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Content Tagged with 3g + Technology-News
T-Mobile’s 3G Network Comes Alive in San Francisco
Three full weeks before T-Mobile’s Google-powered G1 handset is due to arrive, the wireless carrier has lit up its high-speed wireless spectrum in San Francisco. The UMTS/HSDPA service is usable on handsets that currently support the 1.7 GHz frequency like the upcoming G1 and the currently available Sony Ericsson TM506, allowing their owners to take advantage of a network not yet oversaturated by data-hungry devices.
San Francisco was on a short list of cities slated to receive the faster network by mid-October. Over the next few weeks, it’s due to be followed by Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Orlando, Seattle and California’s state capital of Sacramento. Since the recently launched Google Android handset heavily leverages a high-speed data connection and Google has such a looming presence in the area, it’s fitting that T-Mobile light up the network there sooner rather than later.
T-Mobile will need to sell quite a few devices capable of using the network to see a solid return on their investment. Or rather, they’ll need customer commitments to long-term data plans that build a revenue stream, as the 3G investment in San Francisco alone cost over $322 million to implement. The G1 handset can actually help sell the network, but much will depend on whether or not developers embrace the platform and deliver a wide array of applications for the network-centric device.
Even Moms Love Mobile Data Cards
OK, that is a bit over the top! Nielsen Mobile came out with a report that points out that there were 13 million mobile data cards in the U.S. at the end of June 2008. Not a big surprise, since wireless carriers in the U.S. are having a blockbuster year as far as mobile Internet revenues are concerned. The GigaOM Team has about seven of them and uses them for business and filing stuff when on the road. Apparently, so do a lot of people. However, Nielsen points out that there is a change in the making.
…Nielsen’s research reveals that the cards are beginning to play an important role in home and personal Internet access, as well. In fact, 43 percent of mobile data card users report they most often use their data card at home, while 15 percent say they typically use the card at work. Additionally, one in five (21 percent) data card subscribers take advantage of ubiquitous access by heading outdoors and 9 percent use their card while commuting.
An easy explanation would be better price packages and higher speed tiers, thanks to newer 3G technologies. Of the nearly 1,300 mobile data card users Nielsen surveyed, more than 99 percent still kept their wired broadband service: 40 percent of card users also have cable broadband and 34 percent also have DSL in their home. That number can jump to 59 percent, giving wired carriers something to think about.
Maybe the wireless guys need to rethink their wireless broadband plans and bring them forward. For phone companies the prospect of being cannibalized by wireless data connections must be scarier than losing them to voice connections. No wonder they started to limit bandwidth transfers on their connections. (Photo courtesy: Novatel Wireless.)
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Mobile Subscribers Forecast to Top 5 Billion-Mark by 2011
A few days ago, I pointed out that India was finally getting its 3G act together by coming up with a liberal licensing policy that will boost mobile broadband in that country. A similar scenario is playing out across China, Brazil and Russia, which together with India account for a major chunk of the global mobile footprint.
That is one of the main reasons why Infonetics Research is expecting that by year 2011 there will be one mobile broadband connection for every four wired broadband subscribers. The Campbell, Calif.-research firm made some other bold predictions, among them:
- Worldwide mobile subscribers will hit 5.2 billion by 2011
- Cellular mobile broadband subscribers will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 104 percent between 2007 and 2011.
The research firm claims that WiMAX is going to play a role in the spread of mobile broadband as well.I checked with the firm to get more clarifications on the cellular mobile growth.
They said that the number of worldwide cellular mobile broadband subscribers (not including WiMAX or SMS) will more than triple in 2008 from 2007 and to continue ramping quickly through at least 2011. They went on to point out that “with an expected mobile subscriber base passing the 5 billion bar in 2011, which will be migrated to both 3G and 4G networks, there is a lot of potential for mobile broadband subscribers to outnumber wireline broadband subscribers in the long term ( in the 2015-2020 timeframe).”
As high-speed wireless pipes become commonplace, we can expect this new platform to spur innovation just like wired broadband. The availability of high-speed access over DSL and cable resulted in the formation of Skype, YouTube and Facebook. Despite the carrier chokehold on the networks, innovation will soon start to thrive in the wireless broadband world as well.
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It’s Here - The New 3G iPhone.
For once, the FedEx guy showed up right on time. Here it is — the unboxed pics of the new iPhone 3G. More thoughts to follow later. I guess I am lucky in a way because I didn’t have to deal with lines or deal with the activation process. The activation servers are down, thanks to an incredible rush to buy this phone. Apparently it is getting sold out across the world. If you are at an Apple store and want to send us photos or stream a Qik video, let me know and we can plug you in. My thoughts on the phone will appear over the weekend after I have actually had some time to play around with it. In the meantime, NewTeeVee has a look at the video-related iPhone apps and Earth2Tech has a round-up of apps that can help to save gas.
GigaOM Poll: Will You Buy iPhone 3G
So in a couple of days the iPhone 3G is going to go on sale. Like many of you I am going to get this device as part of my duties as an intrepid reporter (and a shameless Apple-holic.) However, if you are rational, then you might want to read these reviews by the big three tech writers and their take on the iPhone 3G before you decide to hand over your credit card to the sales people.
- Walt Mossberg/WSJ: “I found it to be a more capable version of an already excellent device. And now that it’s open to third-party programs, the iPhone has a chance to become a true computing platform with wide versatility…if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life.”
- Edward Baig/USA Today: “With GPS newly added to the mix, this handheld marvel has no equal among consumer-oriented smart phones. While not everything on my wish list made it onto the new device, Apple has raised the bar with iPhone 3G. To which I offer an enthusiastic thumbs up.”
- David Pogue/NYTimes: “It’s not so much better that it turns all those original iPhones into has-beens. Indeed, the really big deal is the iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store, neither of which requires buying a new iPhone.”
I am sensing some hesitation on the part of the these reviewers. And now that you have read their reviews, are you still interested in buying the iPhone 3G.
Poll: Will You Buy The Rumored 3G Version?
“iPhone, till now, has not exactly been video-friendly,” writes Liz over on NewTeeVee. And that is a damn shame because the screen is pretty awesome and made for enjoying video-on-the-go.
However there seems to be a thought that the new version with video features and 3G could change that. “I personally haven’t been persuaded by the touch-screen dream machine yet, but I’m thinking this could be my moment. How about you?,” Liz asks. Take our poll, and answer her question.
In London, a Glimpse of a Broadband Future
London is one of those few fortunate cities to have a surfeit of telecom competition. From broadband providers to mobile operators, Londoners have a choice. They have decent broadband speeds as well as access to Wi-Fi and 3G networks. And as a result, there has been a big change in their behavior. A new report from Ofcom outlines how Londoners (and the rest of the UK) are using these new wireless and broadband services. It’s a great example of how consumer behavior changes with bandwidth.
In London:
* 40 percent of people watch TV or video content online.
* 20 percent make VoIP calls.
* 32 percent are using their mobile phones to access the Internet.
* 19 percent listen to audio content on their mobiles.
Impressed? I am! I feel London has the user base to qualify as an always-on platform that will soon spur interesting applications, including many that are yet to be invented.
Mobile Backhaul Equals Big Money Opportunity
As noted earlier, wireless industry experts believe that mobile backhaul networks represent a big opportunity, mostly because of the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks and the easy availablity of iPhone-type devices is going to boost mobile data and video use.
Infonetics Research has issued a report that forecasts 4.4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2011, and estimates that their needs will push the demand for wireless backhaul equipment to over $10 billion by that year. Infonetics predicts that the big spending is going to happen on the IP/Ethernet portion of worldwide mobile backhaul equipment with triple-digit growth rates predicted from 2007 to 2011. No surprise: T-Mobile, Swisscom Mobile and Telecom Italia are all building IP/Ethernet based backhaul networks. Ironically, given the amount of money being spent on this sector there isn’t much startup activity in this space.
Mobile Web Bad, Mobile Data Good?
Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far, a story in The New York Times gives US mobile web usage a B-minus grade. According to Rethink Research mobile web accounts for “12 percent of average revenue per user in 2007, far below the expected 50 percent” while Yankee Group says “only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web.” Terrible phones, puny network speeds and WAP browsers - no surprise that in a society where people lug laptops even on vacation, mobile web as outlined by NYT isn’t doing well.
In sharp contrast, mobile data seems to be doing well for the US carriers. Here is what they have raked in from wireless data: $8.6 billion (2005), $15.8 billion (2006) and $17.7 billion for first three quarters of 2007. Assuming that the non-messaging data revenues are in the 50-60% (of the data revenues) range for the US carriers, that is pretty hefty growth.
A large push, one would guess is coming from the growing popularity of 3G cards, especially among the web worker/mobile worker crowd. There is anecdotal evidence things will change quite rapidly when we have mobile handsets with real browsers showing up in the sales isles. One such device is already showing its impact. I caught up with Omar Hamoui, Founder & CEO of AdMob, a mobile advertising start-up last week, and he said that over past 30 days the total share of traffic coming to their network from iPhone doubled from 0.4% to 0.8%. Google Maps usage went up after introduction of iPhone. Next year a whole slew of devices are coming to market situation will most certainly change.
CTIA 2007: How far behind is the U.S. vs. Europe?
This week, San Francisco will play host to the CTIA’s Wireless I.T. & Entertainment convention, an annual gathering of those intimately involved with the U.S. mobile industry — from tiny startups to corporate giants such as Verizon (VZ), Qualcomm (QCOM), Nokia (NOK) and AT&T (T).
Many will talk about their vision of the future, and at some point will undoubtedly lament over how far we lag behind Europe. With the help of analyst Chetan Sharma, I decided to pull together a small comparison chart that gives you a sense of what’s fact and what’s fiction.
I would like to point out that the above numbers are subscriptions and not the actual number of subscribers — often a point of contention. It’s also worth nothing that a lot of folks in Europe are pre-paid customers and that people have a habit of carrying more than one SIM card. Lastly, the comparison between the U.S. and Western Europe is going to get more interesting once we have complete information for 2007.
Update: As many of you have noted in comments, subscribers in Europe do not pay for incoming calls. However, the carriers do collect incoming calls revenue form other carriers through settlement procedure. The ARPU calculations include total revenue (subs + settlement) divided by subs. The US settlement regime is based on bill and keep (subs pays for both) and no carrier settlements for incoming calls. Hope this helps!
China throws foreign 3G a bone
China announced specifications for two major global 3G standards - W-CDMA and CDMA 2000 - indicating that it was fine with foreign equipment makers selling gear to Chinese mobile operators. It would be nice, except this grand (if meaningless) gesture seems like a diversionary tactic.
For instance, the specifications for the home grown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, were issued in January 2006. Secondly, the specifications don’t necessarily mean licenses, which are yet to be issued. In other words, this is a hollow, meaningless exercise, which doesn’t hide the fact that Chinese government, does indeed prefer home grown telecom equipment makers - Huawei and ZTE Corp.
Read the story in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required.)
Can MVNOs help FMC Succeed?
Venture capital has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into companies building equipment to enable FMC (fixed-to-mobile convergence) products and services. To date, the cellular operator market opportunity has languished but the tide may be changing if the MVNOs take advantage of the technology.
FMC, among other things, allows your dual-mode mobile phone to seamlessly transfer a call between a cellular network and a Wi-Fi network using VoIP. The FMC advantages are that you get to use your dual-mode mobile phone in places where Wi-Fi coverage may be better than your provider’s cellular coverage, such as your home or office (although supporting VoIP over Wi-Fi will have its technical challenges as well).
The Wi-Fi coverage may encourage you to stay with your current cellular operator and that, of course, is also the main advantage to them. Or is it? Truthfully, I’m not convinced that the cellular operators really want to give the consumers more connectivity choices from their mobile phones. Once you’ve made the leap off their cellular infrastructure using onto VoIP over WiFi, it’s a pretty short hop to Skype.
So, if the cellular operators aren’t pushing it because they are worried about cannibalizing their own revenues, who really wants FMC? It appears to be the MVNOs.
Using FMC they can lure their customers off the cellular operators’ infrastructure, where their operating margins are razor-thin, and onto their own VoIP-enabled infrastructure. An MVNO can offer a wealth of profitable services without relying on the cellular networks. As an example, Embarq, an MVNO reselling Sprint’s cellular service, is offering some services based on FMC today. And T-Mobile appears to be readying an FMC-based service for deployment soon as well.
So, do the venture investments into FMC begin to pay off over the next year or so? If enough MVNOs can survive and not suffer ESPN Mobile’s fate, then maybe there will be a decent return on the investments. Personally, I’m getting ready to check out the latest dual-mode mobile phones and the MVNO service plans. Given the coverage at my house, my cellular operator is now officially on notice.
Mac users get your FON on
FON, the share-your-Wi-Fi service company that announced a deal with Time Warner Cable earlier this week has released a new software (in beta of course!) that turns a Mac (Intel-based machines) or a Linux computer (preferably Ubuntu-based) into a FON spot.
In order to make the service work, you need to be connected to the Internet via the wired or 3G wireless connection. If its the later, it is almost guaranteed that Sprint and Verizon Wireless are going to come down on you hard.
You cannot share your Wi-Fi connections, however. Whisher, which launched at DEMO earlier, also offers a similar software download and allows you to share your wireless network. Of course, if you don’t want to be part of the FON network, then you can achieve the very same ends with the built-in network sharing features on a Mac. (Since I have little experience with Ubuntu-based computers, I digress.)
The company has also released a connection manager for Nokia E-Series phones that allows them to connect to FONspots. There were some bugs related to the bandwidth sharing management, and it seems like the company has fixed those.
Ericsson inks big spare-parts deal with Vodafone
In a deal the companies say is worth millions ( millions! ) of Euros, Ericsson announced Tuesday that it will supply and manage the spare parts needed for Vodafone’s mobile networks. The deal covers both 2G- and 3G-flavored networks, the companies said.
Mobile Media needs Mobile CDNs
The traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) of the mid-1990s were designed to move web content close to the narrowband last mile of modems and ISDN connections. As I’ve written about here before, even today in the broadband age CDNs are booming because digital media is pushing large pieces of content online, with the promise of more to come in the form of movies and television shows.
And now, we’re seeing new CDNs focused on delivering digital media over the limited data rates of today’s cellular networks. The problem is that while cellular appears to be migrating to higher data rates, only 3G (third generation) networks promise data rates above 144 kilobits/sec that are close to the slowest terrestrial broadband data rates. So cellular nets are going to need help — from CDNs that are mobile-specific.
At slower speeds, downloading digital media can be a frustrating event (imagine using YouTube over a 56 kilobit/sec modem). As an example, the AT&T cellular network in the U.S. supports EDGE technology that can theoretically provide a maximum of 470 kilobits/sec although anecdotal evidence suggests that the average user regularly gets less than half of that data rate.
To solve the data rate problem, the cellular industry is doing a lot of work and there are a number of competing technologies (including what the industry is beginning to call 4G) that should come to market over the next few years, including mobile phones with Wi-Fi and WiMAX. Even with these efforts, it is clear that the cellular network itself will be the skinny straw between large pieces of digital media and mobile devices for the quite some time. And, I suspect that as the data rates increase so will the size of the digital media – the cellular networks are where the Internet was in the mid-1990s and needs help catching up.
That brings us back to the new CDNs that are mobile-specific. Mobile-specific CDNs are deployed close to the edge of the cellular network and provide features that are unique in the cellular world, such as shaping the data rate depending on coverage and re-formatting the content as necessary for specific device types. In theory, using a mobile-specific CDN, most of today’s digital media could be easily consumable on a mobile device.
So, if we want to download music and watch videos on mobile devices, a mobile-specific CDN focused on bringing the content as close to the edge of the cellular network makes sense. The big question is – will the market provide any pull for digital media on our mobile devices? Are you downloading music and videos to your mobile device on a regular basis now? And how is the experience?