applications, which may include wifi hotspots, public safety services, security services, and subscription-based technical support.”

The company left the door open to entertainment services, noting that its mobile WiMAX network may eventually be used to deliver communications capabilities to a new generation of, “notebook computers, ultramobile PCs, PDAs, game consoles, MP3 players, and other handheld devices.”

Following the “if we build it, they will come” philosophy, Clearwire explained: “We further believe that commercial deployment of mobile WiMAX will lead to the development and availability of mobile products that are compatible with our planned mobile WiMAX network.”

GSM: Giant Spam Machine?

2007-04-21T10:08:00.001-07:00

GSM: Giant Spam Machine?

Mobile ads could be poison for users, networks and everybody else.

As Marshall McLuhan said, the telephone is a medium that demands total attention. There is a strong social norm that a telephone call must be answered, and that this overrides any other conversation that might be going on. For this reason, people hate telemarketing with a passion.

Hopes for successful mobile advertising rest on the idea that if you can make the ads relevant enough, then the public will actually like them. In turn, this depends on using the mobile networks’ contextual data to personalize the message, make it location – and time-aware. That sort of contextuality is also what advertisers hope the value of mobile advertising will be.

But doing this raises some problems. There are huge privacy issues – the law, general principles of politeness, and self-interest all mean that personalization data has to be rendered less, personal before it can be released from the mobile operator’s maw. Anonymity and personalization are very difficult to reconcile. But the first is vital, as otherwise the advertiser would be able to reverse-engineer the network operator’s customer database and knock the operator out of the business.

Contextuality also has consequences for the network infrastructure. If you’re doing context, that means that the ad server is making decisions based on data drawn from various network interfaces, including cell location, BSS-OSS, and user history at the least. That in turn means a lot of signaling messages. The Informer recalls gasping with disbelief at an IMS technical conference as the briefer showed logs of the SIP signaling involved in a test project and said that, whereas SS7 took four messages to put a call on hold and then resume it, their IMS had generated no less than 21 signalling messages for the same manoeuvre.

Now imagine trying to do contextual ads in that system. It sounds like the world’s first self-administered DDOS attack. Quick, call Logica-sorry, Acision-and get us another SMSC up here, pronto, and maybe one of those new Cisco switches while you’re at it.

An infrastructure spending binge is one problem. Another is more conceptual. “Contextual ads” mean adverts that are dynamic and event-driven. Rather than selling space near something, mobile networks’ ad sales team will be selling… what? The opportunity to show advert X if conditions FOO and BAR are fulfilled? In other words, advertising to mobile users is going to be more like programming than anything else.

Hands up anyone who thinks the ad world has the technical clue to cope with that. Media buyers and programmers are so different it stretches credibility to imagine they could breed. Mind you, the internet is currently pullulating with start-ups creating various ways to build scripty applications through a graphical user interface. Yahoo Pipes is the best-known, but there are a whole gaggle of techier, enterprise-level plays such as Teqlo and Coghead.

How exactly do you price an advert script created by an advertiser? They will have to have access to your systems to create and test the script, so it will be difficult to integrate this into a traditional ad-buying process. Two approaches sound possible – one would be an ecosystem where third parties come up with the script and pitch it to both the network and the advertiser, and the other would see the network operator charge for the component services of the script. Now there’s a good idea.

A TASTE OF FREEDOM

2007-04-21T10:05:00.002-07:00

A TASTE OF FREEDOM

By Alexander Harrowell

Open-source software for mobiles is coming, and it’s not just because it’s free. China may be the place to look for an outbreak.

In the desktop PC world, open-source software has long ceased to be a geekish, super-minority pursuit with hippy over-tones. The spread of popular applications like Mozilla Firefox has broken down the door for free software to spread, and a computer with one open-source application is likely to gain a second.

In the world’s data centres, of course, open-source was always serious, with Unix, the various open-source BSDs, and Linux being de facto standards for the big machines, not to mention the ubiquitous Apache web server. Similarly, the programmer’s toolkit is getting progressively less proprietary, with the growing popularity of scripting languages and open-source tools such as Subversion and OpenCVS.

But mobile devices have been uncharted territory until very recently. The most common OS, Symbian, is proprietary, as are essentially all of its competitors. Comparatively little open-source application software is available, itself a reflection of the industry’s difficulties in relating to the developer community. However, it’s worth noting that a possible “mobile Firefox” gateway drug does exist – the open-source Opera browser is available as a special mobile version and is gaining a following among technical users.

Another possible source of addicts might be Nokia’s port of Python, the popular scripting language, to Symbian S60 devices. Although S60 is proprietary, Python isn’t – and any applications users create in it will only be proprietary if they decide to make them so. However, a strong current running through the history of open-source software is the idea of providing a full alternative toolchain that will obviate the need to pass through proprietary tools at any point in the development process.

Richard Stallman’s pioneer group set out in the early 1980s to achieve precisely this for Unix, and the result was the modern open-source movement. This requires not just open-source applications, programming languages, or developer tools, but also an open-source operating system.

Since 2005, there has been a steadily increasing number of handsets around that fulfill this criterion, essentially all being based on various Linux distributions. Now, however, a tipping-point appears to be approaching, as a succession of major actors has made decisions that imply the rapid proliferation of open-source phones. Vodafone, for example, has decided on a handsets policy that could be summed up as: “Give me standardization, but not yet.”

The carrier will in future procure devices with any of three platforms – Symbian S60, Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 (and presumably 6), or Linux. This in itself is enough to create a sizable mobile-Linux business. Given that the other two are the only mobile OSs likely to be specifically demanded by customers, it’s clear that Vodafone would like mobile Linux to become obvious. That means the potential for a lot of phones.

On the manufacturer side, Motorola is becoming the most aggressive handset vendor in adopting Linux. Although it announced at 3GSM that it was re-opening its relationship with Symbian, and would launch a Symbian-powered handset again, it also announced a clutch of Linux devices. “Linux is our strategic platform of choice,” says Christy Wyatt, VP for Ecosystem and Market Development at Motorola. “We expect to ship 60 per cent of our product line with Linux installed.”

Motorola’s significant Chinese interests have so far accounted for the great bulk of its Linux sales. There seems to be something of a centre of expertise emerging in Shanghai, where a number of mobile device designers and software houses specializing in Linux devices have established themselves.

E28, for example, soft-launched its 2800 series of smartphones running Linux in China in mid-2004, before bringing them to this year’s 3GSM, where it demonstrated live hand-off between UMTS and WLAN with Bridgeport Networks’ FMC solution.

Meanwhile, Yahua, makes Trolltech’s Greenphone, which was specifically designed to permit user modifications of the OS, as well as some of its own devices. Yulong, Haier, and a good half-dozen others are all at it, as are ODMs in Taiwan and Singapore.

This raises a question – is the sudden wave of interest in mobile Linux motivated primarily by a desire to avoid paying Symbian license fees, or by a desire for greater programmability? Everyone is aware of the predictions that the next billion devices will have to be dramatically cheaper than ever before in order to reach the underserved, so the “free beer” aspect of Linux should sound attractive.

“The licensing cost is significantly less, but the work you have to do in terms of systems integration makes up for it,” says Wyatt, who adds that Motorola doesn’t intend to use Linux in its low-cost devices. “Our TTPCom products groups and AJAR are ideal for the lower end of the market.” Instead, the bulk of the product line, including top-of-the-range smartphones, will be using it, and only products aimed at specific market will not.

For example, Motorola will continue to offer some Windows Mobile devices in order to cater for enterprises that use Windows desktops and servers. “We use that platform to respond to enterprise demands,” says Wyatt. Similarly, Symbian has enough of a power-user following that it’s worth Moto’s while to have a compliant product in its portfolio.

On the other hand, Linux is Linux; the free, fully general-purpose OS used to run anything from set-top boxes and cash-points to banks’ data centres – and possibly also IMS Call Session Control Functions. There is a natural lower limit on the capabilities, and hence cost, of devices that can do it. And, whatever the device is, if it’s Linux it can be reprogrammed. There’s a reason why peculiarly masochistic geeks go round persuading unlikely electronic devices to run classic computer games, or for that matter, Windows Mobile devices to run Linux, like the Xanadux project does with HTC Blue Angel phones.

And can they be masochistic. As well as Motorola’s MobiLinux, there’s another mobile Linux distro that comes directly from the geekosystem, OpenMoko. This was developed by a group of people trying to build a mobile phone that would be open-source in hardware as well as software, which even Richard Stallman might consider over-picky. Still, all contributions are gratefully received. That’s the point of open-source software, after all.

The device, dubbed the NEO1973, is going to be produced by First International Computer, Inc. of Taiwan, and will be a GSM/GPRS gadget with a GPS receiver, using Samsung processing and Texas Instruments RF silicon. The operating system uses the existing mainline kernel at version 2.6.17x, Gnome’s GUI toolkit, and newly developed stacks for the UI, some applications, and the all-important GSM and GPS drivers.

It will also have Push-IMAP support for push email, although to begin with, the email client wouldn’t perform. After discussions on the OpenMoko community listserv, though, one participant decided to make a new version of the client that speaks IMAP, and success was achieved. Alone among mobile devices of recent years, it won’t support MMS, after the community decided they would rather use Jabber, the open-source instant messaging protocol, or email. It will, unlike most mobile devices, have an IPSec client for high-quality secure VPN working, another reflection of the community’s priorities.

Motorola is also investing in the institutional infrastructure of mobile Linux, by setting up the LiMo Foundation as a standardization body for the technology. The company also participates in the Eclipse Foundation, where Wyatt is its representative on the board. This organization’s aim is, according to Wyatt, “to make available a full, open software development kit (SDK) for mobile Linux.”

Going open-source has, in the past, often been a way of extracting value from software projects whose owners no longer wish to support them. The popular OpenOffice package, for example, originates with the old StarOffice suite, which Sun Microsystems acquired with Star Developments in 1999 and then decided to make available as open-source software. Similarly, the old Netscape Navigator browser was open-sourced when it became obsolete, and formed the basis of the early Mozilla solution. Since then, a succession of tiring projects has done likewise.

It can be done with successful projects, too – Sun has progressively open-sourced the entirety of its Java programming language and tools, as well as the core of its Solaris operating system. The latest version of Solaris is going to be based on the current open-source version, rather than the last proprietary version – it has taken over the development process. Well-informed readers will remember that a venture capital-funded developer team was trying to build a mobile device OS written in Java, SavaJe, until it ran out of money.

Now Java itself is open-source, and SavaJe stalled, the inference is clear that throwing open the project to the developer world might just be the start of something very interesting.

Motorola’s biggest supplier for Linux phones is Oslo-based specialist Trolltech, whose Qtopia applications platform for Linux devices drives most of its product line. Adam Lawson of Trolltech claims that five million of its devices have already shipped in China, mostly smartphones or featurephones.

“Historically, the sweet spot for Linux has been towards the high-end,” says Lawson. “Low cost handsets don’t need the power, and don’t usually have the processor grunt or the memory to make it work. The analysts who are saying that Linux is free, and hence a cost play, are wrong.” It is true that similar arguments were made by large software vendors in the IT world against Linux, Apache, and other enterprise-scale open-source projects, which have over time proven to be deeply misguided.

Lanson argues, like Wyatt and like the OpenMoko team, that it’s all about programmability. “We give our code to the open-source community and our customers so they can get their hands into the source code,” he says. “There are increasing numbers of engineers graduating with GNU, Unix, and Linux skills. More and more chipset vendors are using Linux as the initial bring-up OS.”

Mobile Linux’s biggest market is China. We have already mentioned the emerging cluster in Shanghai, but Chinese operators are the biggest customer for foreign-designed Linux handsets. “Many are surprised to know that Linux is running in 15 to 20 per cent of smartphones, primarily in China and Japan,” says Lanson. “China is our biggest customer.”

It is in the nature of open-source software, too, that if a given market has a concentration of users it will also grow a concentration of developers, simply because anyone with the necessary clue can get cracking. Even though TD-SCDMA continues to lag, may be well worth keeping an eye (or both) on Chinese software development.

On the subject of whether the Java OS project might be revived in open-source, Lanson argues that it is a strong possibility. “Given that they tried for many years, it would be a long-term play,” he says. “But as far as I know, they were close to a fit-for-purpose software stack when they ran out of cash.”

Another Linux feature that may help it succeed in mobile is the OS’s strong support for virtualization, a legacy of its server-world beginnings. One of the Motorola Linux devices launched at 3GSM uses a single ARM11 processor core to handle both applications and real-time baseband processing, with these tasks being segregated between virtual processors. It’s one of the first single-core mobiles, as well as the first to use the ARM11 chip.

In a related development, embedded and mobile OS developer Wind River Inc. recently acquired FSMLabs, a company specializing in Linux for embedded systems. FSM’s technical approach is to run Linux as the lowest-priority task on the real-time OS, permitting a minimum of functions to be carried out in real-time and everything else on Linux. This system, RTLinux, was used in an early prototype Linuxphone FSM created with chipmaker Infineon Technologies. Co-existence with real-time operating systems, such as are used to control mobile devices’ RF functions, is a vital step in the adoption of Linux outside the multi-processor smartphone market.

More than one processor core is usually a bad idea, and multiple cores only exist in the IT world where seriously high performance is demanded. This makes it mildly paradoxical that mobile devices frequently do have them, given the constraints of battery life. The answer is, of course, the dramatically different requirements of radio-frequency and audio processing functions to anything else a smartphone might be doing. Even if that was all Linux could offer, it would already be a persuasive argument for it.

In conclusion, it’s almost surprising that Linux devices don’t already have more visibility outside China. As science fiction author William Gibson said, the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. We can certainly expect a lot more Linux activity, and possibly other open-source operating systems, and if we get that we can also expect a wave of open-source application development. And, given the scale involved, China is likely to be the place where the first global hit Linux device is designed, as long as it doesn’t turn out to be the OpenMoko, of course.

Vodafone’s S60 launches

2007-04-21T10:05:00.001-07:00

Vodafone’s S60 launches

Nokia and Vodafone have deepened their partnership with the release of the first Vodafone-specific software package to all S60 licensees.

The software is intended to enable Vodafone to roll out new services across a variety of different handsets without having to develop a range of different software designs.

Samsung and Nokia are expected to be the first vendors to ship devices incorporating the software this year. According to research from Canalys, S60 is the clear leader in converged device software with 54 per cent market share globally in the fourth quarter of 2006.

DoCoMo makes

2007-04-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

DoCoMo makes

Fast food mobile

Japanese consumers will soon be able to pay for a Big Mac and fries using their mobile handset. Leading Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo has struck a deal with fast food giant McDonald’s that will see the establishment of a joint venture company to plan and manage e-marketing promotions to the restaurant chain’s planned membership club.

The move will be timed to coincide with the introduction of DoCoMo’s iD platform for mobile phone-based credit cards and ToruCa information-capture service at McDonald’s stores.

From October 2007, mobile services for iD credit card payments and ToruCa information-capture will be introduced in McDonald’s stores throughout Japan. The joint venture company will be established with around ¥300m in capital, with 70 per cent coming from McDonald’s and 30 per cent from DoCoMo.

Vodafone introduces

2007-04-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

Vodafone introduces

B2B ad model

Vodafone has introduced a business-to-business mobile advertising service in the Netherlands. The carrier said it will start with a proposition for two segments in the enterprise market-insurance resellers and pharmacists.

Mobile users will be targeted with content and ads on their phone. In cooperation with Dutch company I-Wood and Dutch Insurance Network, Vodafone will provide the two target groups with a handset, tariff offer and access to specific information.

Vodafone Netherlands plans to extend this model to other target groups. Jeroen Hoencamp, director of Vodafone’s Enterprise Business unit said: “We think advertising and mobile phones are a winning combination. Both advertisers and customers benefit from new services like this.”

WiMAX cheaper than 3G

2007-04-21T10:02:00.001-07:00

WiMAX cheaper than 3G

But for how long?

WiMAX spectrum is significantly cheaper than 3G bandwidth and in some cases has been less than one thousandth of the cost of 3G for a given geographic area, according to figures from Pyramid Research.

The analyst notes that a correlation exists between the price per MHz per person and the GDP per capita of the country in which the license is used. In India, Brazil, and Ukraine, where GDP per capita is low, the price per MHz per person is less than $0.01. By comparison, in countries with high GDP per capita, such as the UK and Germany, the price per MHz per person is slightly over $0.01, while in the US it is greater than $0.03.

Dan Locke, analyst at Pyramid Research, said that bidders for WiMAX spectrum to date have been smaller players, with large mobile operators remaining faithful to the cellular technology roadmap.

“Deep pocketed MNOs have long felt that owning 3G spectrum was central to their strategic future. Few feel the same about WiMAX or are willing to enter yet another expensive auction,” he said.

And Locke believes that WiMAX spectrum is about to get a lot more expensive as more regulators release lower frequencies to be used for mobile WiMAX. These bands are attractive because they enable an increase in traffic capacity without the need for additional base stations.

In Britain, expectation that the 2.5GHz UMTS Extension band might be opened to other technologies has caused a stir and could be the starting gun for UK WiMAX. The move has also drawn interest from leading cellular operators, with Vodafone believed to have registered an interest.

Heavyweight interest could well push up the price of WiMAX spectrum, as operators are not averse to competitive bidding if they believe they will achieve a worthwhile return on investment.

Berners-Lee Calls

2007-04-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Berners-Lee Calls

For Openness

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, made a ringing call for openness, decentralization, and user control on the mobile web in his speech to the Innovation Forum at the 3GSM World Congress.

Some of Berners-Lee’s comments seemed controversial to his audience of telco executive, as he called for a re-examination of some of the industry’s most traditional beliefs.

“The serendipitous re-use of information happens because when I buy an internet connection, I don’t specify the websites I am going to connect to,” he said. “If you buy an internet connection, and you run a web server, then I can connect to your site. I don’t find my ISP saying that it wants to be my supplier of music and so it will block access to any site I try to load music from.”

This is probably not what the numerous mobile operators who are keen on applying DRM-based restrictions to their mobile music players wanted to hear.

Berners-Lee characterized technologies as falling into two categories, “ceilings”, which restrict their possible uses, and “foundations”, which maximize the variety of possible uses and the spectrum of users who can adapt them to their own needs.

“Ceiling technologies are the end of the road of innovation. When you want to make a foundation technology, you need to look ahead. You need to put aside the short term return on investment questions and look at the long term,” he said. “A great example of this is the patent question. In 1989 my colleagues in the internet community would not have dreamed of patenting the ideas in the internet protocols.”

Cisco Helps Give Mobile Operators Greater Security

2007-04-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

Cisco Helps Give Mobile Operators Greater Security

In an increasingly uncertain World

Cisco is aiming to help mobile operators secure their networks and protect their subscribers from an expanding array of network-borne threats.

Less than a decade ago, hazards including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, worm outbreaks and viruses, many of which are now mobile-specific, were not a concern for mobile operators. This was because their networks were isolated, connected only to tightly-controlled infrastructures such as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the Signaling System 7 (SS7) network that linked all operators so they could deliver a single product – mobile voice.

Since then, however, mobile networks have been undergoing a number of transformations. Traditional voice backbones based on Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) are being replaced with IP networks that are much faster and more flexible and efficient, allowing mobile operators to deliver not just voice, but literally hundreds of IP-based services to their subscribers.

PSTN and SS7 networks are no longer the only ways in and out of a mobile network. Direct connections to the Internet, roaming exchanges, corporate customers, information services and application providers have proliferated, making mobile networks some of the most accessible and interconnected in the world. And mobile devices, once limited to simple voice services, have evolved to an astonishing level of sophistication.

These transformations are just a few of the many that have occurred as mobile operators deploy third-generation networks. 3G networks and services enrich the lives of subscribers and deliver promising new markets, and revenue. However, they also expose both subscribers and operators to new risks. For example, the proliferating connections to the Internet, roaming exchanges that are critical for the delivery of rich new services also provide a vector over which malicious parties can hack into systems, launch DDoS attacks and propagate worms or viruses.

Increasingly powerful and sophisticated 3G mobile devices offer a unique concern for mobile operators, for they can serve not only as the target of many exploits, but also as a source. Many 3G devices are essentially small form-factor PCs and furthermore with the advent of 3G PC cards millions of laptop computers are now using 3G networks for wide-area broadband services.

Protecting 3G mobile devices from attack, and protecting mobile networks and subscribers from compromised or malicious devices, is a daunting task, especially given that mobile operators can no longer exert complete control over device capabilities or configuration. A further area of concern is the availability of peer-to-peer applications allowing 3G mobile devices to become a source for potentially huge volumes of data that can overwhelm limited network resources or negatively affect the experience of other revenue-generating subscribers.

Addressing these and other risks is critical if mobile operators are to minimize disruptions and meet subscriber expectations for service reliability, data security and privacy. The key to overcoming them, says Brian Daugherty, security business development manager within the service provider mobility team at Cisco, is to “Manage, monitor and mitigate.”

To help operators, Cisco offers a suite of no less than 13 security solutions that can be applied to mobile network infrastructures based on Global System for Mobile communications, Code Division Multiple Access, Wi-Fi or Dual-Mode architectures.

Mobile operators can apply elements of this security suite to harden their IP infrastructure to help protect their borders, help ensure that subscribers are complying with established policies and help prevent worms and viruses from propagating over their networks or disrupting their critical servers and services.

AT&T vs Verizon battle heats up

2007-04-16T14:34:00.002-07:00

AT&T vs Verizon battle heats up

By Tammy Parker

If they truly take up the competitive challenge, two US telecoms titans could lead the way to a host of converged services as they battle one another.

The die was cast on December 29^th, when the US Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T’s buyout of BellSouth, its partner in top US mobile operator Cingular Wireless, enabling the largest telecoms merger in US history to close immediately thereafter.

The buyout was valued at $67bn when announced in March 2006, but a subsequent 25 per cent run up in AT&T’s share price boosted the deal’s final value to $85.5bn. The merged AT&T is flush with an impressive market capitalization of more than $220bn that might be used to develop new service, improve its network or buy any needed spectrum.

The new telecom behemoth’s biggest competitor in the United States is Verizon Communications, which co-owns Verizon Wireless with Vodafone Group. Though Verizon has shown over the years that it pulls the strings when it comes to the US wireless operation, there are concerns about how fully integrated Verizon Wireless’ operations can be with Verizon’s landline products, given the ownership situation. Yet Verizon is apparently not holding back.

That will help raise the competitive bar given that integration and convergence is what the AT&T-BellSouth merger was all about. AT&T is phasing out the Cingular moniker, and immediately after the merger closed, AT&T announced it intends to integrate all of its wireless and wireline IP networks, combine product portfolios and merge customer care capabilities. The company’s new AT&T Unity calling plans provide unlimited wireless minutes for calls to and from AT&T landline and wireless phones.

AT&T has also said it intends to sell ads on mobile handsets, internet TV and broadband networks.

The planned integration of mobile services, TV and broadband raises an interesting point. Though it’s known that AT&T has been looking at partnering with parallel mobile TV networks such as Qualcomm’s MediaFLO or the DVB-H network being built by Crown Castle’s Modeo, the operator has made no public commitments so far.

AT&T’s current mobile video service enables customers to watch video highlights from top media outlets. But it will need more than that if it is to market an advanced mobile TV offering in conjunction with AT&T’s expanding fibre-to-the-node Project Lightspeed service, which is in about a dozen cities.

Verizon Communications leads AT&T in IPTV, with its FiOS fibre-to-the-home platform having attracted 118,000 customers at end-3Q06, and it is moving quickly to launch broadcast mobile TV using Qualcomm’s MediaFLO USA network in Q107.

During a January 7^th press conference on the eve of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Verizon announced the impending launch of the MediaFLO-based V CAST Mobile TV service, Verizon reps said they hope to eventually integrate the mobile TV offering with Verizon’s FiOS IPTV project.

Denny Strigl, Verizon’s president and chief operating officer, said the carrier is leading the way in the next revolution of television: “with the strength of our fibre networks, we have transformed our business.”

The plan initially involves letting mobile customers remotely program their DVRs from their handsets, much like a service planned for later this year by a joint venture of Number three mobile operator Sprint Nextel and four cable TV operators.

Meanwhile, the top three US mobile operators are all busy battling it out in 3G. AT&T’s WCDMA/HSDPA network has been rolled out to 165 cities, including 73 of the top 100 markets. That pales in comparison to the vast coverage of EV-DO networks built out over the past couple of years by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel.

And the biggest handset announcement so far in 2007 from the new AT&T does not have a 3G component. The operator signed an exclusive, multi-year partnership to market Apple’s iPhone, which will not arrive until June, and that handset will not have WCDMA/HSDPA capability but will instead use EDGE and wifi networks for data connectivity.

Like AT&T’s other mobile music services, this iTunes-powered offering will not offer over-the-air downloading, only sideloading from a PC. That contrasts with the approach of Verizon Wireless, which has offered OTA downloads and sideloads of music for more than a year. According to one source, the vast majority of songs downloaded through the V CAST Music Store are sent over-the-air to users’ handsets rather going to a PC for later sideloading.

Meanwhile, AT&T’s merger with BellSouth may have the unintended consequence of strengthening WiMAX offerings from either Craig McCaw’s Clearwire or Sprint Nextel. In order to secure FCC approval for the merger, AT&T agreed to divest BellSouth’s 2.5GHz wireless spectrum holdings, which would fit nicely with spectrum holdings of the two aforementioned WiMAX networks, which are currently being built out. Both Clearwire and Sprint Nextel have signaled interest in buying the 2.5GHz spectrum licenses from AT&T.

ORANGE GAME FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING

2007-04-16T14:34:00.001-07:00

ORANGE GAME FOR MOBILE ADVERTISING

By Sean Jackson

Advertising is gaining some traction as a champion for mobile content. But is subsidizing necessarily the way to add value?

January 2007 saw a slew of announcements regarding mobile advertising, continuing the trend established in 2006. Delegates can expect it to be a major talking point at this year’s 3GSM World Congress.

Advertising has been talked up in the past. The difference now, we are told, is that there are enough high-end handsets out there to deliver the level of quality that leading brands are happy to be associated with.

Whichever way you look at it, mobile content has so far failed to set the world afire. Proponents of advertising are promising to solve all that. How? Simple, advertising will make mobile content more affordable for the consumer.

Orange France is using a system supplied by Amobee Media in order to test the business model behind using advertising to help fund mobile content. Subscribers are being offered the option of downloading a game from games publisher Filao at a reduced price or for free, just so long as they opt in and agree to receive advertising within the game.

A number of leading consumer brands are taking part in the trial. The ads are served during idle time in between levels or while the game is loading. For a period of two months, users will have the option to request further details on each brand, either by initiating a call by opening a WAP session, or to click past the ads and continue with the game at any point. Filao has integrated Amobee’s HAPI (Handset Application Programming Interface) into its games. The HAPI is a small SDK file that enables the games to receive ads.

It’s true that, when consumers are given something for nothing, they will lap it up. Someone has to pay, though, and therein lies the problem.

Why would leading brands want to subsidize a product that only a select few were interested in buying (often cheaply) in the first place?

Dan Olschwang, CEO of search and advertising firm JumpTap agrees: “When you subsidize the content it cheapens the content. Subsidized content has a lot of hype surrounding it, and it has potential, but it is a limited potential. It is on the horizon and some operators are talking about subsidizing voice or data, but advertising is not a saviour, we’re trying to provide an upsell.”

JumpTap offer a solution that combines search with advertising. Olschwang backs the sponsored-links approach to generating advertising revenues, although he did concede that the subsidized content market does have some limited potential.

“Mobile is the only media that has not relied on advertising. So we have the luxury that users have a propensity to pay for content. First we need to ask how we layer in an ad model,” Amobee CMO Patrick Parodi told MCI, adding: “It should start with choice. If users want to pay then they can. Advertising doesn’t necessarily mean free and our system allows for that.”

Parodi pointed out that network operators play a unique role setting up a campaign. “If you compare it to the web, a destination is only able to generate advert revenues from one site. So only Google can make money on the Google site. Mobile is different, and the network operators are in a unique position. Amobee provides a service that allows for ads that benefit from knowing the user’s history,” he said.

At the time of going to press there were no publicly available statistics on the success of the Orange trial. Parodi remained bullish, claiming the revenues associated with the advertising make more than the subsidy cost. “We feel the ad model can quadruple the business,” he said.

Another network operator enjoying success with advertising is Temasek subsidiary AIS Thailand.

The carrier is using a solution provided by idle screen specialist Celltick to offer leading brands the opportunity to carry out individual campaigns. One such campaign saw Japanese automotive and electronics giant Honda broadcasting teaser messages with the aim of drawing viewer into a free to enter competition. The firm paid the carrier $1 per click-through, the campaign ran for a three week period and received, on average, 5,500 click per day.

Celltick’s CEO Stephen Dunford gave MCI an indication of the revenue split. “In situations like this a media agent will be involved, and they will generally take 15-20 per cent of the revenues. The rest is shared between Celltick and the operator. Celltick manages and maintain the service.”

When it comes to the revenue share Amobee’s Parodi advocates a tried and tested approach: “We believe that, whatever the split is at the moment, it should pretty much stay the same. The media companies own the content and that is what is being advertised against, but the mobile companies have the technical know-how to make that advertising tailored to the users across platforms, “ he said.

It seems like persuading the network operators should be fairly straightforward-consumers too are likely to ambrace this new ‘free’ world of mobile content.

It could be a little trickier persuading the brands that mobile advertising has long-term value. There are more problems than solutions at the moment, but the arrival of widespread third party brand advertising on mobile phones is almost inevitable.

NO CLEAR CONNECTION

2007-04-16T14:33:00.002-07:00

NO CLEAR CONNECTION

Between mobile and tumours

A study across five northern European countries has concluded that there is no clear connection between mobile phone use and the development of brain tumours.

The study, published in the online version of the International Journal of Cancer in January 2007, looked at the link between mobile use and glioma (tumours) and is thought to be the biggest study of its kind.

Researchers interviewed 1,522 glioma sufferers and 3,301 cancer-free participants in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the UK. They found that regular use of a mobile phone, duration of use, or the cumulative number of calls had no affect on the risk of developing glioma.

However, the research team did argue that those glioma sufferers who have used a mobile for ten years or more have a 39 per cent higher risk of developing glioma on the side of the head on which they typically hold their handset. It also showed that long-term users are two per cent less likely than average to develop a glioma on the side of the head where they do not hold their phone.

The study concedes that there could be a risk of error associated with recall, which could affect the reliability of the results.

Professor Anssi Auvinen, Research Professor at the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, which reviewed the results of the study, told that there, “remains some uncertainty about the biases in the study,” particularly people’s recall of use over a ten year period.

Asked if people could rest assured that mobiles were, after several studies, now safe, Auvinen responded that, “more research is definitely needed. If you want a stronger understanding of how mobiles affect the brain there needs to be significantly more work done with more data and many more variations. It is important also that any new research should be done looking at current use, rather than historical use.”

Moto strengthens up

2007-04-16T14:33:00.001-07:00

Moto strengthens up

3G platform

At the end of January, as if in response to analyst criticism of its 3G portfolio, Motorola announced an expansion of its relationship with Texas Instruments to include 3G, WiMAX and OMAP technologies.

Motorola will develop 3G handsets based on processors from TI’s OMAP3 architecture which should be available in 2008.

Motorola also plans to use the OMAPV1035 solution in forthcoming low cost multimedia mobile devices and the OMAPV1030 chipset in new mid range devices expected to be in the market later this year or early next year.

“Today’s announcement significantly expands what Motorola will be bringing to market in the future,” said Ron Garriques, executive vice president of Motorola and president of Motorola’s Mobile Devices business.

Additionally, TI will also be developing a customized Motorola WiMAX solution, and providing digital design elements, analogue components, RF solutions, and manufacturing process and fabrication expertise for Motorola’s core 802.16e mobile WiMAX portfolio ahead of new mobile devices that Motorola plans to launch during 2008.

AN APPLE A DAY

2007-04-16T14:32:00.002-07:00

AN APPLE A DAY

Is still months away

Unveiled just nine days into the year, the arrival of Apple’s iPhone in January 2007 will likely prove the biggest handset product launch of 2007. Never has a phone been so hotly anticipated and the flurry of unsolicited comment that succeeded the launch served to underscore its impact.

It’s just one phone, of course. The firm’s competitors in the mobile space pump out broad portfolio semi-annually. And it won’t see commercial debut until June this year at the earliest, through an exclusive deal with Cingular in the US. European availability is slated for the fourth quarter, with the Asia Pacific debut trailing into 2008.

Free of buttons, the phone’s touch screen gives access to a widescreen iPod, capable of playing music, movies and displaying photos, as well as a phone and a rich HTML browsing client. Wifi, Bluetooth and EDGE capabilities – where’s the 3G? – allow for surfing and email access with built-in Safari, Google and Yahoo search and a full QWERTY soft keyboard.

In terms of extra hardware the device sports a two megapixel camera, built-in speaker and microphone. Stealing an idea from the gaming market it also employs a motion sensor that switches the display from portrait to landscape when the device is rotated. A proximity sensor detects when it is raised to the ear, switching off the display until the call is finished.

All that’s been written about the phone – much of it resoundingly positive, some of it bordering on the hysterical – is based entirely on what Apple has promised about the device’s capabilities. There is, after all, no other source of information on the product. That’s not to suggest that Apple won’t deliver on its pledges; the firm clearly has the skills. The storm of coverage only serves to demonstrate the frenzy of expectation Apple has been able to generate.

Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo probably summed it up best, though, when he said to MCI: “I don’t mean this in a negative sense but the thing that you learn in this business is: until somebody has it and they can show it to you and it works – and it works on multiple networks – and it has delivered, you don’t know how real it is.”

SINISTER BUG

2007-04-16T14:32:00.001-07:00

SINISTER BUG

Invades TomTom GPS units

A Trojan that attacks GPS devices sounds like the stuff of security nightmares. The possibilities are endless – it’s hard to work out whether the danger that hackers might make it produce wrong results is worse than the risk that they might make it return the user’s location to anyone who wants to follow them.

But this February 2007, it happened, as GPS vendor TomTom confessed that all the G0910 GPS receivers produced during one week in October had been shipped with a virus aboard. The Trojan, Backdoor.Win32.Small.io, exploits the Windows Autorun function to initiate other malware on the gadget once the GPS is connected to a PC or other computing device running MS Windows.

The exploit came to light after a user who bought a brand new GPS connected it to a PC, where anti-virus software detected win32.Pervloga.A and TR/DropSmall.qp. According to Kaspersky Labs, detection rules for the malware have been available since June 2006, so anyone who updates their anti-virus software regularly ought to be safe.

TomTom’s advice to users is to scan the device’s hard disk with their anti-virus application and remove the infection.

CINGULAR

2007-04-16T14:31:00.002-07:00

CINGULAR

In $31,000 billing fiasco

Cingular – soon to be AT&T Wireless once more – has celebrate the re-creation of Ma Bell by billing an 81-year old man $31,000 for calls he couldn’t physically have made. Oliver DeSofi had been expecting a bill for about $150 when he received one for $21,042 instead. Having called the operator, he was told that more calls had been made and that the outstanding balance now stood at $31,000.

The itemized bill showed some 4,500 roaming calls to United States from Nicaragua, a country DeSofi had never visited.

Further embarrassment was caused when it was discovered that many of the telephone numbers called no longer existed, or had never existed in the first place – a sample being 000-000-0000.

JOB CUTS

2007-04-16T14:31:00.001-07:00

JOB CUTS

At Motorola

3,500 jobs are to be lost at the world’s second largest mobile phone maker, Motorola.

The announcement came in late January 2007, days after the company announced a slump of 48 per cent in its revenues to $624m as it cut prices across its handset range in a bid to keep up with Nokia.

Announcing the company’s results, CEO, Ed Zander, said: “We are very disappointed with our fourth-quarter financial performance.” The job losses amount to some five per cent of the company’s global workforce, which Zander believes will save the company around $400m over the next two years.

Ovum analyst Martin Garner noted at the time that Motorola’s problems probably began during Q306, when Nokia and Motorola were locked in intense price competition. However, other analysts believe the problem is more to do with Motorola’s handset portfolio which is showing signs of weakness. In a conference call with analysts, Zander acknowledged as nuch saying: “the area where we are missing is a very strong 3G product.”

Motorola said its 2006 net profit shrunk 19.6 per cent.

SONY AND WARNER TEAM UP

2007-04-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

SONY AND WARNER TEAM UP

On mobile music in China

Two of the world’s leading music companies have partnered on a joint venture in China that will research and develop technology for distributing media content to mobile phones.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group have joined forces to make what Warner described as “a strategic investment” in Access China Media Solutions.

Access China Media – a joint venture company Access and US firm Melodeo – creates software designed to improve the user’s experience of downloading music, video and ringtones. China currently has around 460 million mobile users and the two firms are betting that, as mobiles become more sophisticated, they will play an increasingly important role in entertainment.

Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business at Sony BMG said: “We think a good chunk of those consumers will be looking at their phones as an entertainment device.”

According to a statement from Sony and Warner, the pair will be focusing closely on Chinese oriented music. Sony and Warner will also be keen to examine how to make China’s music market, in which piracy is rife, more secure. Michael Nash, senior vice president of digital and business development at Warner Music said: “Physical piracy in China is an enormous problem that’s created a crisis around investment in repertoire and artists.”

INTEL OFFERS “DRAFT 802.11n” PLATFORM

2007-04-16T14:29:00.002-07:00

INTEL OFFERS “DRAFT 802.11n” PLATFORM

US chip vendor Intel, has peeled the wraps off its new 802.11n wifi platform. As the final 802.11n spec has not yet been signed off, Intel’s upgrade will join the ranks of other platforms based on the “draft 802.11n specification”.

Unfortunately, analysts and researchers have long been warning consumers and business to put off upgrading to 802.11n until the final spec is approved. Many fears there are likely to be wide variability between “draft compatible” specs.

Towards the end of January 2007, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 working group unanimously approved draft 1.10 of the 802.11n specification. All that is left now is for the IEEE to sign off the draft, which will be the final specification for the technology. However, the draft is not expected to be fully approved until 2008.

Intel’s next generation Wireless-N technology is now being delivered in conjunction with new notebook computers powered by Intel Centrino Duo mobile technology from OEMs such as Acer, Asus, Gateway and Toshiba.

LINUX PROPONENTS REV UP

2007-04-16T14:29:00.001-07:00

LINUX PROPONENTS REV UP

LiMo Foundation

A handful of telecom powerhouses banded together in January for the official launch of mobile Linux collective, the LiMo Foundation.

Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile, Samsung and Vodafone intend to collaborate on a Linux-based software platform for mobile devices.

A not for profit organization, the foundation is aimed at blending the community-based development benefits of Linux with development practices from the mobile community in a bid to minimize fragmentation.

The LiMo Foundation will also be seeking new members interested in participating in the development of a set of APIs, architecture, and contributing source code for the common components of the Linux-based mobile platform.

EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

2007-04-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

By Paul Beaver

High-speed uplink packet access (HSUPA) is still being standardized but, even during the first stages in its design cycle, developers need test platforms to be available to help them identify and fix errors. That is why test solution providers are playing a key role in helping to bring this latest stage in the evolution of WCDMA to market.

Should you be unlucky enough to stand at the foot of an exploding volcano, lava will not be your first concern, but rather the flow of hot gases that precede it down the slope. Major evolutions of GSM and WCDMA technology are similar, with a steady rollout of new technology heralded by a fast-moving blast of rhetoric and hype that whistles through the trade magazine and conference programmes, leaving a scattering of new and exotic acronyms in its wake.

This picture very much characterizes the emergence of HSUPA today, which is provoking much debate, while the tangible evidence of progress seems harder to make out. However, behind the smoke and noise of the hype, the first design and prototypes for HSUPA infrastructure and user equipment are being developed and tested today.

HSUPA – or high-speed uplink packet access – represents the next stage in the ongoing evolution of WCDMA, and is intended to bring increasingly high levels of performance and enable new wireless broadband applications.

The evolutionary shifts in WCDMA have been driven and defined by the 3GPP standards, which represent an ongoing process of collaboration, negotiation and debate between its many members drawn from the wireless technology industry. Iteration of the WCDMA standard, known in 3GPP as a release, represents the distillation of many hundreds of papers submitted at the 3GPP working groups.

Despite the complexity of the standards process, an overview of the 3GPP releases provides a fairly straightforward outline of how WCDMA has evolved, and the roadmap for its future. The first 3G products brought to market followed the 3GPP Release 99 specification. The Release 5 specifications introduced the next significant step change focusing on HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which used advanced modulation techniques to provide downlink data rates up to approximately 14Mbps to support packet-based multimedia services.

HSUPA was ‘born’ through Release 6, and provide an enhanced uplink data transmission service to WCDMA 3G networks. Employing some of the same principals as HSDPA, such as fast scheduling and retransmission with incremental redundancy, HSUPA achieves higher data rates at the air interface by utilizing a new dedicated channel and employing variable spreading factor allocation.

The example of performance for a 3G terminal enabled with HSDPA and HSUPA are provided in the table. They illustrate that throughputs are comparable with current speeds for ADSL connections in use today.

By offering data rates of up to 5.76Mbps and reduced packet latency in the uplink, HSUPA will enable a wide range of wireless broadband data services including interactive video applications, gaming, VoIP and instant messaging. Existing service will also be improved to better meet customer expectations. For business users, HSUPA will bring the experience of working remotely via wireless closer to that of wired networks. Popular applications such as mobile email will be sped up through latency improvements and higher data rates will let users send large attachments such as PowerPoint files. And for those users with a more creative streak, mobile blogging, including the uploading of video clips, will become more straightforward and rapid.

HSDPA is about enhancing the ability to receive data of the user and, by extension, about enhancing existing patterns of user behavior that are focused on consumption of content. While HSUPA has some technical similarities to HSDPA, it essentially aims to support a very different model of user behavior, one where people use the network to create and send their own content. In this respect, the mobile industry is following the online world, which is currently adopting the Web 2.0 model. This encourages participation, creativity and co-existence of peer-to-peer relationships alongside traditional broadcasting of content. Just as IMS is promising to adapt telecommunication services and content to this new world, HSUPA will deliver the appropriate capability to infrastructure and user equipment.

In describing the promise of HSUPA, or even explaining the progression of 3GPP Releases as above, it is possible to create a falsely deterministic impression of HSUPA. It is quite wrong to believe that the industry has a collective vision of how the desired features would be delivered, and that development of infrastructure and user equipment only started once the standard had been ratified. In reality, the work to build equipment started long ago, while the march to create a standard was still underway.

Developers are beginning to test their ideas about how a new technology can be implemented before the specification for the technology is finalized. Despite clear aspirations, there are often many hundreds of potentially contradictory submissions to be reconciled and distilled towards a consensus. And much of the early work to deliver a new technology is carried out in this initial fog of uncertainty. However, this is how many companies ensure their competitive position: developing products by making educated decisions on where the standards are going to go.

In certain stages of this pre-standards development phase, technology vendors cannot work in isolation, but need to work in ecosystems that bring together user equipment vendors, infrastructure vendors and, crucially, service providers. Service providers are critical in this mix because they hold the knowledge and ‘big picture’ vision that links the technology to user behavior – and thus to service evolution. Working together helps to identify the common requirements for the emerging standard, and allows each group to use the technology or the network of the others to test their solution.

Setting the risks on standards aside, developers still want to make sure they are testing as much as they can, as early as they can. In order to prevent or guard against delays to development projects, developers need test platforms to be available from the first stages in the design cycle in order to help identify and fix errors as early as possible.

Accordingly, test solution providers play a key role in helping to bring new technologies such as HSUPA to market. Through the provision of test solutions that deliver early test capability, developers can begin to eliminate the risks associated with leaving testing until later in the development process. Although access to early test capability is clearly a major concern facing developers, consistency is also a key. Test solution providers must work to ensure that both the underlying physical layer and protocol baseline implementations within the test solution and the key control interfaces remain consistent throughout the development cycle. This maximizes efficiency and ultimate confidence in the end design. Instances of hardware errors being detected once the equipment is on the production line do very occasionally occur, but rigorous testing at all stages of the development programme ensures that issues are identified and remedied earlier in the process, and starts with fundamental components such as the chipset at the heart of every design.

For example, a user equipment vendor could find that the integrated circuit (ASIC) designed for a new device will not be able to provide the necessary processing to run a desired technology. In this scenario, development progress towards the saleable product would be seriously impaired while the ASIC is redesigned. Until a few years ago, user equipment vendors would wait until prototype hardware had been produced before engaging in testing. This has changed with the increasing sophistication of the technologies being utilized by each new release of 3GPP. For GSM devices, the relative simplicity of the chip design meant that it was possible for vendors to evolve a design and recreate an ASIC very rapidly. With HSDPA and HSUPA, ‘re-spinning the silicon’ can take up to three months and cost as much as US$1m a time. The real headache here is not that dollar amount, but the opportunity cost of delaying a new product by three months and giving competitors a head start in an emerging market. In this environment, testing is starting earlier, with the optimal point of engagement with the testing process occurring when the hardware design is still only in simulation.

Once a device has been developed, it must be certified. Certification requirements and test cases are specified as part of the mandatory certification processes set out by industry bodies such as the Global Certification Forum (GCF) in Europe and the PCS Type Certification Review Board (PTCRB) in the US. Test cases essentially look at how a technology meets a given specification, and also create a simulated process or script to check that each requirement defined in that specification is being met.

The first HSUPA test cases were validated on commercial test platforms and accepted into the GCF in October 2006, with testing companies already engaged with vendors two to three years before this. The only way for companies providing certification test equipment to engage at this very early stage and to deliver early access to test cases is to stay close to the standards process. To participate in the development of the test specifications, with the working groups that create the test cases and the certification bodies, such as the GCF and the PTCRB, mentioned above.

One of the peculiarities of the early days of a technology like HSUPA is that the test solution providers are themselves very much subject to the same challenges as the user equipment vendors that are developing devices before infrastructure is available. Test solution providers need the vendors’ equipment to validate their own test solutions, and vice versa. The only way through this apparent paradox is through collaboration and continual dialogue. In the chaos and noise of the early days, it is these close partnership that lead to success and survival.

THE ART OF FALLING APART

2007-04-16T14:27:00.002-07:00

THE ART OF FALLING APART

By Gavin Patterson

Standards discussion on LTE and 4G are continuing, and with them attempts to avoid the disagreements that slowed 3G standardization in the late 1990s. However, that could be a forlorn hope as technical issues, national interests and concerns over spectrum allocation and IPR threaten to slow progress towards – or completely undermine – global agreement.

The long-held aim of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to have a single global mobile standard is getting closer and closer with new iteration of the respective technology roadmaps. However, just as in 1999 when political differences between the US and Europe saw the identification of a ‘single’ Wideband CDMA-based standard – but with three optional modes (UMTS, CDMA2000 and TDD), a number of Asian countries are now attempting to plant their flags over 4G.

The difference this time round is that rather than future-proofing the legacy interest of CDMA and GSM – as happened in 1999 – major vendors from South Korea, Japan and China are now attempting to ensure that they are central to the development of 4G, having been sidelined by either the wrong technology choice (PDC in Japan) or scalability issues (CDMA in South Korea) with both 2G and 3G.

Indeed, in July 2005 South Korea, Japan and China signed an accord on joint development of 4G technologies, while announcing plans to have commercial 4G services up and running by 2010 “with the intention of adopting a unified communications protocol that could form the basis for a global standard”.

As well as technical issues, the three countries are also planning to harmonize 4G spectrum allocation policies, which will strengthen their negotiating position at this year’s World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-07) to be held 22 October to 16 November in Geneva, Switzerland.

Informa Telecoms & Media learned that when ITU-R Working Party 8F last met in Denver, USA, during August 2006, Japan voiced opposition to proposals that would develop a harmonized 4G technology, and joined with other Asian countries in opposing the use of the 3.6-4.2GHz band for 4G services; this is the band that is emerging as a strong 4G candidate in Europe.

At the Denver meeting, Canada proposed that 4G be a harmonized global standard so there would be no technological differences between next generation systems in different regions. This proposal received backing from France in the EU, while the US “remained quiet” and Japan was “a vocal opponent”.

The process of identifying spectrum bands for 4G at WRC-07 has uncovered major differences between Asia, Europe and North America, while individual regions have also yet to agree on what spectrum is best to use.

“Clearly there’s still a lot of discussion going on in Europe within CEPT (the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunication Administrations) in preparation for WRC-07. CEPT will arrive at recommendations early next year,” says Klaus Kohrt, vice president of government and industry relations at Siemens Communications.

Within CEPT, the 3.6-4.2GHz bands and the 4.2-5GHz bands are under discussion for System Beyond IMT-2000 (also known as 4G), as well as the re-farming of some existing bands. However, Kohrt says, “Asian countries have a lot of satellite systems in place in the 3.5GHz band, and they’re very sensitive [to the possibility that] these satellite would need to be turned off at some point”.

Kohrt says that WRC-07 may not identify common spectrum for 4G that can be used on a global basis. “It’s quite possible that a set of options will be identified at WRC-07, but then it will be up to the regions to decide which options to use. This may be the road we go down. Fragmentation on a global level is a real danger. You have to be realistic as well, and accept that different conclusions can be drawn from the same guidelines. We may not achieve the ideal of a common spectrum for 4G.”

James Person, Asia Pacific director at the CDMA Development Group, believes 4G systems will require contiguous spectrum of 20MHz. “The expectation is that some spectrum owners will need to vacate the spectrum they currently use for it to be re-farmed. There will need to be lots of horse-trading to achieve this.”

Person says that with 4G spectrum, there might be a proliferation of new spectrum bands, which could mean that 4G spectrum would not be contiguous on a region-by-region basis.

On a global level, spectrum under discussion for future wireless services at WRC-2007 will be 410-430MHz, 450-470MHz; 470-806/8862MHz; 2.3-2.4GHz; 2.7-2.9GHz; 3.4-4.2GHz; 4.4-4.99GHz.

WRC-07 will free up 1280-1720MHz of spectrum globally for existing and future mobile communications. In Europe there will be a net additional spectrum available between 587MHz and 1027MHz bands in the 2015-2020 timeframe.

In the meantime, however, development work is still ongoing for 3GPP’s Long Term Evolution, and there may be some surprises in store for proponents of a single, common mobile platform.

3GPP and 3GPP2 are each currently working to standardize the next generation of technology for WCDMA and CDMA, LTE and Revision C of the 3GPP2-developed 1xEV-DO standard. 3GPP2 aimed to standardize Rev.C early in 2007, while 3GPP is aiming for LTE standardization by September.

The two systems both have MIMO and IMS A in the core and use OFDM in the air interface. While the systems share a common hardware at the core level, there is differentiation at the upper, software, levels.

However, following demands from the Next Generation Mobile Network initiative (NGMN), LTE is also being engineered to allow compatibility with CDMA systems such; LTE opens the door for CDMA operators to buy LTE handsets and infrastructure at potentially less cost than Rev.C.

Adoption of LTE by both CDMA and GSM operators would end the long-running technology disputes that have been raging in the industry since the first digital networks launched in 1992, and which were exacerbated in 1999 when the ITU failed to harmonize CDMA and GSM within IMT-2000, bowing to political pressure and opting for three ‘modes’ of Wideband CDMA instead.

However, LTE is now fast emerging as an alternative for CDMA operators to Rev.C as they look to take advantage of the better economies of scale that LTE will offer.

Telus, Canada’s third largest operator is looking at adoption either LTE or WiMAX – which 3GPP says itself will merge into LTE – rather than future CDMA technologies, such as Rev.C. “If you look at the situation we’re in now with CDMA handset and network economies of scale, it’s bad,” says a Telus executive. “In five years time it will be even worse.”

And Telus joins a growing number of CDMA operators edging away from CDMA. In the second half of 2006, Brazil’s Vivo and Reliance in India, the sixth and seventh largest CDMA operators worldwide, both indicated their intentions to opt for WCDMA rather than evolutions of CDMA2000 for next generation networks.

CDMA operators are it seems increasingly eager to take advantage of the global economies of scale of WCDMA. South Korean operators KTF and SK Telecom each used to be CDMA-only operators before opting to roll out WCDMA in their 3G spectrum, while in November 2005 Australian incumbent Telstra decided to rip out its 1xEV-DO network and roll out WCDMA in rural areas instead.

Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless, the second largest CDMA operator in the world after China Unicom, also believes the time is right to merge Rev.C with 3GPP’s LTE. Ed Salas, vice president of network planning for Verizon Wireless, told Informa Telecoms & Media that an opportunity exists to harmonize Rev.C with work under way for 3GPP’s LTE. “I may be an optimist, but I believe that we have an opportunity to align standards at both an engineering level and at a technology level,” he said.

More importantly, however, Sprint Nextel, the world’s third largest CDMA operator, has already signaled its interest in LTE by joining the NGMN Initiative.

The driving force behind 3GPP’s LTE is the NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks) initiative. With China Mobile, KPN, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and Vodafone as founding members, NGMN was established in 2006 with the objective to avoid what its members saw as the mistakes made with WCDMA.

“Our mission is to provide a set of recommendations to enhance the ability of mobile operators in offering cost-effective wireless broadband services for the benefit of their customers,” say member in Version 2.1 of a White Paper entitled Next Generation Mobile Networks; Beyond HSPA & EVDO published in September 2006.

“These recommendations are intended to guide the activity of equipment developers and standards bodies, leading to the development of a cost-effective network evolution path beyond HSPA and EVDO in the timeframe commonly referred to as Beyond 3G.”

NGMN members believe that WCDMA was too expensive, did not make good on its promise to deliver a high-speed wireless broadband network, and was tied up with prohibitively high intellectual property rates (IPR).

“The CTOs of these companies started to bang the table, and they laid down some challenges to LTE standardization efforts,” says Adrian Scrase, CTO of European standards body, ETSI, which is overseeing the standardization of LTE.

“The NGMN consortium shook things up, but it has given us a very clear message about what these operators expect. They want only a few radio technologies. We need to address this. They want a clear IPR situation.”

Scrase says the operators behind the NGMN initiative want a single air interface for mobile and broadband access systems. “They want rationality, simplicity, and cost advantages. They want more simplicity than today and improved power consumption. The cost of a LTE base station should align with the cost of a WCDMA base station.

“NGMN was a wake-up call, with the operators saying: “We’ll get out standards from anywhere,” says Scrase. “It doesn’t matter what standard we adopt, providing it’s robust, interoperable and it works.”

The operators behind NGMN don’t want to replicate the WCDMA IPR situation with LTE. The operators want the current IPR regime “to improve significantly”, arguing that the existing Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) regime “does not protect [operators] sufficiently and is under stress”.

However, Qualcomm, whose IPR regime is facing considerable public criticism, says: “The current IPR regime is working quite well.” Gilbert argues that Qualcomm “has taken the IPR issue off the table by committing to no stacking of standards from an IPR perspective”. Gilbertson says this means there will be no extra charge for a vendor that includes Qualcomm OFDM technology in handsets that already have Qualcomm GSM / WCDMA chipsets.

ETSI says that IP discussions might be prevalent in the selection of technologies for LTE, and that it might select technologies based on a pre-conceived understanding of the cost of technologies. Scrase concedes that if the final LTE standard contains essential IPR for which the owner isn’t prepared to comply with its IPR policy, the standard will have to be re-written.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

2007-04-16T14:27:00.001-07:00

COMMERCIAL BREAK

By David Wilson

With the rise of the internet and the increasing personalization of communication channels, there are already questions over the future of traditional ad-funded media. Enter the mobile phone, offering advertisers a ubiquitous medium and operators a way to promote and subsidize content. But can a business model for mobile ads be made to work – and will consumers buy into it?

Mobile advertising is an enticing prospect. Operators are keen to expand their ARPU and gain market share. Advertisers are facing an increasingly fragmented media market, with more and more communication channels challenging for ever-smaller groups of ‘eyeballs’. The mobile phone channel would seem an ideal, personalized way of reaching consumers.

Of course, mobile advertising has been around for some time. Numerous companies have run SMS/MMS campaigns, and WAP services come with banner ads. However, it is now much more feasible, enable by the likes of WCDMA and especially HSDPA. It also has the potential to be highly successful, with big opportunities for brand sponsorship of content such as TV, music and games to be transferred to the mobile channel.

However, one difficult lies in maximizing potential for advertisers. Personalization, perhaps the biggest strength of mobile, is at present also still a weakness. Operators have not collated their CRM databases to the extent that they can target individual subscribers – which are what advertisers want.

To establish a new advertising channel, there is a need to build new relationships and business models. Players in the value chain must decide the fundamentals of how business is done, how results are tracked and who – and how much – is charged. Operators and advertisers must cooperate not only with each other, but with content developers, as well as with technology enablers.

At present there is little understanding between the various industries, and much more collaboration is needed if a new ad-funded model is to work. Operators need to address data mining issues and there needs to be a major, and costly, overhaul of back office systems. But, with experimentation still very much the watchword, which types of mobile advertising are most likely to succeed?

The first key issue is user acceptance. Mobile advertising only works where ads are relevant, contextual and permission-based-driven by consumer ‘pull’ rather than by advertiser ‘push’. At its basic level, this means encouraging users to view content or vote for their favorite celebrity by offering something in return – free air time, texts, music downloads, multimedia content, or the chance to win prizes.

Effective targeting is also essential. A Harris Interactive survey, conducted in August 2006 on behalf of mobile marketing and advertising platform provider Enpocket, found that targeted mobile advertising was 50 per cent more acceptable to mobile internet users than untargeted ads. Of 1,200 users surveyed in the US, Europe and India, 78 per cent said they would be happy to receive mobile advertising tailored to their interests and, of those, 64 per cent would be willing to provide personal details to improve the relevance of targeted ads. Fifty-eight per cent of respondents said they would prefer banner ads displayed on mobile internet pages to mobile marketing text messages.

The report also suggested that mobile operators can reduce churn and increase ARPU if they use consumer data to personalize content merchandising and promotion. Of the respondents, 57 per cent said that they would be more likely to remain loyal if their carrier personalized services and products to their need, and 42 per cent said they would be more likely to buy more mobile content if they received personalized recommendations.

Enpocket has clients across Europe, Asia and the US. It works with major operators, media partners like CNBC and Trinity Mirror, and brand clients such as McDonalds and MasterCard. Some clients simply license its technology, while others opt for a complete service that encompasses planning, creative services and analytics. A recent package agreed with US-based go2 Directory Systems, a provider of local search and movie guide information, included click-for-coupon advertising, click-to-locate retail outlets, mobile internet-based micro-payments, affiliate partner text message programmes, and campaign reporting and analytics.

Enpocket’s Marketing Engine is a multi-format mobile marketing campaign management system, integrating both push and pull consumer messaging that spans SMS, MMS, WAP and the web. This means an operator can control the messages the consumer sees, regardless of format. The Personalization Engine delivers predictive analytics and automated personalization, using a system of analytical models to ‘score’ mobile users based on past behavior.

“Mobile marketing is reaching an interesting and critical phase of development, because for the first time in the marketplace it is happening in all continents,” says Jeremy Wright, co-founder of Enpocket. “Until the second half of 2006, SMS was widespread, especially in Asia, but now mobile advertising is being launched in Europe and the US. This will create much more interest in the medium and will pull in the advertisers.”

“We are now at a point where mobile vouchers and coupons are taking off – big brands are realizing the potential of mobile campaigns to drive traffic and to get people into stores,” says Wright.

Enpocket ran a trial campaign with Robinsons Barley Water (a brand owned by Britvic) at the 2006 Wimbledon tennis championships. Bottles of the soft drink carried an SMS shortcode number, which tennis fans could text for the chance to win Centre Court tickets. In a parallel promotion, mobile users sent their photographs to a number and the best were displayed on a giant screen, again with the chance to win tickets.

“Vouchers and coupons have a simple, unique redemption value,” says Wright. “I think, in the early stages at least, that this will be the main mobile e-commerce application. Its real strength is the fact that the mobile phone is carried on the person at all times, giving it a big advantage over PC-based internet advertising.”

Celltick Technologies describes itself as a pioneer in idle-screen applications and mobile interactive broadcasting. Its LiveScreen Media platform delivers teaser messages (silently) to the screen when the phone is on but not in use, in the form of sponsored content, brand campaigns or promotional messages. Subscribers can receive news headlines, traffic reports, games, sports updates, weather – even make-up tips and horoscopes. When a teaser interests them, they click once to access a mini-menu of content and services, and again to access the service itself.

“The content is location-based and interactive, and the messages change every 20-30 seconds,” explains Rani Wellingstein, vice president marketing at Celltick. “LiveScreen is reaction-based and so removes the need for the user to initiate action, and we use broadcast technology, which is cheaper. In effect, we use the mobile screen as an interactive billboard.”

Since launching in 2000, CellTick has sold its technology to operators around the world, most of which use their own branding for the service. Globe Telecom, for example, calls it GLive, AIS Thailand, mLive! and Hutchison in India, HutchLive. “It can be made to feel very local – like a radio channel,” says Wellingstein.

There are three main marketing options with mobile, as Wellingstein explains. “Unsolicited SMS/MMS/voice messaging is very intrusive, but has proven to be very effective. However, you are limited to two to four messages per month before you start having a negative impact on the subscriber. WAP-based browsing is more of a pull-based mechanism, engaging users’ attention. However, even if you assumed that 20 per cent of subscribers used WAP, and that each viewed 10-20 pages per month, would still only be two to four marketing opportunities per month.”

With a model like LiveScreen, he argues, the marketing opportunities are much greater. “You can have 15-30 promotions per month. At the moment our figures show that 90 per cent of subscribers accept the service (i.e. only 10 per cent ask to have it switched off) and that 35-40 per cent each month clicks on a content teaser. Even if we assume that, as the market develops, the acceptance figure might drop to 50 per cent, which means that on average users see four to eight messages per day.”

Until recently, Celltick simply licensed its technology to operators. Now, however, it finds that operators are becoming more open to cooperating with third party content providers, and that a proper media sales function is developing for digital advertising.

“Currently the business model is that 20-30 per cent of revenues go to the media sales people, and the remaining 70-80 per cent is shared between the platform provider, the content providers and the operator,” explains Wellingstein, “Of course, where it’s pure advertising and there’s no content involved, there’s a bigger share for the operator.”

Another model comes from Amobee Media System, which offers the Mobile Media System – an advertising-based server platform for mobile operators. It consists of server and client software that enables the insertion of ads into different types of content – WAP browsing, video, music, SMS/MMS and games – using a single platform. Advertising is targeted and users can choose whether to accept it or not. If they do, they receive free or subsidized content in return.

The company has conducted live trials with a number of tier-one operators across Europe, focusing on games initially, as it has found games players to be more accepting of advertising than other users. The user can opt to download an ad-free game at full price, but choosing the ad-sponsored version gets them a 50 per cent discount. Insertions are served to the screen during idle times, for example while the game is loading or between levels. The subscriber can choose to receive information or even initiate a transaction, or can skip the ad and go straight to the next level.

According to Amobee’s director of business development, Nitzan Yaniv, the key issues are reach, targeting and personalization. “Mobile as a medium has far greater penetration than TV – no-one leaves home without their phone, and it’s a very personal device. As for targeting, operators’ data banks could and should be lot better than they are, but they are still probably a lot better than any other channel. For instance, we know that someone uses a certain type of phone, or lives in a certain postcode area. Potentially it is the most targetable medium in the world.”

User behavior in the trials has so far been very encouraging. According to Yaniv, for every person who has paid the full price for a download, about 60 have opted for the ad-subsidized version. Amobee has also tracked user behavior post-download and created a media model based on usage and the number of ad impressions generated.

“Media value compared with a simple pay-to-download model was in multiples in the range 7:1 to 15:1. The number of ad impressions per user during the life of the game had a value 10 times higher than that of a simple download,” says Yaniv. “You have to factor in the extra costs of the technology but, even at a conservative estimate, operators could potentially quadruple the value of their business.”

Yaniv predicts that, as the market develops, operators will introduce ad-funded price plans with different levels of sponsorship – though not for a while. “I think 2007 will be another year of testing the waters and 2008-2010 is when it will start to gather critical mass,” he elaborates.

As for the business model, Amobee believes it should be based on revenue sharing – which means that the company gets paid only if it generates revenue for advertisers. Advertisers will most likely be charged either on a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) basis, which is the model currently used for internet advertising, or by CPC / CPA (cost per click / cost per action), which is based on user interaction. Instead of operators paying developers a set price for pay-per-download content, again payment will be based on usage.

“Advertisers can bill on the basis of CPA / CPM and can measure the impact of their campaigns,” says Yaniv. “I think that, as things develop, a mix of billing models will be used, with different types proving to be more suited to different types of content.”

JumpTap is a mobile search engine specialist. Its suite of technology – user interface, mobile-specific search engine and JumpTap Advertising Suite – is offered on a white-label basis, meaning that operators can brand it as a seamless part of their own offering.

“We’re trying to bring the same service as the internet to mobile. Google and Yahoo are business worth billions of dollars, and we think that mobile operators should get their fair share of that – hence the white-label approach,” says Eric McCabe, vice president, marketing. “We work with everyone behind the scenes – advertisers, content providers etc – to provide a complete package to the operator.”

As with Google and Yahoo, JumpTap’s search results come with paid-for ads at the top or side of the screen. The system is performance-based, and advertisers pay only when a subscriber clicks on their link. The consumer access the system via an on-screen search application box. Users click to find out more information or click and go straight through to the advertiser, paying per click as they would per call. The business model is based on sharing ad revenue with the operator.

“Sponsored links are not like pop-up ads. The customer must be actively searching for something before they appear – it’s very much pull rather than push,” says McCabe. “This is a fundamental principle as a mobile phone is a very personal device. People don’t want anything that feels too intrusive or that they feel is using up their airtime.

“Currently 70-80 per cent of home PC users use a search engine. We see this getting to the same level on mobile.”

As mobile advertising grows, there will inevitably be a need for regulation. In the UK the Advertising Standards Agency wants to ensure that all services are opt-in and that consumers have the right to opt out within 14 days if they wish. In Europe, the Television without Frontiers (TVwF) initiative is currently being revised, but includes a whole new set of guidelines about what can be advertised on mobiles. This has drawn protest from industry associations, which fear over-heavy regulation could stifle growth.

The industry itself is keen to adhere to best practice, as well as to drive growth in mobile marketing. The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), which brings together operators, service and technology providers and advertisers involved in direct marketing, released a third update to its Mobile Advertising Guidelines in November 2006, in response to advancing network speeds and handset specifications.

The Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) – which focuses more on ad-funded and sponsored entertainment – is working on a White Paper that will address some of the issues facing the industry. The association has 120 members globally, representing all parts of the industry, from operators such as Sprint and Vodafone to content providers such as Endemol and small technology developers.

“There are legislative issues, such as marketing junk food to children, and we have taken someone on board to monitor new developments of this kind,” says Matt West of Alcatel, who is head of the MEF. “We have to ask how best to manage it, and what guidelines or codes of practice there should there be.”

Apart from regulation, one of the MEF’s biggest concerns is to gauge consumer reaction to mobile advertising. “Consumers will tolerate a certain level of advertising or sponsorship, and voice traffic is becoming much more commodity-driven, with multimedia etc as added value,” says West. “There’s more of a mix and, as this happens, brands and companies see an additional point of contact with their target audience.”

Mobile is already a payment culture, as West points out. “Historically, people expect a bill at the end of the month, and to pay for ringtones or wallpaper – unlike the internet, where they react with horror if they’re expected to pay for anything. What we’re trying to do is build a view across the industry of consumer satisfaction levels –and at what point advertising becomes intrusive and a turn-off.”

Another big concern is to foster collaboration between partners in the value chain and manage expectations among value chain partners. “Companies come from completely different worlds, and have different goal and different business models. For an operator a huge concern is building a 3G network that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but for a content / entertainment company that is not even an issue,” says West. “There is also the question of how to get all the partners to work together via a common platform.”

In conclusion, says West, advertising has been on a downward trend for the past couple of years, but mobile now has the potential to stimulate it and drive it forward. “Companies need to look to digital forms of distribution, as traditional marketing channels become more fragmented,” he says. “The consumer has the power and the will to make the decision. Because mobile is so personal you can get a level of individualization and, potentially, loyalty that you couldn’t possibly get though TV advertising. In this fragmented market, the consumer’s wallet is ever decreasing, but mobile has the potential to reach it.”

A DROP IN THE OCEAN

2007-04-16T14:26:00.001-07:00

A DROP IN THE OCEAN

By John White

Many in the mobile industry feel SMS is the only truly successful mass-market messaging format. By contrast with this staggering phenomenon through which hundreds, possibly thousands, of millions of users send trillions of messages, messaging via MMS, mobile email and mobile IM is barely a drop in the ocean. However, this does not mean that these other messaging formats have failed.

SMS has become a ‘dirty word’ for some people. Analysts don’t like to talk about it, mobile operators don’t like to focus on it, and no one acts like its sexy any more. It’s as though SMS is ‘old’ technology fit only for the history books.

This is crazy. Worldwide, SMS still accounts for approximately 75 to 80 mper cent of all non-voice service revenues, SMS traffic volumes are still growing at a breathtaking pace and, as worldwide subscription numbers climb from 2.5 billion to 4.5 billion over the next five or six years, SMS is the only non-voice service likely to gain widespread acceptance among the majority of new mobile users.

Worldwide, SMS traffic hit one trillion messages in 2005, a figure set to reach over three trillion by the end of 2011. Set against that backdrop, of course other messaging formats look inadequate. However, worldwide MMS traffic touched 14 billion messages in 2005 and is forecast to pass 115 billion by the end of 2011. These are not small numbers, and while they are only a fraction of the volume that SMS has achieved, MMS should still be seen as a great success.

MMS has clearly not failed – but it has suffered from the mobile communications industry’s unrealistic expectations of it. MMS was hyped as the natural replacement for SMS. However, that shows a misunderstanding of SMS and the reasons why SMS has been such a big hit worldwide. SMS owes its success to its simplicity. It is the quickest, easiest and cheapest way for two people to communicate a short and simple message and as such it serves as an extremely useful communication option that is affordable universally, even among some of the lowest- income groups of society.

MMS, on the other hand, has been misunderstood from the start. It should be seen more as a mobile entertainment service than as a messaging service. MMS is more complex and expensive than SMS, so consumers are unlikely to use MMS to communicate a simple message when SMS does the job so quickly and easily and costs so little. MMS will always look like a failure when placed alongside SMS, yet when you consider MMS in its own right, as an entertainment application and content delivery tool, and then MMS can be seen as a very popular and successful service.

Which is all very comforting for MMS supporters but it doesn’t explain why growth has been so slow. MMS struggled to gain ground between 2002 and 2004 primarily because the service was not fully supported and the necessary equipment was not in wide circulation. At the time of launch, MMS-enabled handsets – with GPRS support, color screen and camera included – were comparatively expensive, and many networks launched services amid and array of complex tariffs, MMS was often charged according to the size of the message (per KB), which left end users confused about costs and created the perception that picture messaging was expensive.

Further problems were caused by a lack of standardization among handset vendors, leaving screen display for MMS messages unreliable. A lack of signed interoperability agreements between network operators further hampered the potential growth of MMS services. Add all this together and throw in a complex user interface an it is hardly surprising that MMS got off to such a slow start. The industry failed to understand that until the penetration level of MMS-capable handsets reached a certain critical mass, widespread use of the service was never going to happen.

Only now is MMS growing in popularity – largely because all networks are fully interoperable, color-screen camera phones are in widespread circulation and MMS tariffs are now cheap and transparent. Compare this with SMS: worldwide there are approximately two billion SMS-enabled handsets in operation, it’s cheap and easy to use, it is widely supported in almost every corner of the mobile world and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of services and applications that use SMS as a communication medium. That is why SMS is so popular – and why MMS has been so long taking off.

Once we understand this argument, we can put mobile email into perspective. Set against an installed base of two billion or more SMS-capable handsets, mobile email has only just got off the starting blocks. RIM’s Blackberry is widely accepted as the market leading device of choice for corporate executive that need reliable mobile email, and yet, after years of pushing these excellent devices into the market the installed base of Blackberry subscribers worldwide in mid-2006 reached only a little over six million. Taken alone, six million or more is great success for RIM, but compared to the two billion souls around the world with SMS in the palm of their hands, it’s just a drop in the ocean.

Looking forward perhaps ten or 25 years, we should see a future where email becomes the unchallenged number one most popular form of non-verbal communication on the planet. With billions of people connected to the internet, wired and wireless, email will surely by the messaging format that most people use. This, however, is unlikely to be a conscious decision on the part of the consumer. By this time, how an individual is connected to the internet, and which messaging platform he or she is using won’t matter – and the user will neither know nor care how it all works. Messages – text or images, moving or still, with or without attachments, in color and/or with sound – will be sent and received by any device, any time, any place, with or without wires, and telecommunications service providers, if they are smart, will not burden consumers by even trying to explain how it all works.

But getting us to that vision of the future from where we are now will take some time, and there will be some barriers to cross along the way. To move towards a point where mobile email becomes the mass-market messaging format of choice will require absolutely seamless integration of competing technological standards in an industry that so far has a poor track record on standardization. For mobile email to start reaching deep into the mass market we need widespread penetration of email-enabled devices, we need to see simple, transparent pricing and we clearly need effortless interoperability between telecoms operator – not only mobile network operators but also wireline operators and the broader internet community as a whole.

So it may be a while before consumers all use mobile email – but what about the enterprise sector? In the short term, mobile email solutions such as Blackberry will remain popular tools with company executives. Meanwhile, many operators around the world are promoting their own email solutions. This should slowly help the sector to grow. But, as we learned from MMS, it takes a long time for handset penetration to build a critical mass of users, and a long time for a service to penetrate the consumer masses who are more price-sensitive than corporate users.

Further hampering the take-up of mobile email in the enterprise environment, corporate IT departments are unclear about how to integrate mobility into the broader world of the corporate IT infrastructure. For example, should enterprises procure mobility solutions (such as handsets, contracts and support) through their existing relationships for IT services, incorporating supply and support for mobility along with their corporate wireline telecoms, broadband, desktop IT services and so on? Or should they continue buying their IT networking and desktop services from their existing supplier but go directly to a network operator to procure mobility solutions as a standalone purchase? And should corporations equip large sections of the workforce with mobile devices, possibly costing a hefty slice of the IT budget, or can companies tap into the devices these individuals already own? If employee devices are used, who should pay the bill and how does the corporation control network security? Corporations are understandably concerned about making these decisions, and so far no clear precedent has been set.

Again this presents an opportunity for SMS, and a problem for mobile email. While big companies can afford complete mobility solutions, for many small and medium sized enterprises that simply is not an option. In mature markets such as Europe and North America, the vast majority of employees already have an SMS-enabled device in their pockets. Solutions are available to offer some email functionality to SMS, such as copy, backup, archive, forward, auto-divert, out-of-office reply and so on. If enterprises could buy into these solution from network operators at a fraction of the cost of replacing all those handsets, many SMEs might find that SMS has an affordable place in the corporate communications infrastructure, at least for a few years, while the industry tries to overcome the technical barriers to cheap, widespread mobile email for all.

So mobile email has a strong future, but it would be a mistake to expect it to replace SMS for many years yet and probably the best part of a decade. Mobile email will continue to grow year-on-year and big corporations will start deploying large-scale mobile email solutions as time goes by, but mobile email for the consumer mass market remains some years away. Hundreds of millions of email-enabled devices need to penetrate the market first, alongside cheap and easy-to-use services, and technical issues around standardization need to be ironed out before they have a chance to put people off. Remember ‘you never get a second chance to make a good first impression’.

And it’s pretty much the same story for mobile IM, plus or minus a few subtle differences. Again mobile IM requires market maturity to make a big impression on the messaging industry globally. Hundreds of millions of IM-enabled handsets need to penetrate to be in place and operators need to work together to ensure standardization and the removal of technical barriers. Much of the promise around mobile IM lies in the argument that hundreds of millions of individuals already use IM services on their PCs. And these people are likely to switch effortlessly to using IM on their mobile handsets instead.

While this may eventually happen, this theory relies on a number of factors. For one, maybe these people use IM on their PCs because they sit in front of a PC all day anyway – so that’s unlikely to change. Secondly, IM on the mobile handset needs to be a perfect replica of the desktop experience, or better, in order to attract users away from a cheap wireline broadband connection to a more expensive wireless connection. Facilitating this experience will mean network operators, handset vendors and IM heavyweights such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN working closely together to ensure standardization of handset display configuration and so on. Finally, true IM requires presence awareness in order to function as it does in the desktop environment. For operators worldwide to deploy fully IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence Service) – compliant IM services and have those services fully interoperable around the globe will take some time. Until that happens, without presence awareness IM offers little more utility to end users than good old SMS, which everyone already has and already knows how to use.

As markets move forward mobile IM is likely to gain increasing popularity in certain countries, such as the US and some big Asian nations, where desktop IM is already popular. For hardcore users IM is likely to be cheaper than SMS, but in strong SMS markets, such as Europe, operators will keep SMS prices low and IM prices less competitive. Cannibalization will inevitable happen at some stage, once all-IP based networks penetrate the mass market and IMS improves the functionality of IM, but until then SMS is likely to continue to wear the crown.

THE GREAT PRETENDERS

2007-04-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT PRETENDERS

By Guillermo Escofet

The past year has been an interesting one in mobile messaging – and not always for the right reasons. The united front behind the Personal IM initiative announced at last year’s 3GSM World Congress started to falter. The buzz surrounding push-to-talk died out. And consumer mobile email was dismissed by at least one major operator as a niche service. So do any these messaging service now have a real claim to be pretenders to the SMS crown?

The grandiose promises made by some of the world’s top GSM carriers in February 2006 to have IM interconnectivity up and running by the time they got back together in Barcelona for the next 3GSM World Congress were beginning to sound hollow by the end of the year. Not only were there still several technical problems to iron out before a standard for the GSMA-led initiative could be agreed, but it had become painfully evident that carriers still had no clear strategy on how to position the new service – or on whether it would even be called IM.

Although the GSMA dubbed the initiative Personal IM, operators are increasingly leaning toward the idea of marketing the service as an extension of SMS and not as instant messaging at all. This appears to be a rethink since the official launch in 3GSM 2006, when the concept of SMS 2.0 or SMS+, as it is variously named, had not even been mooted.

Some industry sources say that SMS+ is a vendor-led concept promoted by the likes of Followap and Colibria and designed to counteract the growing enthusiasm among operators for ISP-led mobile IM and to create a clear differentiation between this and the Personal IM initiative.

The feeling that the operators’ commitment to Personal IM might be lukewarm at best was reinforced by Orange’s announcement in October that it would be launching Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger – at the same time as it was being deathly quiet about the groundbreaking cross-network IM initiative that it and other French operators had supposedly been working on for a couple of years at least. There was also very little evidence of progress on its global IM interconnection efforts with Vodafone as part of the Personal IM initiative.

Some saw the Windows Live announcement as marking a change in strategy by the France Telecom-owned carrier away from operator own-brand IM and cross-network interoperability.

The GSMA’s Personal IM announcement at 3GSM 2006 came as something of a surprise to many observers. It was widely believed that most mobile operators had slowly but surely come to the realization that trying to build mobile email and IM communities from scratch, independently from established internet messaging providers such as MSN, AOL and Yahoo, was a lost cause. Yet the Personal IM initiative seems to fly in the face of that. The industry body argues that the two billion mobile users worldwide are more than enough of a match against the estimated 200 million PC-based IM users.

But things are not as black and white as they seem. The very same operators – Vodafone and Orange, for example – who seemed the strongest supporters of the February announcement have also been busy striking deals with the likes of Microsoft to hook up to fixed IM communities.

The truth is that operators are hedging their bets. Although they would dearly love to have consumers identify IM as a mobile product delivered by cellcos, the way the vast majority of IM users have discovered the service has been on their PCs via ISPs. Mobile IM is likely to be regarded by these users as an extension of the service they already use on the internet. Only in territories with low PC and internet-café penetration do operators stand a chance of branding IM as their own. So it makes sense that operators are interconnecting with ISP communities to kick-start their own IM services.

Also, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Personal IM initiative may not necessarily be about building a service that competes directly with the image of fixed IM. It looks like most of the operators involved in the project are thinking of marketing the service as an extension of SMS.

SMS+ would, on the one hand, solve the problem of how to build an IM community from scratch, since it would tap into the hundreds of millions of SMS users that are already around. It would also move away from the fragmented model that most carriers have adopted for the rollout of messaging services – launching a separate product with a different name every time mobile messaging technology evolves. First it was SMS, then came MMS, and now come mobile email and IM. But that can confuse consumers and it may go some way to explaining why all that’s followed SMS has so far failed to take off in any significant way – not least in the case of picture messaging and email.

Some operators may want to move to a model more aligned with that of i-mail on NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode. Although i-mail is generally regarded as synonymous with mobile email – the standard form of messaging between mobile users in Japan today – it wasn’t always that way. It first started out as something pretty much resembling SMS, then incorporated picture-messaging capabilities and then finally opened up to email servers around the world, becoming what it is now – but it kept the same name all the way through. There were no issues of legacy messaging revenues being cannibalized by newer, more advanced services. SMS+ would tap into the same philosophy.

SMS+ would essentially fuse SMS with presence. It would also migrate SMS to IP. Personal IM falls within a wider initiative to establish IP interconnection between networks. But the idea is that SMS+ would be fully interoperable with regular SS7-layer SMS. And rather than depend on a username and password for log-in, as with fixed IM, it would be mobile-number-based and would fully integrate with mobile users’ existing phonebook. It could also interoperate with fixed IM communities, however.

This does not mean that operators and ISPs can look forward to a life of peaceful and mutually beneficial coexistence, however. There are still many issues that remain unresolved between both sides.

One that has come to the fore recently is the question of termination charges. Spanish incumbent Telefonica Moviles – another signatory of the Personal IM initiative – recently saw its negotiations with Microsoft to also launch MSN on phones fall through because Microsoft refused to accept termination charges from Telefonica. At the same time, Telefonica would not budge from its position arguing that termination charges are fundamental to the whole fabric of cross-network relations.

Microsoft has not been consistent on this issue, however. It is paying termination charges to Vodafone, for example. Yet with Bouygues Telecom and Ten Mobile in France it is not. It all depends, it seems, on the market strength of the operator Microsoft is partnering with. Obviously, in the case of Vodafone, it felt it was worth compromising, whereas for some reason it did not in the case of Telefonica.

Attitudes also vary among operators. Third-tier operator Bouygues Telecom and MVNO Ten Mobile both feel it is ridiculous to insist on termination charges when transposing an internet service such as MSN Messenger to mobile. They also probably felt they had much more to gain from bending over backwards to partner with a mighty brand like MSN – which in France and many other European countries has a virtual monopoly over the consumer IM scene.

Also more flexible in its approach has been 3G pure-play operator 3, which, having no 2G legacy to protect, is less encumbered by SMS cannibalization fears and less tied down to traditional mobile messaging business models. Although it is not entirely clear whether 3 waived termination charges for its launch of Windows Live Messenger in August, the carrier has taken the bold decision to offer the service for free, mirroring the reality on the fixed internet. The decision paid dividends, since the service had generated a phenomenal 100 million messages in the two months after launch.

Contrast this with the poor take-up so far of MSN on Vodafone. MSN users wanting to message Vodafone mobiles have to first buy a bundle of messages from MSN, whose price covers the termination charges paid to Vodafone by MSN. But for customers used to not paying anything for IM, the service charge has been a barrier. And for heavy users, it works out as far too expensive. No doubt Microsoft will exert pressure on Vodafone to change this.

By contrast, 3 have wholeheartedly embraced the internet business model and hopes that the heavy traffic its service has attracted already will draw advertising and sponsorship money with which to monetize the service.

However, at least mobile IM is finding a market. The fate of push-to-talk is much less clear. Voices of dissent started appearing in the push-to-talk camp during 2006, questioning the strategy taken so far by vendors with the cellular flavor of PTT, principally PoC.

Manufacturers have sunk half a billion dollar into rolling out the PoC standard, yet the VoIP push-to-talk technology has so far failed to generate much take-up, despite numerous deployments.

One vendor of the technology, Sonim, accused PoC of being ‘over-hyped’ and ‘under-delivered’. After its initial hype, said the vendor, PoC went into a deep trough caused by the fact that it didn’t work, it wasn’t interoperable, it wasn’t on enough devices, and it was targeted at the wrong segments.

Sonim’s words could be dismissed as sour grapes from a vendor that failed to win a single customer in its first four years in the PoC market, as opposed to more successful rivals such as Motorola and Nokia. But the evidence from cellco deployments so far backs up Sonim’s somber synopsis. So do comments from some of these operators, such as Portugal’s TMN, which admitted to having problems retaining PTT customers because of performance problems with PoC.

And failures have not only been racked up by the PoC flavor of PTT. The cellular-voice-network flavor pioneered by Kodiak also seems to be floundering. Its launch customer, carrier group Orange, which unveiled its global plans for PTT in early 2004 amid much hype, has pretty much given up on its Talk Now service in some territories, at least on the consumer front. In the UK, the service was discontinued on November 1^st 2006, other than for customers on Orange Business plans.

Some believe that PoC vendors have made a fundamental mistake by trying to bring PTT out of its traditional comfort zone among blue and grey-collar workers and turn it into a consumer, teen play. Although PTT has gained some traction in the latter in the US, its ‘loud and rude’ style of communication does not suit all cultures. However, the likes of Nokia and Motorola see the ruggedized-device market for manual field workers as too niche, and they have naturally wanted to incorporate PoC into the mass-market devices they excel in.

Push-to-talk got the thumbs-down in the mid-2006 Mobile Content Industry Survey conducted by Informa Telecoms & Media. The poll solicited the opinions of 635 mobile industry executive on many of the burning issues occupying the minds of those in the mobile messaging space.

When asked to gauge the revenue-generating importance now and in five years of various messaging services, respondents put PTT at the bottom of the list on both counts relative to SMS, MMS, IM and email.

PTT also came bottom relative to other voice-based messaging services: voice SMS, voice-mail-to-SMS and SMS-to-voice. Voice SMS – a catchall term describing SMS-like voice messaging – topped the chart, although not by much.

Survey participants also see mobile IM as the strongest pretender to the SMS crown, and as likely to win out over mobile email. While 28.2 per cent of those polled either agreed or strongly agreed that mobile email will never find mass-market appeal, 39 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that IM will become the most pervasive form of mobile messaging.

This opinion was echoed by Orange, which at Informa Telecoms & Media’s Mobile Email conference last year dismissed mobile email’s chances of ever become mass market.

Mobile users worth targeting with email represent less than 20 per cent of the total subscriber base, and within that 20 per cent only those above a certain age are likely to be interested, said Orange.

People between the ages of 14 and 21 are just interested in instant messaging, added the carrier, pointing to online community sites such as MySpace, where messaging is centered on IM. In fact, the carrier has noticed dips in SMS usage among certain demographics – which it is blaming on sites such as MySpace.

WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!

2007-04-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!

By Abraham Joseph

Unauthorized access, stolen handsets, data theft, malware, phishing... Threats to the security of mobile devices are growing almost as fast as the choice and sophistication of the devices themselves. But who is most at risk from this growing number of threats? What is being done to combat them? And how serious are they in reality?

The problem of securing mobile devices like smartphones and PDAs is one that challenges enterprises, operators and, increasingly, consumers.

For enterprises, device security is essential, not only to protect the data stored on devices and the corporate resources that devices are able to access remotely, but also to comply with a growing number of corporate governance regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley acts which, although originating in one country or industry, have widespread impact.

For operators, whose primary security concern until recently was airtime theft, several additional factors now drive the need for security on mobile devices. They include avoiding revenue loss from – as well as the high cost of fixing – compromised devices, protecting their brands, and providing confidence to customers in order to encourage the use of advanced data services. Additionally, many operators are now focusing on the revenue opportunities offered by security services in both enterprise and consumer markets.

So what exactly are the threats that need to be faced? Several tasks can be considered to be within the scope of mobile device security. They include:

Ø Preventing unauthorized access to a device.

Ø Protecting data stored on a devices, including its memory cards.

Ø Protecting systems and networks from being harmed through a lost, stolen or compromised device.

Ø Preventing malware and other unauthorized software from being installed or executed on a device.

Ø Preventing inappropriate use of a device.

But why is device security such a problem now? Jari Salomaa, security technology manager at Nokia, offer this perspective. “As mobile device get more computing power and become increasingly feature-rich, the likelihood of attack against potential vulnerabilities exists. Increasingly, the most common attacks are not for fun but against users or systems to obtain critical data that can be exploited for monetary gain.” He suggests also that the way we use the devices plays a part. “They are always with us, they are usually on and they are more likely to carry information that is personal or private,” he points out.

Jesper Svegby, director of business development at PointSec, a provider of encryption software for mobile data protection, agrees. “Five years ago, the information on a device was not much use to anyone apart from the user of the devices,” he says. “Today we have the same information on the handheld device as on the laptop and, in most cases, the data is in clear text and not protected.”

Which leads, inevitably, to the next question: just how secure are our devices? Open operating systems, for example, are desirable from many perspectives, but arguably not from a security viewpoint. “One of the key challenges with mobile devices security over the next few years is the propensity of open operating systems to be attacked by hackers,” says Paul Jacobs, CEO of CDMA pioneer Qualcomm.

Nokia’s Salomaa believes that operating system security issues are being addressed, however. “Platform security is the biggest breakthrough in security in recent years and it will significantly reduce the threat of security breaches on mobile devices,” he says. The company’s E-series phones are based on the Symbian 9.1 operating system, which incorporates platform security mechanisms including VPNs and application signing. The company also offers a file encryption solution from PointSec.

Microsoft, whose Windows Mobile operating system is used by a number of smartphone and PDA vendors including Motorola, Samsung, HP and HTC, also defends its operating system. “The combination of Windows Mobile and Exchange Server includes the security features most requested by our customers such as data protection, password protection and remote and local wipe, and helps them to keep control of their vital information,” says Alex Reeve, director, mobile devices, Microsoft UK. He adds that the Windows platform provides support for third party solutions for even greater protection and that the company works closely with partners like F-Secure and Symantec, both of which are major names in data protection.

As for how seriously we should be taking security threats, at a conference last October, Paolo Simoes, messaging architect at MTN Portugal, suggested that concerns over mobile security might be overstated. “Our feeback suggests that the opex of many security solutions are higher than the real risk,” he said. After conducting extensive trials the company decided to select the best-of-breed solution for each type of threat.

Jan Volzke, mobile director of anti-virus software and intrusion prevention specialist McAfee, offers different perspective. “One of our customers estimates that the cost to disinfect 400 devices was €150,000 (about US$197,000) and another estimates that the cost of disinfecting a phone is equivalent to the average annual subscriber revenue,” he says. The company’s security solutions are embedded in over 30 million devices at NTT DoCoMo and the company is in discussion with a number of handset vendors about embedding its security solutions into device operating systems.

Regarding the current scale of threats, Volkze says” “There are over 200,000 known [forms of] PC malware but only 350 on mobile phones. Of those the majority affect the Symbian operating system. Less than ten affect Windows and only three affect J2ME.” However, he admits that the concern over viruses on mobile phones could be overstated. “Viruses are not the greatest concern at present,” he says. “Operators are finding dealing with phishing and spamming increasingly problematic and costly.”

Currently the best mobile device security solutions will contain many of the items shown in Figure 1.

Of these, application management – the ability to determine whether an application is permitted to run on a particular device and, if so, when and by whom – is of particular interest to enterprises, since employees are often responsible for security breaches. Mossec, a provider of centrally managed device security solutions whose system is used by BBVA and the Spanish Royal Household, takes an interesting approach to application management: the company operates a ‘white list’ system that enables enterprises to ensure that only applications that have been granted explicit permission are able to run on the device. “With mobile anti-virus, a third party decides what is wrong, and the system might need daily updates,” says José Luis Maté, the company’s CTO. “Furthermore,” he adds, “for some enterprises, the playing of games or the use of IM might be a bigger problem than viruses.”

Carsten Brinksschulte, CEO of Synchronica, a UK-based developer of device management and synchronization systems, believes that security management requirements for mobile devices are different from those for PCs. “It is important to choose a solution that was designed for the mobile environment instead of one that is retrofitted,” he says. “In the mobile environment, connections break and the features that you want to manage are different.” The company developed the famous ‘scream’ feature for mobile phones. In addition to locking and wiping a lost or stolen device, network administrators can force the device to issue a loud alarm that continues even after the battery has been removed and replaced.

Kushwaha, CTO of mFormation, a developer of device management solutions, whose system is used by Vodafone, Telefonica and T-Mobile, adds another perspective. “It is important to understand that this is not the traditional IP world,” he says. Management takes place over licensed wireless spectrum and this means that there is invariably a relationship between the enterprise and the service provider and various cost factors come into play.” He goes on to say that as carrier and enterprise worlds converge, it will be better to take the operator approach and modify it to suit the enterprise than to take the enterprise approach to the operator.

Qualcomm’s Jacobs agrees. “I think the culture of managed services and managed devices will overtake the open platform culture of IT because people will not tolerate the crashes and general levels of inconvenience with their mobile phones that they do with their PCs,” he says.

This argument is supported by the experience of US carrier Sprint. After a six-month trial, the company launched its managed security service last September and reports considerable interest from large corporations as well as SMEs. “Device management is nice to have but security hits a very identifiable ‘pain point’ in organizations,” says Stephanie Burnham, group manager, product marketing. “For our customers, information security is vital and applications cannot be rolled out without first addressing the security requirements.”

Mark Whiteman, CEO of RemoteXT, a UK provider of device management and security services, believes that end users are also very concerned about device security. “Information theft is also a major concern, with users’ biggest worry being their data falling into the wrong hands,” he says. The company provides managed network and security services to enterprises that includes backup and restore.

There has, however, to be a trade-off between security and usability is certain to fail,” says Yad Jaura, VP of global marketing at Appear networks, a provider of context-aware enterprise mobility solutions. “A better way is to understand the situation of the user and have the platforms (rather than the user) ensured data security. This is security in context, and means that security can be utilized when and where it’s needed, leaving users to concentrate on the job in hand.” The company is partnering with Cisco in a number of enterprise deployments.

As with other aspects of mobile communications, standards have an important part to play in mobile security. The many organization involved in standardizing device security include the Trusted Computing Group, the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), the Liberty Alliance, the Jericho Forum and the Mobi Forum. The OMA leads mobile terminal standardization and its security working group is currently working on application layer security specifications that will describe how identification and authentication, confidentiality, integrity and accountability will be provided in the application layer protocols.

Device security cannot work in isolation. It needs to interact with other device and system functions such as digital rights management and content management. It also needs to fit within (and be deployed and supported by) an overall device and systems management solution. “It is crucial to manage our client just as any other application on the device,” says PointSec’s Svegby. “Therefore, OMA device management is one of the most important standards today.”

John Rhoton, mobility lead, Advanced Technology Group, HP Services, agrees. “The challenge of securing the access and content [of lost and stolen devices] is compounded in an enterprise environment by the need to enforce security mechanisms comprehensively across the entire employee population,” he says. “This necessarily involves a limited degree of mobile device management, at least to ensure compliance.”

The e-commerce world offers slightly different challenges, however. In fact, Liisa Kanniainen, VP at Nordea Bank and workgroup executive at Mobey Forum, a global financial industry-driven forum, whose mission is to encourage the use of mobile technology in financial services, cautions that when it comes to the use of mobile devices for e-commerce transactions, operators and technology vendors are not the final authority on the design of security solutions. “It is important to distinguish between informational security and transactional security,” she says. “With transactional security, the risks can be much higher because an individual’s or organization’s entire asset portfolio could be at risk. This means that the issuing institution, the entity that is carrying the financial risks, is the one that ultimately needs to decide on the most appropriate security mechanisms.” The announcement in December of the strategic alliance between mFormation and Visa to develop mobile payments solutions shows the compelling logic of this argument.

Despite some of the concerns about their security, mobile devices can still be a critical component of a security process. Tyntec, an enterprise-grade SMS routing vendor that guarantees delivery of SMSs within 15 seconds, reports that its infrastructure is being used by a number of banks to deliver one-time passwords using mobile phones.

Although a great deal of attention is focused on smartphones and PDAs, an increasing array of devices like iPods pose equivalent or even greater risks. “The storage capacity of inexpensive USB devices has created a data management and security nightmare that is now recognized worldwide,” says Paul Huntingdon, EMEA sales director at mobile data security specialist Credant Technologies. “Organization can no longer ignore the threat of portable devices and need automated solutions that centrally detect, protect, audit and enforce security. Without this, the ability to cost-effectively and quickly close these security gaps is impossible,”

Protecting the mobile user entails a lot more than protecting the device. A sophisticated phishing attack can easily be disguised as a friendly SMS. There is general agreement in the mobile industry that user education has a critical role to play.

Ultimately the mobile industry faces an interesting challenge: until enterprises and consumers are convinced about the security of devices the uptake of some products and services will suffer. But interestingly, the adoption of strong security at the expense of usability is also likely to yield similar results.

It is in operators’ and device vendors’ interest to solve device security problems because otherwise they risk endangering their brands and missing out on revenue opportunities. Luckily, they are grasping the nettle and the good news for both groups is that managed services seem to be of interest to both enterprises and consumers.

WHY HSPA WILL SAVE THE DAY?

2007-04-16T14:22:00.000-07:00

WHY HSPA WILL SAVE THE DAY?

By Julian Bright

The failure of early 3G services to fulfill their promise left many mobile operators struggling to justify their investment in the technology. The introduction of High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA), however, has begun to change all of that, and the progression from 3G to 3.5G appears to be heralding an era of true mobile broadband services.

The GSM evolutionary spotlight seems to be firmly on high-speed packet access (HSPA) at the moment. According to industry group the Global Mobile Suppliers Association, 131 operators had committed to the downlink version, HSDPA, including 73 commercial launches, as of November 19^th, 2006. Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that the number of new 3.5G subscribers worldwide will increase by almost 320 million between the end of 2006 and the end of 2011, 84 per cent of whom (269 million) will subscribe to HSPA services.

Operators are reporting significant performance gains with HSDPA. Orange France says its HSDPA network, launched in September 2006 and dubbed 3g+, is delivering three times the bandwidth of 3G. At launch, the 1.8Mbps service was providing an average downlink speed of 1Mbps and latency of around 100ms, according to Henri Roulet, head of broadband mobile network and products at Orange France Telecom Group.

Data rates for HSDPA networks are set to rise steadily, as the early implementations – at 1.8Mbps and 3.6Mbps – rise to 7.2Mbps by around April/May 2007, according to Douglas Ros, VP business development and marketing at data card supplier Option Wireless Technologies. Speaking at the Broadband World Forum in October, Ros said: “We have seen growth in HSDPA really taking off compared to 3G. It’s all about speed.”

HSDPA is just the latest in a series of enhancements to the 3GPP standards that are providing further significant gains in UMTS performance, capacity and cost, says a recent white paper from 3G Americas. With Release 5 HSDPA comes a 50 per cent reduction in cost per megabit compared with Release 99. HSDPA Release 6 will reduce that cost further, the GSM industry body says.

Further capacity-enhancing features will follow with Release 7 and beyond, introducing improvements such as MIMO technology (which uses multiple transmit and receive channels and antennas), theoretically taking peak rates for HSDPA well past the currently expected 14Mbps maximum, and improving the average cell throughput.

In addition, Release 7 includes enhancements to the radio access network that will improve its ability to provide real-time services, such as VoIP, mobile gaming and push-to-talk.

Crucially, it has been very easy to deploy HSDPA from existing WCDMA networks and to provide service continuity, so helping in the rollout phase, says Svend Lauszus, director HSPA marketing, radio networks, at Nokia. The improved performance characteristics of HSDPA, such as its use of the available radio channel capacity through scheduling and superior link adaptation, far outperform 3G, says Lauszus.

“A lot can be done [with HSDPA] in terms of the software in the scheduler and the radio capacity in the devices,” says Lauszus. “When you go further away from an HSDPA antenna there is also a much more gradual drop in speed than with WCDMA, which means you can have more users that have better quality all the time,” he explains.

The HSDPA technology has worked so well that 75 per cent of operators are using a single carrier for both HSDPA and 3G voice/data, says Lauszus. Far from being just a solution for hotspot coverage as some had suggested, 80 per cent of operators implementing HSDPA have done so across their entire network.

Coupled with the rollout of UMTS and HSDPA, enhanced GSM, in the form of EDGE, has helped ensure that the performance criteria for mobile broadband are finally being met, say vendors. Hand-off to EDGE can provide surprising levels of performance, with music and video downloads, email attachments and intranet access no longer trying the user’s patience. “EDGE is often able to deliver better download times than a poor WCDMA connection,” says Lauszus.

Evolved EDGE, which experts say will boost EDGE’s data rates from the current 120-160Kbps to about 400Kbps, is increasingly being regarded by GSM operators as a viable alternative to 3G network upgrades for 2008 and beyond, says research company ABI Research.

Evolved EDGE also forms part of 3GPP Release 7, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2006, leading to commercial implementation in 2007 or 2008. The technology offers spectral efficiency similar to that of HSDPA. ABI Research forecasts that the Evolved EDGE market will generate US$25 billion in revenue from network upgrades and mobile devices between 2008 and 2011, with 504 million subscribers worldwide by the end of the period.

The mobile industry is now preparing to start implementing HSPA in the uplink (HSUPA) in 2007. The first version of HSUPA, which was standardized in Release 6 of 3GPP, is set to raise uplink speeds to 1.5Mbps from the maximum 384Kbps rate currently available using HSDPA. Higher categories of HSUPA will reach a maximum of 5.8Mbps.

Vendors say the improvements in throughput, capacity and latency that are delivered by HSUPA will enable mobile operators to take advantage of the online boom in user-generated content and peer-to-peer communication, and will provide corporate users with enhanced capabilities and improved spectrum efficiency.

Latency should be improved from just under 100 milliseconds to under 50 milliseconds with the implementations of HSUPA, says Nokia’s Lauszus. By contrast, latency for ADSL and cable is 10-20ms, and operators in the Next Generation Mobile Networks initiative are asking for latency of 20ms to compete with DSL.

Most vendors expect to have HSUPA available in the first or second quarter of 2007. Andre Mechaly, product marketing director for Alcatel’s mobile radio division, believes the market will take off by about Christmas of that year.

Cingular is expected to be among the first to deploy the technology. The US operator says that it is testing HSUPA in the lab and that it expects to deploy it across its network in 2007. In Europe, Mobilkom Austria says it plans to launch HSUPA in the first half of 2007. At Orange, however, Roulet does not expect HSUPA to be introduced until 2008.

At O2, which along with Cingular was among the first operators to launch HSDPA commercially, deployment is expected at the end of 2007 or in early 2008 according to CTO Dave Williams, although there is uncertainty as to which markets will launch first. “If we start to see more demand for data services and people use mobile broadband more, then the uplink will come just in time to make the customer experience better,” he says.

As was the case with HSDPA, vendors say that the implementation of HSUPA requires just a software upgrade for recent base stations. O2 for one is well prepared, says Williams. “We had to put the extra capacity in for HSDPA, and we have some spare capacity, so for HSUPA it’s not such a problem. We’ve done all the work.”

Initially HSUPA is expected to be incrementally cheaper than HSDPA, says Michael Thelander of research and consulting company Signals Research Group. But as operators deploy the higher categories of HSDPA and HSUPA, investment in network capacity might have to rise substantially.

“From a base station poin of view, there is no impact from HSUPA, but operators might need to increase transport or to have more intelligent transport mechanisms,” agrees Dina Bartels, director of the UTRAN product line at Siemens.

But the higher categories of HSUPA might also require changes to base stations, says Bob DiFazio, CTO of wireless technology platform specialist Interdigital. “High data rates demand an advanced receiver, and one can expect that the base stations may need to evolve to advanced receivers for the higher HSUPA categories,” he suggests.

However, the need for higher power in user terminal equipment is the most immediate technical challenge that HSUPA poses to the industry. With HSDPA the increase in power that is needed for transmitting higher data rates is provided at the base station, but with HSUPA the increased demand will have to be managed by user equipment without a fixed power source, because it is the uplink that is transmitting more – and hence drawing more power.

Although no HSUPA data cards are as yet commercially available, Option Wireless Technologies said in October 2006 that it had completed HSUPA calls in trials with Nortel and that it expected to have full products ready by mid-2007. Thelander says he expects to see early HSUPA handsets on show at the 2007 3GSM in Barcelona, but that he does not think handsets will be commercially available until 2008.

Alcatel’s Mechaly expects that the corporate market will be the first target for HSUPA. “These are the high-end ARPU people who operators want to capture with mobile email, mobile office, and videoconferencing, because of the improved latency and bandwidth,” he says.

Kai Sahala, head of radio network strategic marketing at Nokia, believes that the mix will be mainly business, with some consumers using the benefits of HSUPA for creating content. “All kinds of videos and sound clips can be shared,” Sahala says.

The low latency levels of HSUPA mean that web browsing would become a better experience and that the most popular online applications in the fixed space – gaming, content sharing and other real-time and interactive peer-to-peer services – would be available on mobile terminals. “The round-trip delay is perfect for peer-to-peer,” William says. “HSUPA gives you efficiencies in the uplink, so you have more capabilities for peer-to-peer and get a good customer experience. It feels faster.”

However, a key aspect of HSUPA, and one that poses a serious dilemma for many operator business models, is its support for mobile VoIP. Mechaly says there are two options for operators with VoIP. “You can see ARPU going lower and lower every year because of competition [and impact of] UMA, WiMAX, etc, and try to compensate for the decline with data,” he says. “Or you can go to all-you-can-eat flat-fee voice and unlimited web browsing, in which case VoIP will be very interesting for you. Whether this is your own decision or a decision you have to make because of competition, the market will decide.”

As for the road beyond HSPA, work on the long-term-evolution (LTE) and system-architecture-evolution (SAE) initiatives for future networks is already well advanced in 3GPP. While LTE is designed to maintain a competitive edge in terms of performance and cost, the 3GPP SAE is the framework for evolution and migration of current systems to one that supports multiple radio access technologies.

LTE has identified peak target data rates of 100Mbps for the downlink and 50Mbps for the uplink, both operating in up to 20MHz of spectrum. “Although these data rates may appear overly optimistic, 3GPP is in the process of describing the target data rates and technology standardization is expected to follow,” says Informa Telecoms & Media.

LTE will be based on many elements of 3GPP Release 7 and is expected to be employing MIMO-OFDM. The current proposals are to use OFDMA in the downlink and single carrier FDMA in the uplink. NTT DoCoMo has jumped the gun as regards LTE and issued a request for proposals for what the operator terms Super 3G – a pre-standard version of LTE developed by DoCoMo itself – with a view to implement the technology by the end of 2009.

Operators have different views as to when they may deploy LTE, says Informa Telecoms & Media. Some, like DoCoMo, would like to deploy in 2009-10, while others would prefer to wait until around 2015.

DoCoMo is also one of seven operators, along with T-Mobile, Orange, KPN, Vodafone, Sprint Nextel and China Mobile, that have formed the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Forum, to establish clear performance targets, fundamental recommendations, and deployment scenarios for a future wide area mobile broadband network.

The organization plane to work alongside the standards bodies to ensure favorable conditions for the rollout of LTE technology in four key areas:

Ø The reuse of assets, including efficient reuse of spectrum.

Ø Competitiveness – including staying ahead of rival technologies.

Ø Readiness in time to capture the appropriate window of opportunity but with no impact on the HSPA road map.

Ø Creation of a new IPR system to support the licensing of NGMN technology.

The final point is a proving key, as the NGMN is concerned that the IPR rules applied to WCDMA haven’t provided operators with visibility of the IPR costs attached to the technology before they committed to it.

One other area where the NGMN believes it can be influential is in the drive towards harmonization across GSM and CDMA standards. However, whether the will exists to achieve such harmonization across 3GPP and 3GPP2 – its CDMA counterpart – remains to be seen.

GLOBAL EFFECT

2007-04-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

GLOBAL EFFECT

By Mark Newman

In 2006 GSM’s reach extended further than ever, helped by economies of scale and the lure of roaming revenues. But this global effect is extending only very slowly into the WCDMA market, while in the all-important area of services GSM is still awaiting the major breakthrough of new applications beyond voice and SMS.

The term GSM resonates more strongly now with developing markets in Africa and Asia than with Europe, the cradle of GSM. You barely hear the term GSM mentioned in Europe nowadays. The talk in the trade has moved on to convergence, IP, 3G and its long-term evolution.

As GSM’s epicenter has shifted south and east, the technology has redefined itself. GSM brought mobile telephony to the masses in Europe. But in the developing world its impact has been far more dramatic. For half – or more – of the world’s 2.2 billion GSM subscribers – mobile is their first and only taste of telephony of any kind. It is cited by governments in many of the world’s poorer economies as a central plank to their political and economic development. Mobile telephony is breathing life into rural communities, connecting friends and families and helping farmers and trades-men to discover new markets.

The growth in the GSM population is astounding. In the Philippines, where 30 million out of a total population of 85 million inhabitants live on less than $2 per day, there is close to one phone for every two people. Brazil, with a population of 188 million people of which 53 million are considered to be on incomes insufficient to meet their basic needs, will soon celebrate its 100 millionth mobile subscriber. And Vietnam, with a GDP per capita of just $3,023, has seen its mobile population double in the last 12 months.

China and India remained the largest markets – in terms of subscriber growth – in 2006 and will continue to be the focus of the mobile sector in 2007. But growth in China will slow in 2007 as the largest cities begin to reach the upper limits of subscriber growth. Shanghai and Beijing both have penetration rates well in excess of 100 per cent. India, on the other hand, still has plenty of room to grow. With cdmaOne operators snapping at their heels in many regions, GSM operators are having to continue to invest in expanding their networks and seek out new lower-income customers.

Much has been made in recent years of the digital divide between the developed and developing world. But for many countries the true divide is between the mobile ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Karim Khoja, chief executive of Afghan mobile operator Roshan, says he receives requests on a daily basis from small towns and villages making a case to receive mobile coverage. And he receives letters of thanks from villagers who have been connected to the country’s mobile network.

Not every mobile subscriber in the developing world uses a GSM phone. Most of the big developing markets, including China, India, Brazil and Pakistan, have – in response to fierce lobbying from parties representing the two rival technologies – licensed operators to use both GSM and cdmaOne technology.

But 2006 saw GSM make great strides and, in some cases, all but stamp out the opposition. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Latin America where, as little as five years ago, TDMA and cdmaOne provided effective competition to GSM. Two out of three mobile subscribers in Latin America are on GSM networks compared with fewer than one in two at the end of 2004.

Operators have based their decisions to migrate to GSM on pure economics. The cost of building GSM networks and buying GSM handsets has fallen sharply as a result of economies of scale resulting from the most extensively deployed communications network and technology in the history of telecommunications. Intense competition in both handsets and networks has been a key factor. In the last five years European vendors have had to survive an onslaught from Asian vendors, particularly Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE.

The operators themselves have counted on falling handset and network cost to make it worth their while expanding into low-income segments. Operators have had to find ways of making new customers spending as little as $3-$4 per month into profitable ones. The GSMA’s ultra low-cost handset initiative in 2004 was an important statement to the handset industry about their role in expanding the GSM footprint, although ultimately low-cost handsets have made their way into people’s hands by a variety of means – from grey market imports to conditioned units to import and export channels that have allowed developing countries to soak up discarded or excess stock from richer markets. In 2006 more than a billion phones were shipped worldwide of which more than 80 per cent were based on GSM.

It is not only developing markets that have been seduced by the ‘global’ effect of GSM. North America was split four ways as it moved into a digital era: cdmaOne, GSM, TDMA and iDEN. But now that TDMA operators – most of which now form part of the enlarged Cingular Wireless – have decided that their future lies in GSM, the battle lines are clearly drawn between just two technologies. For the time being only 37 per cent of US mobile users are on GSM but this figure will inevitably rise given that two of the four national operators use the European-developed standard.

The lure of roaming and its associated revenues and massive profit margin is a big draw for any operator finalizing its choice of network technology. It played a part in NTT DoCoMo’s decision to use WCDMA several years ago. Japan now has two other WCDMA operators, Softbank (previously Vodafone) and E-Access, which is scheduled to launch commercial service some time in 2007. Korea was the other noteworthy absentee on the GSM map but it joined the 3GSM family of technologies in 2006 when SK Telecom launched the country’s first WCDMA network.

European GSM markets have continued their slow evolution to WCDMA over the last 12 months. During 2006, WCDMA’s share of net additions rose from 50 per cent to more than 60 per cent. But this apparent vote in favor of GSM from European mobile consumers is somewhat deceptive. 3G services have not proved a major draw in Europe and consumers have been seduced more by 3G phones than the services they can support. The hoped-for uplift in ARPU generated by 3G devices has proved elusive.

Beyond voice and SMS no single GSM application made a major breakthrough in terms of mass consumer (or enterprise) adoption in 2006. Mobile music has been a focus for operators and device manufacturers and many operators are reporting strong full track download sales. But mobile television is the concept that most excites the industry and 2006 was the year that we saw the launch of full commercial services. Italian WCDMA operator 3 offers programmes transmitted by its TV channel. In the UK Vodafone and Sky teamed up to offer a sports-based mobile TV service. Then, in the last quarter of 2006 US CDMA2000 operator Verizon attempted to cash in on the popularity of community-based internet services in a tie-up with YouTube.

Operators are delivering first generation mobile TV over WCDMA networks but speed and capacity limitations means that they will need higher-speed networks to support a mass market. In the short to medium term this will mean offering services over HSDPA networks that operators rolled out across Europe, North America and parts of Asia during 2006. But in the longer term such services will require dedicated mobile TV spectrum and networks.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the rollout of HSDPA is operators’ caution about thrusting yet another technology on a general public that has grown skeptical about the benefits of new platforms. The early signs are that operators hill hold back from marketing HSDPA in the consumer market.

But it could give them the opportunity to re-launch 3G campaigns. After all, HSDPA will offer mobile users the speeds promised (but never achieved) from WCDMA. Higher download speeds will certainly do no harm as operators continue to promote music, video, games and browsing services that have been held back by disappointing GPRS and WCDMA performance.

The opportunity that HSDPA provides is in the market for laptop – and even PC – connectivity. In November, two Asian operators, Singapore’s MI and SmarTone from Hong Kong launched home broadband services over HSDPA networks. Neither operator has a fixed-line subsidiary so HSDPA has given them the opportunity to compete for DSL revenues.

Looking beyond HSDPA, mobile operators are already plotting 3G’s long-term evolution and its evolution into genuine mobile broadband. The threat of competition from (mobile) WiMAX beyond 2010 is helping to give operators reference points in terms of speeds and timeframes. The ultimate aim of GSM operators is to incorporate many of the key building blocks of WiMAX in their own standard so as to ultimately minimize that threat.

Handset manufacturers and infrastructure vendors have the though job of satisfying the (sometimes) conflicting objectives of the operator community. Faster speeds and support for new applications imply greater investment in networks and devices, but stagnating ARPU levels mean that operators need their suppliers to deliver these benefits within the confines of tighter capex and opex budgets.

In 2006 handset and network vendors acknowledged that there would need to be a shakeout in their sectors to achieve the savings and scale required to meet their customers’ – the mobile operators – objectives. The mergers of Lucent and Alcatel, and of the mobile infrastructure divisions of Nokia and Siemens, mean that the mobile infrastructure landscape is now dominated by four companies: Ericsson, Huawei and the two newly merged businesses. Speculation has now turned to the future of Motorola’s infrastructure business and to Nortel, which has already sold its 3G infrastructure operations to Alcatel-Lucent but plans to go it alone in the mobile broadband space.

The handset business saw just one casualty in 2006 – BenQ’s newly acquired Siemens subsidiary, which it was unable to turn around. This leaves just five major players – Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG. But in a business with declining margins and costly R&D requirements, further casualties may not be too far away. As the mobile phone moves into the consumer electronics space the competitive landscape will start to change fundamentally. We have already seen Nokia emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of digital cameras. In the meantime Sony Ericsson is making a strong push in the MP3 space.

But Apple’s long-awaited launch of its first mobile phone will be the mobile industry’s first and most vivid demonstration that multimedia convergence is a two-way street. It has given telecoms firms the opportunity to expand into the consumer electronics and entertainment space. But, more importantly, it offers leading ‘internet’ and consumer electronics goods companies the change to expand out of their highly competitive markets into the relatively ordered and cosseted world of mobile communications.

WEB-BASED ADDRESS BOOK

2007-04-16T14:19:00.001-07:00

WEB-BASED ADDRESS BOOK

From O2

UK carrier O2 has launched My Bluebook, a service that enables customers to store contact information, text messages, picture and video clips to a free web-accessible personal account. Users can then share the information with friends and family by forwarding a link to the password-protected site.

My bluebook was launched as a result of O2 customer research, which found that 80-85 per cent of mobile users want to be able to back up their phone contacts easily. Nearly a quarter of O2 customers would like to be able to back up their photos, while 10-15 per cent would like to back up their texts.

To upload text messages, picture messages or video clips, users send them to a dedicated short-code, 40202. Currently, users can print photos or create mementos to share such as photo albums, t-shirts and mugs. Early next year, O2 plans to ensure that any text or picture message My bluebook subscribers create or receive will be automatically uploaded to the site.

From May 2007, O2 aims to extend the service to enable customers to upload and keep address book information on line automatically, depending on their device. In addition to the uploading services, O2 wants customers to be able to create blogs and to synchronise their phone and Microsoft Outlook contacts.

A Mobile Q&A

2007-04-16T14:18:00.001-07:00

A Mobile Q&A

ANSA – SMS Question & Answer Service

ROK TV has launched an attempt to combine the pub quiz cheat’s favorite mobile service with user-generated content. ANSA is a text message-based question and answer service. Each question costs 50 pence plus the carrier’s standard SMS charge.

When asked how many users the service expected to have, ANSA replied almost immediately: “ANSA is a fun service. Whilst every effort is made to provide you with correct information, we cannot guarantee the validity of the answer provided.”

Nine minutes later ANSA followed up: “Thanks for using ANSA. We look forward to answering more of your questions. The service costs just 50p. For web site & customer services visit www.ansanow.com.”

And finally: “Should ANSA keep growing at the current rate in the UK, over one million messages will be answered in the first 12 months. The US is expected to be two mil, China – a lot.”

When users text a question the ‘experts’ at ANSA – presumably someone in a call centre armed with Google and Wikipedia – search for the correct answer. If it’s not in the database then the question will be sent to ‘experts’ around the globe.

The expert that answers the question correctly gets paid ten pence. Whenever that answer is used in the future, the expert gets paid five pence.

Sticking on more familiar territory ROK TV has signed up Yamgo, a UK-based extreme sports mobile content provider, to launch a mobile TV channel dedicated to extreme sports entertainment.

PREDICTIONS: TOMORROW’S WORLD

2007-04-16T14:17:00.001-07:00

PREDICTIONS: TOMORROW’S WORLD

By Informa Telecoms & Media

As 2006 winds up, MCI speaks to some of Informa Telecoms & Media’s thought leaders and finds out on what they believe 2007 could hold. MCI polled a quartet of Informa Telecoms & Media’s senior analysts in a bid to cast some light on the coming year and find some answers to the questions the industry will face in 2007.

Mike Roberts

Principal analyst for telecoms infrastructure and technology

2006 has been all about the big deals; the major consolidation we’ve all been predicting has finally begun. Nokia and Siemens was one of the major deals, while the other was Alcatel and Lucent, which will now include Nortel’s UMTS business.

This latter deal highlights one of the challenges the new company will face-aligning and rationalizing three different WCDMA/UMTS product portfolios. Obviously the company will eliminate or merge products to cut costs, but it will be a challenge to do this in a way that doesn’t alienate too many existing customers.

Looking forward, something has to happen next year to Motorola. There could be a match with Nortel’s CDMA business but it doesn’t look like it would solve either one’s problems. Motorola has had a deal with Huawei and, if it wasn’t for politics, on pure logic you could see Motorola putting its networks out to a joint venture. But I’m not sure if a Chinese vendor would be up for that.

Huawei is now making the transition from competing fiercely on price to starting to move up the quality ladder as well, which will continue at 2007. It seems to be all about more growth ahead for them. Obviously this leaves the mid-tier vendors getting squeezed from above and below.

It takes the Chinese taking out a smaller Western vendor more possible. It just depends on political and cultural issues. I think the price would have to be pretty competitive for a Chinese vendor to make an acquisition which would increase their cost base and reduce their margins, which is what it comes down to. The question would be whether what they were getting in technology would worth it.

Going forward the big wildcard is convergence, because all the vendors are going after one another’s revenues. Motorola has been beefing up in the enterprise and fixed broadband. But its mobile is weak so it has to make in fixed so it’ll be looking for something in fixed, either in the telco sense or the IP sense. Everyone’s going to be doing that, looking at the packages they’re putting out and which pieces they’re missing.

In the sort term the top two ranking vendors – Ericsson and Nokia Siemens – look quite safe. For the next few years a lot of the cores of their revenues are going to be driven by software upgrades. For HSPA, carriers are almost inevitably going to go with their existing supplier.

One thing that may happen in the short term, during the integration of Alcatel-Lucent-Nortel and Nokia Siemens Networks, is that Ericsson could gain a few points of mobile equipment market share, since it has a stable product line and can focus on the market rather than merger management.

Nick Lane

Principal analyst for mobile content and applications

The major story of 2006 has probably been the true arrival of mobile TV, through the relationship between Vodafone and Sky. User generated content has also created headlines, although I don’t believe it’s that profitable yet.

The question remains, however, as to whether mobile content will truly reach the mass market. So at 2007 we’ll see more operators feeding the consumers these new services and educating them about existing services like games, music and TV. Gradually they’ll start introducing new concepts like search and advertising-funded content. You’ll see more of the latter comings into play in 2007 as many of the deals have been put in place in 2006.

But there are concerns: Until everyone has the high network speeds of HSPA, I think the user experience will just be too slow. The operators have to ensure that the user experience is of sufficiently high quality. So they have to set the expectations fairly low.

Advertising will creep in as a means of funding content during 2007. It has to. We carried out a consumer survey in the UK, with more than 2,000 respondents. 56 per cent of respondent were aware of mobile TV. A fraction over five per cent have used their mobile to watch TV, which I think is quite high.

But 63 per cent were not interested at all. Fifteen per cent were interested beut were not prepared to pay for the service, which means that you have just over 20 per cent of UK users who are prepared to pay for mobile TV. But only one per cent are prepared to pay more than £10/month. If you’re going to offer a free service you’ll attract 37 per cent of the UK market. If you charge that drops to 22 per cent and if you charge over £10 then it’s just one per cent. The case for advertising content is glaringly obvious.

David McQueen

Principal analyst for mobile handset developments and vendor strategies

2006 has been very polarized, with the dominant trends lying at either end of the spectrum. On the one hand the continued push of low-cost devices into developing markets has occupied much of the vendors’ time while, at the other extreme, there has been a marked growth in the availability of handsets equipped to receive mobile broadcast TV.

Low-cost growth will continue at 2007, although there will be more emphasis on 3G. 3G handset take up came of age in a lot of developed markets in 2006; subscriber growth has been healthy.

In the higher end handsets, we can expect to see the arrival of HSDPA. Nokia has said that 50 per cent of its high end handsets will have HSDPA in the near future, and wifi as well.

2007 could be the year that HSDPA moves away from the laptop. There are already some HSDPA handsets available, and the Korean vendors are to the fore in this area.

At the same time, in 2007 we’ll see more mass market 3G devices arriving, rather than just the high end terminals. And I think you’ll see Chinese vendors such as Huawei and ZTE partnering with the European operators to make this happen.

That said, the top brands have strengthened their grip on the market in 2006. We forecast that 85 per cent of all handsets shipped in 2006 would be accounted for by the top six players [Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, BenQ]. At 2007, a similar proportion of sales will be limited probably to the top five vendors.

The top five brands are doing very well, with Motorola still enjoying the benefits at 2006 of the success enjoyed by its Razr handset. Motorola’s shipped more than 50 million Razr units, which is massive. But if it can’t come up with another product that performs as well, Motorola’s in trouble.

In 2007, some of those top five ranking positions will definitely change hands. And I would think that, Sony Ericsson will be the firm grabbing market share. Sony Ericsson has some great [Sony} brands to build on. It’s done well with the Walkman brand and it’s trying a similar tack now with the Cybershot camera brand. It’s also launching a Bravia TV phone in Japan (Bravia is Sony’s high-end LCD TV brand).

And a lot of the phones coming out will be WCDM. In 2007, WCDMA handsets will be much more dominant.

Devine Kofiloto

Principal analyst for emerging markets and member of wireless research teams

In 2006 the big story in developing markets has been carrier consolidation. What we’ve seen is that most of the M&A activities have been carried out by regional players that have the right experience of these markets. That’s not to say that the big Western carriers aren’t suited to these markets but if you look at their growth market expansion plans, they’ve mostly been moving into Eastern Europe.

Going into 2007, there are far fewer targets available for this kind of consolidation so, while it will continue, it won’t be on the kind of scale that we’ve seen in 2006. There are, however, a few state-owned PTTs coming up for privatization and I’d expect to see large foreign players investing as these carriers privatize.

The companies to watch include MTN, which has done very well, and carriers that have good funding from the Gulf, such as Orascom and MTC.

One thing we will definitely see growth in 2007 is managed services contracts. In many of these markets, the primary growth is now in rural areas and operators have to be more clever as they manage their network expansion and try and keep their costs down in the face of declining voice revenues.

On the handset side, the GSMA emerging market handset project has done its job and the market is managing itself. Even the players that didn’t participate in the programme have suitable products in the marketplace.

In terms of services, though, it will remain about voice. I really don’t think we’ll see any data growth at all in 2007. Although most operators now have GPRS and some are beginning to look at 3G, I think data will continue to be restricted to simple SMS-based value added services.

We’ll be looking for more in-market competition as well in 2007. Many of the markets are still restricted to two players. In the mature markets in Africa, none of the operators have been particularly innovative around their pricing strategies, so we’ll look to increased competition to change that.

THE BIG ISSUES

2007-04-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

THE BIG ISSUES

By James Middleton

ITU Telecom World 2006 kicked off in Hong Kong by bringing together industry leaders, government ministers and regulators to discuss topics including the digital society, lifestyle and ecosystem.

Viviane reding, the EU commissioner for information Society and Media, spoke at ITU Telecom World, calling on goverments to back open standards and facilitate competition between technologies.

Reding argued that businesses should be left to define attractive business models thal will entice consumers to opt for the standard they like best. She said that it was the duty of the governmants to, “eliminate uncertainty by insisting that standards setting procedures are open, strealined and independent and that the standards that are adopted are open and interoperable.”

Although the call for openness and competition came from a European minister, it was just as applicable to developing markets, which were a major focus of the conference. The ITU conference played host to the tenth international Telecommunication Development Symposium, where there was a wide consensus that the next phase of networked communications in developing markets will be based upon Next Generation Network (NGN) technologies.

The NGN concept is intended to be technologically neutral and to span both fixed and wireless, so that the same services can be delivered no matter what access technology is used.

Mario Maniewics, who heads up the ITU TDS, expressed the general consensus that wireless NGNs were likely the best way to tackle the developing world where many countries have problems with infrastructure and electricity.

But in both mature and developing markets, the evolution to next generation networks, at present spurred by the drive for convergence, is throwing up some new regulatory challenges.

Michel Feneyrol, commissioner for French communications regulator ARCEP, said that convergence on a technological level had highlighted a need for convergence at a regulatory level. Feneyrol said that while fixed line communications were usually dealt with by one regulatory body, a separate broadcast regulator was typically responsible for spectrum issues and that transparency and non-discrimination in regulation were only obtainable through an integrated converged regulator for both fixed and spectrum.

Seri Lim Keng Yaik, minister at the Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications in Malaysia, said that the question now is whether to have different regulators for content and carriers or to forge a unified approach. The Malaysian ministry has followed a converged regulatory framework since 1998 and in Yaik’s words, “had an early start and has not looked back.”

Following the consensus reported by the Telecommunication Development Symposium that wireless would be a major access technology in emerging markets, WiMAX was high on the agenda at the conference.

Just prior to ITU, mobile WiMAX chipset developer Beceem Communications had announced availability of the industry’s first baseband and RF chipset that supports all features of the mobile WiMAX Wave 2 profile.

Beceem anticipates that manufacturers will be delivering commercial devices with MIMO capability in the second half of 2007.

In “Future Mobile Broadband: HSPA, EV-DO, WiMAX & LTE”, Informa Telecoms & Media predicts that mobile WiMAX will play a relatively minor role in the mobile broadband market through 2011, largely because Mobile WiMAX notebooks and handheld devices will not arrive in volume until 2008-09 at the earliest. Beceem believes that this push will come as early as this 2007, but Informa also agrees that the wait for commercial product should not obscure the fact that WiMAX will gain significant momentum in the fixed, nomadic and portable wireless broadband segments in 2006-11.

Nortel president and CEO Mike Zafirovski also announced a fivefold increase in invesment in WiMAX during the second half of the year. The company has won a contract to build Taiwan’s first integrated local government WiMAX network in association with operator Chunghwa Telecom.

On the show floor, along with WiMAX, future technologies were a popular topic of discussion. One of the most photographed stands at the show was probably the one belonging to HP.

Although much of the equipment on show a mock-up, Phillip McKinney, HP’s chief technology afficer for personal systems – also known as the company’s “gadget guy” – assured us that everything on the stand was being actively researced and developed by the company’s boffins.

McKinney said he had instructed his designers to remove all the radios from devices under development. Instead, the company has packed all the radio technology into an accompanying device, which will be used to connect all the other devices.

The phone itself could also be eliminated and exchanged for something like a simple ear bud, which acts as a microphone and speaker and connects to a cellular radio in a wrist watch via a technology such as Bluetooth or UWB.

McKinney demonstrated other such possibilities as ultra thin tablet PCs or notebooks, roll up digital displays, and even a connected coffee table which would display media and allow internet access via the wrist watch.

GSM Network Overview

2007-04-16T14:08:00.000-07:00

GSM Network Overview

Abbreviations: (in Alphabetical Order)

- ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode

- AUC Authentication Center

- BSC Base Station Controller

- BTS Base Transceiver Station

- EIR Equipment Identify Register

- FNR Flexible Number Register

- GGSN Gateway GPRS Support Node

- GMSC Gateway MSC

- HLR Home Location Register

- IP Internet Protocol

- IWMSC Inter-Working MSC

- MSC Mobile Switching Center

- PLMN Public Land Mobile Network

- SGSN Serving GPRS Support Node

- SMS Short Message Service

- VLR Visitor Location Register

- WCDMA Wideband Code Division Multiple Access