Quick thoughts on MWC

I haven't really had much time to write posts this week as I've been dashing about between dozens of meetings here in Barcelona.

But some quick things to mention;

• Nokia's 6700 Classic is a really nice small phone - I'm definitely a believer in nice well-engineered metals and other materials, rather than squeaky plastic.
• QVGA screens are really starting to look tired on handsets, especially for web browsing and heavy-duty email. I think iPhone-style 480x320 or VGA (640x480) or WVGA (800x480) are pretty much essential for decent smartphones from now on.
• Oberthur's integrated accelerometer-on-SIM is quite clever. But like most SIM innovations, it will suffer from the fact that most users keep their SIMs longer than their phones unless they churn, so it's easy to put new stuff in the handset itself.
• Lots of policy management and DPI products. Lots of different pitches and usage cases too. Some are pretty good as they focus on integration with customer intelligence, providing data to marketing teams. Still lots of unrealistic expectation of app-level policies, often backed up by a deep lack of understanding about application environments and user behaviour.
• Mostly realism about LTE, with timelines being pushed out a bit. Outside Verizon and Docomo, it's becoming clear that the only other big player in a rush towards it is T-Mobile. I'm wondering if any CTO-to-CFO friction will result in them dusting off their HSPA+ scenarios instead.
• Recognition that Voice over LTE is still not fixed, although various propositions are being suggested. Since I identified issues with VoIPo3G and VoIPoLTE more than a year ago, there's been fair progress, but it's still slow.
• ...although not as slow as IMS handset development. Yes, there's some release-1 RCS phones around, with trials being expected for H2 2009. But the really useful stuff like integration with Facebook, plus the addition of iPhone and Blackberry and other members remains at some indeterminate point in the future. There still seems a lack of thought about prepaid vs. RCS as well, while a 3rd-party SDK doesn't seem to be even on the horizon. There's a big risk that dedicated RCS clients will be made redundant by more full-featured browser and web runtimes that can access handset APIs, and which are more open to innovative developers.
• Truphone launched it's Local Anywhere service, based on multi-IMSI technology. Looks differentiated from the other VoIP / roaming offers., Will be interesting to see how this evolves as it looks to sign up partner operators in different countries
• Adobe is still quietly building up an impressive footprint for Flash and its Open Screen project.
• I met the CEO of possible the world's only prepay quadplay operator at the Highdeal round-table I moderated. Very cool business model & billing/charging system indeed.
• I'm a lot less surprised than many people about the announced Nokia / Qualcomm relationship for US Symbian phones, although I'd guessed that it would be Samsung rather than Nokia that would bring them into the fold.
• Lots of noise (and foot-fall on the stands) among the picocell and femtocell crowd. A lot of feeling that "it's actually happening!" now.
• The GSMA OneAPI platform for opening the network capabilities to third parties is emerging rapidly. I saw a good demo on the Aepona stand.
• Apple is conspicuous by its absence. Not that surprising really.
• A fair amount of noise about Android, as expected. But I've met one or two fellow unbelievers around. We'll probably be burned as heretics by the Googlistas.
• My little Samsung netbook has got a full day of battery life for undemanding tasks like writing meeting notes. No carrying around a charger & power cord this year.
• Not much mobile TV or NFC hype, although there's a bit of "digital money" and remittances talk.
• Continued interest in developing SMS as a service. Interesting pitch from Acision about it's new open platform for playing with SMS - for example delayed rather than instant deliveries. Forget the doomsayers predicting the replacement of SMS by IM - it's easier to grow a $100bn business by 20%, than a $10bn business by 1000%. Oh, and SMS over LTE needs to work just as well as voice.
• Less overall pessimism about the economy than I expected. Although that might be because the real doom-mongers all had their travel expenses cut this year.

And lastly, the "villains of the year" award goes to the GSMA Stasi demanding photo ID to get into the Fira precincts in the morning. Yes, I know security is an issue, but I'm not interested in attending any event that's based on Stalinist "We need to see your papers" approaches. Have they been taken lessons in authoritarianism from Gordon Brown & Jacqui Smith?

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Prepaid data - my thanks to the Wiki

If you travel a lot, and you haven't seen it before, I'd heartily recommend checking out the prepaid wireless data resource here.

It lists prepaid data SIMs and tariffs in numerous countries - invaluable if you want to avoid ridiculous and unjustifiable mobile broadband data roaming prices.

Thanks to the Wiki, I managed to get hold of a Yoigo prepay SIM in Barcelona, and it gives me flatrate (albeit slowish) mobile data for €1.20 a day. The SIM costs €10 and comes with €10 of credit. It's great for email and web access on my phone, plus I'm finally able to use Google Maps and navigate myself in a foreign city, for less than the price of an equivalent taxi ride.

It was a bit of a pain to find and buy the SIM. I needed to take my passport as ID, and the sign-up process took about 15 minutes in the store. In other countries like Portugal, the process is a lot smoother.

It's a very good advert for the benefits of unlocked, unsubsidised smartphones. It's also highlighted that I need to get myself an unlocked or reflashed 3G dongle.

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be an equivalent provider in the US - even on just with flatrate EDGE would be useful.

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Time to ditch the phrase "over the top"

One of the big themes of this year's MWC appears to be the justification of LTE deployment business cases. The received (but largely whispered) wisdom seems to be that plain-vanilla "pipes" for normal mobile broadband just won't cut it. You might as well just stick with HSPA and sweat the assets. The CTO of an operator might like LTE's architecture, spectrum flexibility and overall performance - but I can imagine some interesting discussions when CFOs ask "So, what new stuff does it do? How much extra money can we make - or save - and in what timeframes?"

One answer is around operator-managed end-to-end device + service combinations, perhaps for in-car or healthcare sectors. That seems a reasonable target, although I definitely have my doubts about locked or "walled-garden service" laptops.

But I'm also hearing from various large vendors that LTE should enable new revenue streams from exposing QoS or other network assets to web-based businesses or software providers. Fair enough, that's very aligned with Telco 2.0, two-sided business model philosophies.

But there seems to be little emphasis on actually convincing those upstream providers that they really need these extra capabilities - or that the incumbents can be trusted. Given the issues around DPI and Net Neutrality, it would hardly be surprising if many of the Internet application providers viewed these "offers"with wariness. Perhaps they would be better off just lobbying for ever-bigger pipes?

One particular aspect stands out. I've never heard anyone from Google, Facebook, Skype or an enterprise PBX vendor refer to themselves as an "over the top" provider. It's a phrase only used by incumbent operators or major vendors - and usually in a disparaging tone. I get the distinct impression that it's usually used as a more polite alternative to "parasite", on the orders of the speaker's PR team.

I think "over the top" exemplifies the arrogance of the telecom establishment. Most operators wouldn't like their networks and services to be dismissed with hand-waving terms like "plumbing", "legacy" or "dinosaur".

Given that the telecom industry wants to convince these companies to spend money on enhancing "quality of experience", perhaps buying QoS-managed pipes, or advert insertion, or identity management services - shouldn't the industry start being a bit more polite towards their target customer base?

The computing industry refers to third-party applications by the neutral term "ISV" (independent software vendor). Perhaps an equivalent term like "IAP" (independent application provider) would be more appropriate in discussions like these?

There also needs to be an acknowledgement of symmetry. For every capability exposed by an operator and consumed by an Internet player (eg location or messaging or QoS guarantees), there is likely to be a reciprocal relationship in the opposite direction. Why shouldn't an operator use Amazon's data centres for hosted storage - or even use Skype or Facebook as identity and contacts management providers?

If the mobile industry (and also fixed broadband providers) continue to sneer down their noses at Google et al, they should expect to see a even more strenuous efforts by those players to force operators into being plumbers.

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DPI and MVNOs - a question

A quick question for any blog readers who work in the area of deep packet inspection for mobile - is it possible to apply different policies to an MVNO's data traffic, vs. the host MNO's retail services? Also, are roamers subject to their home or visited network's policies?

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The need for a new approach to roaming

I've spent most of this afternoon sorting out all my meetings and logistics for a week in Barcelona at NetEvents and MWC. One thing that's immediately apparent is that despite all the talk of VoIP, SIM-swapping and the like, I'm going to end up with a large bill for voice and SMS roaming.

I've got dozens of meetings, loads of people I'll need to contact (or be contacted by), inevitable changes to schedules and venues, plus all the usual work and personal call traffic I'd normally get in the UK. I'll be paying for both inbound and outbound roaming calls, which even at the EU's maximum 39p per minute is still likely to add up.

It's clearly not an option just to get a local SIM card - most of the people I need to contact will be outside Spain, and there are too many people likely to contact me, to inform everyone of a new number. For the same reason, one of the "roaming SIMs" is probably not a solution. I can't even have a 'regular' Spanish SIM that I keep year-in year-out, as it would expire after a few months without use.

Neither is WiFi an option. The congestion of the Kubi network at the Barcelona Fira is notorious - as is the pricing. And in any cases, much of the calling I'll need to make will be outside the MWC precincts, in the centre of town or assorted other venues in the evening. Even if it was working and relatively well-priced, many of the VoWLAN service providers have haphazard support of SMS, which is absolutely mandatory at trade shows where you have back-to-back meetings. I will have a voicemail message advising callers to text me, as it's the most reliable method to reach me during the show, rather than voice or email.

It's made me even more certain that the concept of paying a multiple of normal calling or SMS rates when you're travelling, rather than just perhaps a moderate % premium, is a complete anachronism. There is simply no adequate justification, either in terms of technology involved or the value to the user - even with the arcane setup of cellular VLRs and whatnot. The fact that a local SIM would work perfectly fine, barring the hassle factor of advising people of a new number, is a potent illustration of how well things could work, if the system didn't stack the odds against you. It's even more galling because my main number is with O2, which is owned by Spanish operator Telefonica, so I'm paying them huge sums to bounce my call around inside their own network.

I wonder what the regulatory view will be like when operators move to a full IMS or softswitch architecture, when it may not even be necessary for roaming calls or signalling to be "tromboned" back to the home network?

My situation (a frequent traveller, but to lots of different countries) is similar but not identical to those in which someone has two or three regular destinations. People living and working across land borders (eg Hong Kong and mainland China, or the Benelux countries in Europe) often need multiple phones, while people with foreign holiday homes, or students studying abroad, have similar problems. In some cases, their non-resident status may stop them from having postpaid subscriptions in a second country, even if they were prepared to pay for them.

What would be good would be a way to get a local SIM or account/number - ideally without physically having to buy one - and for this to automatically propagated to all your contacts when you were in-country. Or for it to somehow be linked to your existing home account in the network.

One set of possible solutions relates to what I was writing about the other day - multi-IMSI SIM cards could potentially allow two or more local mobile accounts to be tied together via a centralised meta-operator. In a way, this would be a more elegant approach than a dual-SIM phone as the meta-operator could essentially do clever things with call and SMS routing, caller IDs and so on, to give you the appearance of roaming but with local call rates.

I've heard various rumours over the last year or so about this type of "local roaming" concept, but apart from a variant used for telematics and M2M data connectivity, I haven't seen much real action. I suspect that actually getting it working, with all the various permutations for call flows, is pretty tricky - and it's also not obvious to me whether you'd still need some form of client software, or if it can all be tied together via on-SIM applications and menus. There may also be dependencies on different countries' regulatory and commercial stance on MVNOs, plus there are requirements for registration of all SIMs' owners in some markets.

I live in hope. But in the meantime, I think I'll just be very concise with my calls next week. Blame O2 if you call me and I sound abrupt or rude.

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Cheap dongles still selling "like hot cakes"

I just went into my local Vodafone store - I was going to get one of their £39 prepay HSDPA dongles, as it's usable abroad for £10-a-day (ie less than hotel WiFi in some places), albeit with a 50MB daily cap.

Hopefully I'll have other alternatives next week while in Barcelona, but I thought that as a backup, that was a pretty good option - especially as it should also work in the US, where I'll be in 3 weeks' time. My usual mobile broadband provider, 3 UK, is great when used "on net" on other 3 networks in Sweden, Hong Kong etc (it's free, no roaming charges), but reverts to £3 per MB elsewhere - like Spain and the US.

Unfortunately, the shop had none in stock. They've sold 6 today - on a mix of prepay and postpay deals - especially to students at the various universities and colleges nearby. I asked the manager about embedded laptops (they sell Dell Mini 9's), and he said that although they sell a few a week, the overwhelming majority of customers are going for dongles.

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Bought a netbook....

Given Barcelona's reputation for "tea leaves", especially around the time of MWC, I'm a bit wary of carrying expensive stuff around with me next week. I know several people who've been mugged, pickpocketed, scammed - and I've even seen a cyclist snatch someone's bag off their shoulder right in front of me on one occasion. I like the city, but it's not the safest, especially during an event when every crim in Spain knows there will be tens of thousands of extra laptops and phones in peoples' bags and pockets.

Add to this the fact that I want to take notes directly into a PC during briefings and meetings, but don't want to heft a big computer and the power brick around all the time.

The answer - join the throng and buy a netbook. After two of the most gadget-tastic people I know (Andy Abramson and James Body) mentioned it to me in the space of a week, the Samsung NC10 went to the top of the list, especially as I've had two Samsung PCs before and have been happy with them.

The main spec-related arguments are the big battery (7+ hours of light use apparently) and the 10-inch keyboard and screen which are pretty useable. There's no built-in 3G modem, but I'm happier using dongles anyway, or perhaps a handset with Joiku on it. Cost - £280+VAT

Some observations - although clearly a lot of netbooks are being sold through mobile operators or mobile retailers like Carphone Warehouse, the general PC channel also seems to be doing a brisk trade. The shop that sold me the Samsung said it was the 12th one that they'd sold that day, plus another lot of MSI Wind netbooks. Apparently, almost nobody asks about integral 3G modems at the moment. Most of the ones in CPW or PC World in the UK are sold with separate dongles, if they bundle them with an MNO contract.

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