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A thought: HSPA/LTE in unlicenced spectrum? Ideal for femtos?
There's about a zillion frequency bands for 3GPP technologies these days - 700MHz, 850, 900, 1800, 2100, 2600, AWS, various Japanese ones, upcoming UHF bands and so on.
But there's some notable absences - unlicenced 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. The ones that WiFi and Bluetooth and a million other gadgets use.
Sure, its unmanaged, congested, interference-prone.... but for short ranges, who cares? Like, for example, if you had a 2.4GHz HSPA femto at home which you could "roam" onto? (I'm assuming you wouldn't have your own SIM card & HLR).
Why would you want to do this? Different business models - lots of them. And a complete end to the need to put WiFi into phones as well, if you could have a single multi-band chip that supported private cellular as well as operator cellular.
Yes, I know it would have some horrible problems, and I certainly couldn't see the stuffy standards bodies daring to support something so lacking in QoS and control and operator involvement. But if cellular ever wants to stand a chance of competing in homes or enterprise networks, it needs to have an "owned" profile as well as a "service" profile.
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Mobile Web 2.0 and Power Management
I've been playing around with some Web 2.0 services (Widsets, Yahoo Go etc) on a Nokia E71, and one thing I've noticed is that they kill the battery, as they keep going online looking for new stuff to pull down. Given that the device has a huge 1500MAh battery, the fact it can be depleted in a day (and gets pretty warm to the touch too) indicates to me that we've got a problem here.
Anyone else experienced this? Obviously the simple answer is to turn off "push" and "background apps" but that sort of misses the point.
The other option is to have something clever in the network, like BlackBerry or the new notifications server bit in the Apple system, which wakes up the phone when necessary, without needing it to keep "polling" the network.
I've also heard stories that power issues can completely derail the "mobile presence" model - particularly if you have a "live" address book with hundreds of contacts.
I haven't had a chance to look in detail at yesterday's announcement by OMTP of their BONDI platform for Web 2.0 on phones (I have a meeting with them scheduled for next week), but hopefully there's something in there which could help solve the problem.
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Is Internet offload the next bottleneck for mobile broadband?
This article about H3G Austria implementing a "direct tunnel" for data caught my eye today. It fits into an emerging theme I've been seeing about the need to offload mobile data traffic from transiting core network elements unnecessarily. Given that some stats suggest that 95% of all 3G data is going to/from the Internet, it makes sense to "dump" as much of it straight onto a connection to the web rather than routing it through expensive (and capacity-limited) core nodes like SGSNs that add no value.
I heard much the same story about femtocells last week, and I've also heard it mentioned about UMA-type WiFi services, sometimes called "Split tunnel architecture". It makes particular sense for roaming data traffic from PCs, for which there is zero value in backhauling via the home network (and especially for H3G, which doesn't charge data roaming fees to on-net customers).
Now in theory, much of this capability to provide a "flattened" IP network architecture should arrive with LTE, and more specifically its counterpart the Evolved Packet Core (EPC, formerly SAE, System Architecture Evolution). But given the timelines, it makes sense for the more data-centric operators to move ahead sooner.
I have a strong suspicion that offload / direct or split tunnel / (assorted other similar terms) will become the next "big thing" after the current backhaul bottleneck is fixed for mobile broadband operators. There will probably be a few different architectures, which I guess will dovetail with specific operator instances of local (femto/WiFi) radio offload, and macro transport connectivity (owned / 3rd-party).
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Operator-specific vs. Vanilla handsets
I just had an interesting chat with the sales guys in my local branch of Carphone Warehouse. I was inquiring about the new SonyEricsson C902 phone, and so asked them which networks it was available on. They replied that it was supplied in with either O2 or Orange contracts. (Interestingly, the CPW website also mentions T-Mobile, and it should be noted that the company no longer resells Vodafone).
Now, I'd recently tried out another phone which had a horribly slow and clunky operator-specific UI on top of the usual slick midrange SonyEricsson menu and app software. So I asked the CPW staff "Which version of the phone [Orange or O2] has the better software?". The reply surprised me "They're the same, we supply the phone with the generic software".
Now the reason for this can't be logistics (ie desire to avoid stocking separate versions of each phone) as I'll bet that each one still has physical modifications like operator logos. So I'm wondering instead if there has been some push-back from customers about operator-specific differences between phones. I've thought for a while that the handset review magazines and sites really ought to compare between operator variants of the same phone. And anecdotally, I'm certainly aware that some UK consumers are certainly aware that devices' capabilities and useability differ.
Obviously in instances where operators have exclusive rights to given handsets - or more-material customisations - such comparisons can't be done. And in markets like the US and Japan, it's quite common for many devices to be very-tightly specified by a single carrier.
But for popular devices like many Nokias and S-Es and Samsungs, do the mobile operators really want to compete on whose version of a given device is best? Obviously the quick answer is "Oh no, we'll compete on the services available on our version of the phones". While there may well be specific custom client software (to access custom services), this ignores the more in-your-face changes to top-level menus and UI that some carriers insist upon. It's minor things like populating the home screen with unchangeable links to stuff you don't want, or locking the browser's home page, that customers will be irked by.
There's also another question here - will the generic versions of phones supplied by CPW work well with all of each operator's existing service portfolios?
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Carnival of Mobilists on LBS
While I'm turning into a big believer about location-based capabilities in mobile phones (GPS, maps etc), I'm much less convinced by the argument for monetisable location services.
I can quite imagine buying a Nokia device which comes with 4GB of global maps built in, plus GPS. I can quite imagine continuing to use Google Maps on mobile, with its clever autolocation capability.
But I can't imagine ever wanting "local search", or paying for "where is my nearest X", or trusting any "local" restaurant reviews where the venue has had to pay to be included in a directory. Possibly there may be some geo-specific advertising (step forward Google again), but in terms of actually getting money out of my own pocket for a billable service? No.
Nevertheless, there's a number of very good articles and different opinions courtest of this week's Carnival of the Mobilists, edited this week by Rudy de Waele. (It also references my post from last week about applications on smartphones).
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