GSMA Mobile Broadband announcement - a billion dollar ho-hum

Lots of fanfare this morning about the announcement of GSMA's big "Mobile Broadband" branding exercise, whereby notebook vendors will put a sticker on embedded-3G notebooks, reminiscent of Centrino or WiFi.

Some good stuff in the announcement, notably a $1bn marketing budget which is obviously likely to help drive the uptake of both embedded and external solutions. But also lots of self-serving propaganda as well (as exemplified by the quote from Gemalto, maker of SIM cards).

But the focus on WiFi hotspots in the PR points out just how narrow a niche the initiative is addressing. Personally, I use HSPA a lot as an alternative to hotspots - but that's because I'm the type of user who really needs access in a lot of different places, and I cringe at the stupid prices charged by the likes of Swisscom in hotels and airports. My next laptop might well have an embedded module - as long as the price is right, and it's not locked to a specific MNO's data plan.

But I'm in a minority - as, I expect, are most readers of this blog. The vast majority of notebook buyers - consumer or corporate - won't be buying an embedded-3G notebook any time soon. Many don't need mobility anyway, and others will be happy with dongles and tethered 3G phones.

I'm buried in other stuff today, but I'll get back later in the week to why the curve of 3G "attachment" in notebooks will be much shallower than that experienced by WiFi a few years ago.

And as for the semi-serious mention of refrigerators with embedded modules in the PR.... I remember the "screen fridge" in all those house-of-the-future demos back in the late 1990s. It says a lot about the balance of reality vs. wishful thinking in the whole announcement.

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Multiple devices per account on WiMAX + also wholesale options

I saw an interesting announcement this morning from Bridgewater Systems, about a solution to enable WiMAX operators to control the number of active connections per user/device. While it's being pitched as a sort of fraud-management tool, it highlights something pretty important:

WiMAX services will enable multiple devices per subscription

This isn't news as such - many market participants like Sprint have been saying this was likely for some time. But it's something that the existing cellular providers and architecture are pretty bad at. Yes, you can get family plans and corporate group accounts. Yes, discounts are available where you get both phone and 3G dongle from the same provider, linked at "customer account" level. 

But with very few exceptions, operators don't offer the option for a single subscription (ie "phone number") to support multiple devices. A few operators provide 2+ SIMs, but there's typically a clunky procedure for the user to denote which device is "active" at a given time.

Increasingly, I find myself using two or three screens simultaneously - making a phone call while using my laptop, using handheld device for email while doing something else on my PC, and so on. There's no reason why I should need multiple mobile accounts, any more than I do running two PCs over a single ADSL subscription. Why shouldn't I have two, three or more devices sharing my mobile broadband, as long as my aggregate traffic is less than the monthly cap?

WiMAX has an inherent advantage here in not needing SIM cards, in my view.

Interestingly, Bridgewater also has a wholesale solution for WiMAX providers - another angle in which I'm expecting some differentiation from cellular networks. My view is that there will be a broader selection of partner/wholesale business models in WiMAX, compared with the fairly monochrome choice of MVNOs on cellular. I'm expecting to see regional wholesale networks (eg for local councils), or ones based on specific QoS metrics (eg low-latency gaming MVNO vs secure enterprise MVNO vs. streaming-optimised MVNO). 

To some extent, WiMAX operators will be driven to these niches because they've pretty much relinquished the PC-connectivity market to HSPA/EVDO dongles in the near term. But it also reflects the likely open-minded nature of new WiMAX entrants to try innovative Telco 2.0 business models.

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3G Netbook + broadband bundles.... niche?

It's not great surprise to see a number of MNO announcements about low-cost, small "netbook" PCs with embedded 3G - Vodafone+Dell, and T-Mobile+ Asus/Acer [link in German] in particular. Interestingly, Telecom Italia Mobile has gone the MID route instead.

Regular readers will know that I'm skeptical that what I'm calling "Mobile Broadband Computing" products, sold by carriers with embedded 3G, will amount to much. I think there's a lot of wishful thinking going on, which isn't going to fit with the ways in which customers buy and use computing devices.

One thing I haven't been able to track down yet is whether the mobile broadband contracts for these devices will be have standard flatrate dataplan T's and C's, which prohibit, block (or even charge extra) for applications like VoIP and IM. If they do, the proposition will likely fail even sooner than I anticipated. It would be a very serious mistake indeed.

I can just imagine the marketing pitch - "Get our free laptop with embedded HSPA, and ditch your ADSL service! It's like fixed broadband but better in every way! Only, er, you can't use Skype. Or MSN. Or that IM feature built into FaceBook, although as it's a web service we can't see you using it, anyway".

One thing that MNOs will likely find it tricky to grasp is that in the computing domain, you can always give extra applications to customers - perhaps an SMS client, even IMS RCS - but you can't stop them from using their choice of other software. (Unless you're an enterprise IT administrator... and they are doubly certain in not wanting to have PC applications determined by their carrier).

In any case, I'm just not convinced that end users will want to buy their PCs from a mobile operator - and I suspect that those who are most tempted by "Free Notebook!" offers are probably the most likely to prefer prepaid mobile services rather than another 24-month contract. Or those whose credit cards or banks aren't too keen about providing payment plans for PCs.

I'm definitely of the opinion that some embedded-3G offers are really just about massaging up carriers' apparent data ARPU when in fact all they're doing is simply retail finance masquerading as subsidy. I wonder when we'll see cars with embedded HSPA modules for telematics being sold by MNOs too "Our ARPU is now €450 a month".....

One more passing thought on this - given the numerous horror stories about time/hassle in replacing broken or faulty handsets, do you really fancy leaving your embedded-3G PC, with all your data, at the local phone shop if you have a problem with it 6 months down the road? Or perhaps buying separate PC + dongle is the way to go after all?

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Could Google save us from the tyranny of the SIM card?

From the department of "not likely to happen any time soon, but interesting nonetheless" comes this report of a Google patent that suggests that future phones could institute an auction amongst available wireless providers, each time a connection is needed.

If there's one thing worse than being a dumb pipe, it's being one that has to compete continually on price with an array of other dumb pipes.....

(This reminds me a bit of the original view of web services, where applications would in theory pick providers of XML components from a directory in the cloud, in real time. Although given that mobile commonly has 5-10 second call setup times, there's probably a bit more scope for this to work for phone calls, than if it was embedded in a enterprise app needing millisecond response).

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Convergence gateways - some quick thoughts

I had a meeting this morning at NetEvents with a company I hadn't really spoken to for a very long time - GenBand. They acquired NextPoint last week - itself a combination of the former ReefPoint and Nextone, and one that I frequently encounterer when talking about femto and dual-mode WiFi architectures.

Basically, the company plays in the "convergence gateway" market - which as a telecoms industry sector is an ugly mix of security gateways, media gateways, SBCs, GGSNs, DPI boxes, femto & WiFi gateways and assorted other application-oriented boxes.

Essentially, the sector involves something sitting between the access part of the network (fixed/mobile) and the core applications (legacy CS switches, IMS, NGN, Internet, VoIP etc). This "something" or "somethings" perform a selection of security, control, aggregration, transformational and monitoring functions.

Many companies operate in this general space - Sonus Networks, Acme Packet, Mavenir, Cisco, Stoke and so on. Many of the larger telecom companies like Ericsson and Motorola buy modules on an OEM basis and are this also involved as aggregators.

There is the usual debate about best-of-breed vs. integrated boxes, but I tend to agree with the view that certain things will make sense to blend into unified platforms. The GenBand / NextPoint merger looks quite a smart move against this.

I'm also wondering whether this layer of the network might be the right point to open up network APIs & expose capabilities for various Telco 2.0 business models.

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Vodafone Portugal, prepay data SIMs & WiFi...

I'm in southern Portugal for the NetEvents conference. I had a few minutes to kill waiting for my transfer from Faro airport when I arrived, so I decided to see if I could get a prepay data SIM to run in an unlocked phone.

The good news: Just €5 bought me a SIM with a €7.50 credit. No registration, nothing. And for €7.44 the nice lady in the shop set me up with a month's worth of HSDPA (I think with 100MB cap)

The great news: That sure beats £3 or £2 per MB or whatever the ridiculous data roaming charge is on my 3 or T-Mobile or O2 SIMs I have with me.

The bad news: This gives me a separate access point (a Voda Live! one) which doesn't allow me either to send outbound POP3 email, or use SSL to connect to sites like Yahoo, Gmail or British Airways

The slightly better news: There's another APN called Internet Vodafone which allows me full web access. Plus Nokia Maps seems to work, but Google Maps doesn't.

The ridiculous news: I check into my hotel & decide to see what's up with WiFi to connect my laptop. The hotspot is run by, guess who... Vodafone Portugal. Prices for Voda customers are €5 for one hour, €20 for a day, and €30 for three days.

In other words, a day's WiFi costs 4x a month's HSDPA. From the same operator.

So despite my usual dislike of downloading apps to smartphones, I decide to join the tethering fraternity, and install JoikuSpot on my E71, which turns it into a little 3G-backhauled hotspot.

Joy.

I have both phone & WiFi access online for a low price, having navigated through several orders' of magnitude of attempted rip-off. I haven't signed any piece of paper with terms & conditions, I paid cash, I'm totally anonymous (until writing this....), I can send email via my PC/Web interface.

Not only that, but tethering my PC to HSDPA shows how fast it really is - and how much of its speed & latency is wasted by the browser's sluggishness on the Nokia.

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Plenty going on with femtocells

After a few quiet weeks, it's all happening in femto-ville this week:

Top of the list is the NEC/Ubiquisys rollout for Softbank. The Japanese operator has long been rumoured as the most likely near-term commercial deployment candidate, and is interestingly basing its architecture around IMS rather than the new 3GPP femto standard. Like DoCoMo, (which is planning its own "HomeArea" femto service with Mitsubishi) it is slightly hamstrung by near-term regulatory limits on installing cell-sites, which mandate an engineer be in attendance. However, I suspect that Softbank may be a bit more aggressive than its larger & more conservative peer in getting that law changed, or (perhaps) scrutinising it for loopholes.

One thing I'm less convinced by is Motorola's femto/picture-frame combination. Which looks remarkably like the original Motorola femto/picture frame prototype from 3GSM a couple of years ago that never went anywhere. (Unfortunately I can't find the name or a picture of the thing....). Over at ThinkFemtocell, there's a list of other possible widgets that could incorporate femtos , but my view is that all of these things should actually be static 3G endpoints which connect to a central femto elsewhere in the home. In other words, "phones" specifically designed to work with a femto, a bit like the various WiFi home gadgets like Internet radios and the cute Nabaztag wifi rabbit. I discuss the concept of femto-specific devices in this report.

One of my analyst peers has got quite a lot of press this week with the notion that LTE could be underpinned by a femto layer. I agree entirely - back in May I suggested that "femtos will only become truly massmarket when we get to LTE deployment" and my current forecasts only really forecast a major uptick in shipment numbers above 10m per year, from 2013 onwards. There's a good article from PicoChip on LTE femtos here as well. 

My only slight concern on this is that the vast majority of offloadable mobile data traffic comes from devices that have WiFi in them as well - especially PCs, iPhones and high-end Symbian & Windows smartphones. Collectively, I reckon it's 99%+ on many networks at present - a figure that might fall (and obviously there's voice traffic to offload as well) , but the "inverted pyramid" effect will stay in place for many years.

Lastly, I should mention I'm moderating a panel on Femtos vs WiFi at the NetEvents Press & Analyst summit in Portugal on Thursday - speakers include representatives from Motorola, Airvana, Ubiquisys, Trapeze and GenBand (which just acquired NextPoint)

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