Do you want HSPA modules in device, if you're aggressive about LTE?

I just had a call with the always-interesting Actix, which provides planning and optimisation tools for 3G networks. They're enthusiastic about LTE, commenting on its ability to lower the costs of mobile broadband provision compared to alternatives like HSPA+.

Certainly, some operators appear to agree - T-Mobile is cited as being an advocate of leapfrogging HSPA+ and going for early LTE deployment. Others like AT&T and Telstra are more enthusiastic about HSPA+ .

(Yes, officially it's called HSPA Evolved, but everyone I speak to outside Ericsson thinks that HSPA+ is a snappier term).

For the LTE enthusiasts, one of the prime attractions is lower cost-per-MB for data compared to HSPA, especially important given the price and use curves of 3G in notebooks and smartphones. There's even a suggestion that they might switch off UMTS 3G networks before turning off voice-optimised 2G GSM.

If that's really the case, I would have thought that having a long-lasting legacy of devices only using the older, more expensive network technology would be undesirable - you wouldn't be able to transition their traffic to the more efficient LTE until much later. Now phones have a natural lifecycle of a year or two, especially at the high end. But notebooks endure much longer.

If you're rolling out LTE as early as you can, do you really want a load of HSPA-embedded notebooks and other devices lingering around on your older network for 4-5 years?

[I suppose you could just give these people an extra LTE dongle nearer the time, although that may mean having 2 SIMs in the notebook operational simultaneously if they don't remove the embedded one].

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Partner conference - Femtocells USA

A lot of the recent buzz around femtos has headed West across the Atlantic in recent months.

Sprint is continuining to roll out Airave, Verizon has been talking about launching its own 2G CDMA femto, and even AT&T has come out and said it's quite keen on the possibilities. And T-Mobile, while better-known for its dual-mode UMA service based on WiFi, has in fact been one of the pioneers in deploying femtos' bigger brothers, picocells.

Against that backdrop, the upcoming Avren conference in Dallas next month should be pretty lively. Details are here - tell 'em I sent ya.

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Redefining "Telco Grade" for the Mobile Internet era

I've been at a couple of conferences this week - covering Telco 2.0 business models and femtocells. At each one, an "old school" telecom speaker has made reference to "Telco Grade" infrastructure and capabilities, either in terms of security models or reliable voice services.


This isn't new - I always hear representatives of incumbent operators or traditional infrastructure vendors talking about "Five 9's" and QoS. Voice quality scores (MOS) get quite a few mentions too.


It made me start wondering whether these concepts, which are heavily rooted in a world where telecoms was all about voice sessions and dialtone, are in need of a serious update.


In particular, any future metrics for reliability and quality need to cast their net much wider. Marek Pawlowski over at the Mobile User Experience has a coruscating post about his nightmare experiences in buying a T-Mobile Android G1 phone, for example. The fact that ordinary circuit calls might work quite well is clearly almost irrelevant to his view of either the "quality" of the operator or the phone itself.

Similarly, if we're talking about IP services like VoIP, IM or even full IMS over a mobile connection, the fact that one link of a long chain has managed QoS (and even differentiated billing) is totally irrelevant if 30% of the time I'm outside decent 3G coverage. That's the gating factor on quality, not what's going on in the middle of the NGN - you might as well just use the Internet.

It's like posting a letter from London to New York, and getting a QoS guarantee that the central London to Heathrow Airport leg of its journey is 99.999% certain to take 47.2 minutes. But there's a 30% chance the flight might get delayed until tomorrow, and another 17% chance the letter will get sent to Boston by mistake. And a 75% chance the guy at the Post Office sold you the wrong stamp in the first place.

It's also critical to think about metrics other than basic coverage and availability when it comes to "mobile Internet grade". Latency, jitter, packet loss and speed of connection setup can be critical for many applications. And it's amazing that many of the so-called "telco grade" mobile broadband networks have distinctly non-Internet grade DNS lookup capabilities. Loading a MySpace page with all its plug-ins might mean resolving 70+ IP addresses, and again, if you do it over mobile the critical factor isn't the operator's core network.

The bottom line is that vendors and operators continuing to use the "carrier grade" and QoS arguments are often missing the point, or are being disingenuous. Why over-invest in "quality" in one part of the network, when basic radio coverage, IP network internals, or customer service are the "weakest links" on your customers' overall perception of service reliability and performance?

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Swisscom - the worst offender in public WiFi?

I'm still staggered that the paid-WiFi hotspot industry has managed to squander a solid four year lead, to become virtually a running joke in provision of mobility access. Awful user experience, shocking pricing and limited roaming are still the norm.

Yes, there are some good experiences to be had with premium-grade providers like iPass or Boingo. But for the one-off user, it's only a matter of time before cellular data roaming kills the business dead.

One of those hammering nails into its coffin is undoubtedly Swisscom. I always wince when I find out that they're the provider of what's euphemistically called a "service" at a conference venue.

Today I was at the Femtocell Deployment conference at the Hilton Amsterdam. The irony of a 27 Euro daily fee for WiFi access at an event talking about cheap & effective 3G indoor coverage was palpable. Of course, I could have opted for the "basic" access of 256kbit/s and no VoIP, for a bargain 22 Euros. In the end, I used neither, and picked up email headers via cellular roaming at a (comparably) sane 2 Euros per MB - itself a travesty, but that's another story.

But the real kicker was this - during a discussion last night, a certain mobile/WiFi operator was named as the villain by a separate conference organiser, this time wanting to charge $54000 (yes, you read that right) for providing delegate access at a proposed future event.

For that money, he could probably persuade one of the carriers to install a full HSPA macrocell in the building, with full-spec backhaul, and give everyone a free dongle & SIM card.

Don't get me wrong, I really like using WiFi, and will generally prefer it to mobile broadband if it's available on a free/cheap basis. The latency is better, the speed is better and I generally get better battery life than with a 3G dongle. But it just amazes me that the industry has such a suicidal attitude to pricing.

Conference organisers: choose your venues carefully. Or just put a few 3G routers or dongle-docks around the room, with some cheap prepaid 3G data plans, and bypass the "house" WiFi altogether. Frankly, I'm surprised the people who rent out lighting & conference equipment aren't supplying these already.

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Mobile broadband - O2 highlights dissatisfaction and returns management

Last week, O2 announced a refresh of its mobile broadband offerings - an area in which it has been pretty weak in the UK so far. As part of its press release, it also yielded some findings from a consumer survey it had commissioned.


In particular, it highlighted the concept of "mis-selling" of mobile broadband - for example, customers' irritation at extra heavy costs for roaming that they hadn't been made aware of at the time of purchase, or what happens if promises of 3G coverage don't match reality.


Disabling "default" roaming privileges, forcing consumers to call customer service and get a lecture on the pricing realities obviously isn't as good as just lowering the cost to sensible levels, but should at least mitigate the risk of serious bill-shock.


More interesting to me is the idea of a 50-day money-back "happiness guarantee", which will apparently "allow customers, who purchased directly from O2, to return the device within 50 days of purchase with no termination fees being charged and any costs for purchasing the device being refunded".

It will be interesting to see whether this forces the competition into reciprocating. And even more interesting to see how this plays into the USB dongle vs. Embedded 3G notebook debate. It's one thing returning a dongle after a month - it won't need much "refurbishment" before it can be re-used. It's another thing entirely dealing with a notebook with an internal 3G module - returns management could be a nightmare for both customer and operators.

Just think about the practicalities for a minute - you buy an embedded-3G notebook. You configure it, download various new applications, start using it, set the passwords, register your copy of MS Office, start using the mobile broadband. Then maybe it doesn't work properly immediately. Or maybe it works OK in the study where you unboxed it, but not in the bedroom when you move it the next day. Or a week later, your network operator tweaks their local cell tower's set-up, or you move house, or you suddenly get congestion in your cell as 10 neighbours sign up.

So you go back to the shop. You complain about poor coverage. Maybe call customer services. You have a dilemma - you need to find another notebook, another operator, or both. If it's an "unlocked" 3G notebook, bought from an independent retailer, you can probably just try another network's SIM in the same device, without too much extra hassle besides sorting the cancellation and new sign-up. But if you've got a subsidised or locked notebook - perhaps bought from the MNO's own retail outlets - you have a problem. You would have to cancel the contract, download your data temporaily onto a USB stick or old PC (if you have one), delete your data & apps from the hard drive, and rebox it before returning it. Then the store would have to reformat the hard drive, check inside the PC to make sure you haven't added/changed anything (memory etc), reinstall all the bundled applications, test it..... and then find someone who will buy a "shop-soiled" laptop. And deal with all the back-office things like cancelling the MS Office licence.

Bottom line - I'd be very surprised to see anyone - including O2 for that matter - offering an equivalent return guarantee for embedded-3G notebooks. (If I'm wrong on this and someone's already doing such a policy, please let me know).

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No WiFi in the Vodafone BlackBerry Storm - a serious mistake?

In the past, I've not been convinced by some of the conspiracy theories around some operators' alleged rabid diapproval of WiFi. Yes, Verizon has been a bit of an outlier on this, and some parts of Asia (China, Japan, Korea) have not been especially enthusiastic dual-mode WiFi/cellular.

My general impression is that when it comes to smartphones, most of the more progressive operators are now relatively open-minded about WiFi. It works OK, battery performance has improved, it's not generally used for canibalising applications - most VoWLAN is usually incremental not substitutive - and it's seen as an important utility by a fair proportion of users and developers. Not only that, but WiFi is starting to be valuable in offloading data traffic from the macrocellular network.

The situation with featurephones has been a bit different - WiFi has been seen as less valuable, software complexities reduce its utility, and the customer base is perhaps more likely to make expensive technical support calls about relatively trivial problems that smartphone-using peers could fix themselves.

The iPhone has demonstrated how appreciated it is. And almost all other top-end smartphones now have WiFi - Nokias, various Windows devices, the Android G1, quite a few of the recent Samsung Symbian phones and so on. So does the BlackBerry Bold.

Which makes its exclusion from the Verizon / Vodafone BlackBerry Storm all the more mystifying - and, to be honest, it seems rather cynical. Yes, I know it's got EVDO and HSPA in it, so it's a fairly complex RF platform, but that's not a sufficient excuse to hobble what could otherwise be legitimately seen as a proper iPhone peer.

Given that Vodafone has quite a few other WiFi-enabled devices in its portfolio, I guess the finger of blame must point at Verizon on this, which has a lot of "prior" when it comes to hobbling handset features. A real shame, in my view.

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Mobile search doesn't exist - a good proof point

For the last two years, I've been saying that "there's no such thing as mobile search". I've completely disagreed with the rhetoric that "people don't want to search on mobile, they want to find things".

Instead, I believe that broadly, people just want to use Google on their phones. If I want to find an address, or a restaurant, or cheat in a pub quiz, there's a perfectly easy way to do it, without some newfangled search tool that guesses my context wrong.

So Symbian CTO David Wood's write-up of a Google presentation last week made me feel validated:

"The surprising thing is that the spider graph for mobile-originated search enquiries had a very similar general shape to that for search enquiries from fixed devices. In other words, people seem to want to search for the same sorts of things - in the same proportion of times - regardless of whether they are using fixed devices or mobile ones."

Unlike David, I'm not surprised.

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