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Nokia Has Doubts About UMA
Nokia is uncertain about the future of UMA and may not develop any more dual-band handsets for the standard, according to George Fry, director of technology alignment for the Finnish company. “We’re not seeing use diminishing, but we are seeing deployments level off,” Fry said earlier this week at the Personal Computing and Communications Association meeting.
Fry said that in cases in which an operator such as T-Mobile is trying to fill holes in its coverage without spending more to build out the network, UMA makes sense. But he said he wasn’t aware of any new deployments in the last six months or so. Indeed UMA, a standard that allows for secure hand-off between a cellular and fixed network, has proved somewhat polarizing.
Meanwhile Steve Shaw, associate VP of marketing for Kineto Wireless, notes that UMA is also a key component of femtocells, which are currently en vogue in the telco world. Again, there’s no sense of how wide any sort of femtocell deployment might be, but Shaw, whose company bills itself as the UMA company, isn’t counting the standard out.
While admitting that current UMA deployments requiring dual-mode handsets are few, he points out that Orange does have plans to deploy a dual-band network in the UK, Spain and Poland to augment its program started in France. Maybe UMA will become a useful but limited standard, in a manner similar to the way Infiniband was hyped as a replacement for Fibre Channel and Ethernet, but instead was only adopted by the smaller market for high-performance computing.
FON, Time Warner deal confirmed
It has been more than twenty days since we reported that FON, the share-your-Wi-Fi service company was in talks with Time Warner Cable. Today, a news report from Associated Press confirms the deal and adds, that Time Warner Cable “will let its home broadband customers turn their connections into public wireless hotspots, a practice shunned by most U.S. Internet service providers.” Time Warner spokesperson confirmed the deal, though the two companies didn’t give any specifics.
FON is taking a shot at T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi service, with Joanna Rees, chief executive of FON USA adding, “They’re extorting people.” Lets just say, that is a bit of an overstatement - $30-to-40-a-month for a service that is reliable (if not fast) hardly counts as extortion.
Despite all the buzz, FON has a miniscule presence in the US and may not be that appealing to business travelers, who are short on time, and always look for convenience. Starbucks-T-Mobile does offer that. From that perspective, FON has its work cut out.
Meanwhile, since our big FON giveaway, some folks have written to us, and have pointed out that there is a bug in the firmware of the FON routers. Apparently, the default bandwidth control is broken. This is a way to allocate the bandwidth for the hotspot, and can be configured by the users. The bug, however takes away the bandwidth control, and visiting Foneros can suck all the bandwidth. This bug has been mentioned on FON boards.
Disclosure: GigaOM readers were offered FON routers for free as part of a special promotional offer.
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