Dalvik Turbo brings faster apps, better graphics, longer battery life to Android

Mobile middleware developer Myriad has unveiled a turbo boosted version of the Dalvik virtual machine, which runs applications on the Android platform, boosting performance and battery life.

Dalvik Turbo, announced Tuesday, claims to bring a threefold performance increase to applications, richer game graphics and better battery life. The tool is a replacement for the Dalvik virtual machine, which ships as part of the Android platform, and retains full compatibility with existing software. Dalvik Turbo also supports a range of processors including those based on ARM, Intel Atom and MIPS Architectures.

Myriad was created from the merger of Esmertec and Purple Labs and develops a, er, myriad of mobile software including browsers and Java engines.

At the end of last year Benoit Schillings, who joined Nokia as CTO after its 2008 acquisition of Scandinavian mobile Linux firm Trolltech, joined Myriad in a similar capacity. At Nokia Schillings was responsible for Nokia’s cross-device technology as advisor to CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. The industry heavyweight is considered something of a technology guru, known for his design and development of the technically sound but commercially unviable Be operating system (BeOS). He also held the CTO position at OpenWave.

Schillings was the driving force behind Trolltech’s Qt cross platform application framework, which was at the heart of the acquisition by Nokia and would better allow the Finnish firm and third party developers to build web applications that work across Nokia’s device portfolio – a key part of the Ovi concept.

Gypsii teams up with Telmap to direct LBS development

Location-based mobile social network Gypsii has teamed up with mapping and navigation firm Telmap to develop richer, location-enabled services.

Via the partnership, Telmap will introduce social networking and user generated content to its Telmap5 Mobile Location Companion, offering users access to contacts across social networks including Gypsii, Facebook and Twitter, and the ability to contribute location-aware content, share locations, read and post recommendations, videos, pictures, find friends, events, and places, and geo-blog.

Shane Lennon, senior vice president of marketing & product management at Gypsii, recently spoke to telecoms.com about monetising social networking. Lennon believes that social networking features will drive the viral uptake of apps and pave the way for mobile advertising services.

“Our ultimate model, our long term goal is advertising revenues. E-commerce is now mobile commerce and you have premium content services. We will see lots of talk around advertising. We’re working with navigation players who want in on the ad revenue model and want to enhance their capabilities so people can make more transactions,” Lennon said.

Read the interview with Shane Lennon, senior vice president of marketing & product management at Gypsii

“People also want to connect with people beyond who they know to where they are, who they want to see, what they want to do. It’s more interactive and driven towards application needs that are beyond pull/push such as ‘I want a single piece of information’ or ‘give me a coupon’. This isn’t the kind of research you’re going to do on Google,” he said.

Broadband Forum launches certification programme

Industry forums love launching certification programmes, and the Broadband Forum is no different. On Tuesday, at the MPLS & Ethernet World Congress in Paris, the forum announced its first ever certification programme to help drive multi-service network architectures and equipment interoperability testing.

The programme is designed to verify adherence to critical IP/MPLS, broadband and digital home and business specifications - areas of vital importance to the networking industry.

This should give service providers assurance that different vendor products conform to globally recognised and adopted technology standards promoting interoperability, as well as deliver a single industry-approved, and therefore more cost effective, test and certification process.

The Broadband Forum said Tuesday that five companies have already participated and their products have passed the BBF.248 test suite; Alcatel-Lucent, Axerra, Cisco, Huawei, and Juniper.

“The increase of mobile data traffic is putting a lot of challenges on mobile backhaul to provide the required capacity in a cost-effective way. We see MPLS as a viable option for meeting this challenge, and believe this certification program will advance the deployment of MPLS-based backhaul solutions in the market,” said Alain Maloberti, VP of network architecture and design for Orange.

The decade ahead

Ten years is a long time in any industry, but especially in one that moves as fast as the mobile sector. The last decade has seen the industry ride out by far its toughest times and still manage to turn out truly world-changing products and services. Here we take a look at what we can expect to happen in the ten years that stretches ahead of us.

Ten years ago, the newly merged Vodafone Airtouch was sealing its hostile takeover of German carrier Mannesmann, a move which CEO Chris Gent promised would create “the world’s leading mobile multimedia operator”. Virgin Mobile, the world’s first MVNO had just announced its launch, and the must-have handset was the Nokia 7110—attractive not so much for its rudimentary WAP capabilities as for the spring-release cover that enabled its owner to answer calls in a way that briefly emulated Neo from box office smash The Matrix.

The year 2000 had been hailed by some as the ‘year of mobile data’ in what would soon prove to be a hopelessly optimistic assessment. That year’s GSM World Congress saw the first prototype GPRS network on display from Ericsson, including a much vaunted prototype handset. As onlookers applauded this achievement it is doubtful that they could have imagined the post-iPhone industry that would be gathering in Barcelona ten years hence.

In many ways, of course, it was a drastically different world from the one we know today. But a look back at a post World Congress report from the March 2000 issue of Mobile Communications International reveals that, while much of the technology has evolved, some core concerns remain unaltered.

As speakers and delegates contemplated services and business models based on WAP, they were asking: “What is the consumer ready to pay for? How can every organisation in the value chain realise their share of the money?” And in an observation of worries that proved decidedly well placed, telecoms.com noted: “Mobile internet services seemed to be at the forefront of many delegates’ minds. But many were concerned about the impact of fixed internet companies moving into the mobile environment.”

George Schmitt, a stalwart of the conference sessions during those years, and the head of US carrier Omnipoint (to be absorbed by T-Mobile down the line) also had his finger on a crucial point: “Our networks have their electronic eyes on everyone with a GSM handset, practically pinpointing our subscribers’ every move to within a couple of metres” he said. “It’s important that we use this power for good.” Today it is network functionality like location that operators are having to exploit for their own good, never mind anyone else’s.

Clearly the industry has made huge strides over the past ten years. But what kind of evolution can we expect to see over the next ten? To put it another way: If we take the Nokia 7110 as an emblem of 2000 and the iPhone 3GS as an emblem of 2010, what might be used to represent 2020?

Read CTO for Ericsson North Western Europe, John Cunliffe’s thoughts on managed services, LTE and the advances expected over the next decade

How about a refrigerator? Or an electricity meter? There seems to be an industry consensus that the next decade will see the creation of the “internet of things”. It can be summed up by Ericsson’s prediction that, by 2020, there will be 50 billion devices connected to wireless networks worldwide. The majority of this surge in connections will come from machine to machine applications, says John Cunliffe, chief technical officer at Ericsson UK. And this could have benefits beyond revenues for the cellular industry, he says.

“The ITC industry is responsible for two per cent of carbon emissions globally and we need to tackle that small chunk directly,” he says. “But the big benefit we can bring is to use our technology smartly and start to address the other 98 per cent from other industries. Ericsson predicts that this 98 per cent can be cut by 15 per cent through advances in telecoms. A smart meter, for example, could turn off a refrigerator for 15 minutes to avoid peaks in power demand on the grid,” he suggests.

And in a similar vein to Cunliffe’s eco-motivated application of technology, a service that was much on the industry’s mind ten years ago is being given another nod. “Mobile video calling will take off as companies and consumers start to see the benefit—both environmental and financial—of finding other ways to keep in contact over long distances without having to travel,” says Tom Alexander, CEO of Orange UK and, in 2000, the founding chief executive of Virgin Mobile.

Read Orange UK CEO Tom Alexander’s thoughts on HD voice, 3D and NFC

Video calling, of course, was the holy grail of 3G and the headline service around which it was launched. It soon become clear, however, that the experience was frustratingly poor, partly due to the networks but mostly because of the limitations of the handsets. It became more white elephant than holy grail. Today the handset technology is certainly in place and the challenge is more sociological: Can users be persuaded that video calling is a desirable, practical and preferable alternative to voice or text? The question is really no closer to being answered than it was a decade ago.

Irrespective of the appeal of individual applications, how can we expect the already staggering capabilities of mobile handsets to further evolve in the next ten years? Alexander has a few ideas. “Video calling, as well as other services, including digital pictures and video, will also benefit from the advent of projector-phone technology,” he says. “Being able to screen your films or photos on the wall next to you will be a new way of immediately sharing experiences with friends, family and colleagues.

“Furthermore, developments in 3D technology will only mean greater multimedia offerings for the consumers. With 3D films already being produced and 3D TVs currently a reality, it won’t be long before this technology finds its way onto mobile—allowing us to receive the full visualisation experience wherever we are,” he says.

Today handsets have evolved to encompass a huge variety of functionality. They serve as personal media players, still and video cameras, internet-capable computing devices, gaming consoles and mores besides. The telephony function is now just one of many and the fact that they are still called ‘phones’ is a legacy rather than an accuracy.

In fact the telephone functionality could be seen more as a limiting factor than anything else, given that handsets still have to be of a size and shape that allows them to be held to the face, listened to and spoken into. But, says Andrew Bud, chairman of mobile transaction specialist mBlox, this constraint may lessen as the decade draws on.

“The form factor of the handset will be dictated by its use as a ‘personal information terminal’, not a phone,” he says. “The trend to use separate wireless headsets rather than talking into the phone itself will continue and will have a profound effect on phone shapes and sizes. The personal information terminal will become a central source for a user’s entire access to culture, rendering obsolete the home book, the DVD, game and music library—why have collections on your shelf when you can carry them round in your pocket? The terabyte phone will see to that.”

If we take the Nokia 7110 as an emblem of 2000 and the iPhone as an emblem of 2010, what might be used to represent 2020?

The phone as storage device is one option, but industry consultancy Ovum believes that the future of applications and storage lies in ‘The Cloud’. By 2020, the firm posits in the executive summary of its industry wide ‘Telecoms in 2020’ report, most connected devices will have “direct access to web-based cloud content and applications through the widespread adoption of core web technologies and a small number of de facto standard RIA technologies on those devices.” This expanded cloud, Ovum says, will “act as both a source and store” for the huge range of direct to consumer services.

In turn this will impact both carriers and OEMs, Ovum suggests. Device-side software fragmentation will push innovation into the cloud, shifting responsibility for complex application development to cloud platform providers. These players will then sell their platforms to services providers on a managed services basis, drastically reducing the spend that operators are required to make in application platforms and development of their own. In Ovum’s world view, the OEMs will also cede responsibility in this area, leaving them more focused on brand and design competition, while their drop in investment should negate the need for costly device subsidies.

Nonetheless, there will be some constants, according to Bengt Nordstrom, head of Northstream Consulting. “In 2020, Nokia remains the largest player [in the handset market]” he predicts, “but it has been forced to surrender considerable market share globally; to North American players in the advanced device and smartphone segment, and to Chinese vendors in the midrange and low-end segments.”

One of the defining competitive battles of the next decade will surely be for leadership in this new software platform space. Winners are doubtless already familiar faces within the industry. Google, Facebook, Apple, Nokia, Research in Motion and a number of carriers are among those in contention. By way of illustration, Nordstrom takes a punt on the 2020 Mobile World Congress awards. The event, he suggests, will be happening in Beijing. “’Facebook Free Talk & Chat’, already the world’s most popular voice and messaging service, also wins a GSMA award,” he predicts (although it will be surprising if the GSMA hasn’t had a rebrand of its own by this stage).

The role of the operator in this new world is a source of much debate. The most advanced carriers seem universally desperate to retain their position at the customer end of the value chain and are beginning to invest heavily in their own software platform programmes. Few seem willing to focus primarily on excelling in what have been their historical core competencies, as the shift to managed services—which can only gather greater momentum as the decade unfolds—clearly illustrates.

Ovum foresees two types of operator in 2020. SMART players (for Services Management Applications Relationship and Technology) play at the very front of the industry, while LEAN players (Low-cost Enablers of Agnostic Networks) represent the evolution of what today might be called the ‘dumb pipe’ model. For mobile operators that have grown up as the dynamic and glamorous element of the telecoms industry, the LEAN proposition offers insufficient flattery to the ego, says Tony Cripps, a senior analyst at Ovum.

“In many instances this ego-led business planning probably doesn’t make sense,” says Cripps. “In general we think that the SMART proposition is a difficult one because it is based around competencies in software infrastructure and application development platforms that the operators don’t really have.

“You hear about initiatives that operators have that see them moving in this direction but there’s a sense that the companies that do this as a core competency are not just already there—they’ve already moved on to the next level,” he continues. “Typically, and it may not even take ten years, it’s going to be companies for whom software platforms are already a core competence that will be likely to dominate this space.”

Read vice president of public affairs at Telefonica O2 Europe, Mike Short’s thoughts on the future of the  mobile network operator

It is unlikely that Ovum’s view will dissuade mobile operators from pursuing their glorious dreams but the networks do remain essential to all players in the mobile value chain. Software platforms aren’t much use if applications can’t be delivered to end users. So what will network competition look like in 2020; will it even exist? After all, the suggestion has been made more than once that multiple carriers should be able to compete using brand and proposition on a single, shared network. As Mike Short, CTO at Telefónica O2 Europe puts it: “Network as the primary differentiator has already ceased to be the main story in town.”

Ericsson’s John Cunliffe argues that regulatory pressures will ensure that multiple network markets perpetuate throughout the decade. “Maybe you could drop to two or three networks in each market but not one, because regulators will always want to see some physical competition out there,” he says. It follows that if the number of networks in each market does drop that network sharing will continue to be a popular option for mobile operators looking to cut network costs.

While in 2010 there are a good number of passive sharing deals in place whereby operators share sites and masts, operators have been far slower to embrace active sharing deals where all aspects of the network are commonly held. The MBNL joint venture between 3 and T-Mobile’s UK operation has broken ground in this area (the upcoming merger between T-Mobile and Orange will inject a new degree of complexity) and it seems a safe bet such deep integration will be necessitated and replicated in other markets as the squeeze on costs continues.

It won’t all be about sharing, though, and that squeeze will, for some operators, throttle them out of business altogether. “I don’t think it’s impossible that we will see some big telcos go bust over the next few years,” says Ovum’s Tony Cripps. “It’s not foolish for carriers to feel out these new areas of operation but it requires a level of commitment and investment that I don’t think many of them truly have.”

Read head of technology strategy at T-Mobile UK, Tony Weiner’s thoughts on the decade ahead

And in the best tradition of the value chain, any pain felt by the operators will undoubtedly get passed down the line to the vendor community. Those players that are building a solid business in managed services, with Ericsson being the leader, are more likely to prove resilient to a squeeze on the supply side. And those with markedly low cost bases, like the Chinese players, are best positioned to tough out leaner times. As Tony Weiner, head of technology strategy at German carrier T-Mobile’s British outpost says: “There will be major vendor consolidation in the next decade. In some ways it’s unfortunate but Huawei’s performance is staggering; they’re just sweeping the board.”

The Chinese vendors may well be positioned to take advantage of economic factors over the next ten years, but what about the country’s end users—customers, indeed, in all developing markets? Africa, Latin America, China, India and, to a lesser extent, Russia—these are the growth markets in 2010 and will fuel the land grab of the next decade. But will 2020 see a greater parity between the services available to customers in developed and developing markets?

It seems highly likely. For one thing, handset technology is increasingly being pushed down the product ranges so that even midrange handsets from the early part of the decade will be highly capable internet-enabled devices. And the lack of fixed reliable fixed infrastructure in many developing markets—which has made an enormous contribution rapid uptake of mobile telephony—is already fuelling carrier plans for mobile broadband. Bengt Nordstrom’s second prediction for the 2020 Mobile World Congress is that: “China Mobile is the first operator to demonstrate 5G technology, which is capable of delivering data speeds of up to 1Tbps. The first commercial launches are planned for 2021.”

And the argument applies not just to communications infrastructure. Hannes van Rensburg at mobile financial services outfit Fundamo believes that mobile will enable extremely rapid growth in banking services in developing markets that lack advanced financial sectors. “It’s taken around 100 years to ‘bank’ the majority of those in developed nations,” he says. “With the advent and accelerating growth of mobile financial services it could be only a matter of years to ban the remaining global unbanked population. By 2015, never mind 2020, the developing world will have superior financial services—more convenient, secure and ubiquitous—than the so-called developed world.”

The only truly reliable prediction one can make about the state of the mobile industry ten years from now is that there will be elements to it, products and services within it—even companies leading it—that, in 2010, do not exist and cannot be imagined. But the fact that central concerns from 2000 have resounding echoes in 2010 does indicate that we can make educated guesses as to how certain trends will shape out over the course of the decade.

Add your own predictions in the comments box below or read those of other industry leaders in 2020 Vision

The mobile market has done so much to improve our lives over the last ten years, with the first decade of the new millennium having been one of huge significance, and one where communications have been at the forefront of revolutionising our lives in the twenty-first century.

In years to come, the high-speed network infrastructure that has been constructed over the last decade will be viewed with the same importance as the railroads of the American Midwest or the bridges and roads built by the Victorian pioneers in Britain.

The communications revolution has already begun to change the way we live, interact and trade, and is even augmenting our perception of time and distance. And we’re only just at the beginning. If the last ten years have been about laying the infrastructure, the next ten will be about consumers reaping the benefits, with the advent of life-changing services that will totally revolutionise the way we connect with the people and places that are important to us.

In the same way that it’s hard to recall what your business or social life was like before being able to talk to people on the move, innovations in home security, healthcare and commerce will fundamentally change the way we do things for the better.

At the dawn of the millennium, mobile operators began to invest in new networks, using third generation technology and promising exciting revolutions such as weather updates and news alerts on the move. Ten years later, and I’m able to transfer money in an instant, download the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and even watch live television – all on my mobile, which now resembles a mini-computer, and is in fact more powerful than my home PC was at the turn of the century.

The decade has seen some incredible advancements that we now take for granted. Ten years ago, most of us were yet to see our first colour screen mobile, hadn’t yet experienced the Japanese trend for the clamshell, and touch screens were still the stuff of science fiction films. The monochrome classic Snake was the must-have mobile game, and the idea of the internet in your home—let alone accessing it on your mobile phone—was one that many of us were still trying to get to grips with.

In 2002, we took a leap towards the future with the world’s first Windows-powered smartphone – the Orange SPV (which stood for Sound Pictures Video). It was the first time that a consumer could access emails, the internet, watch video and listen to music on a single device. It paved the way for the future – a future of smartphones that now do things we simply expect as standard from our mobile.

Outside the mobile industry, advancements in satellite technology meant we’d never need to have an argument about which left turn to take again, and we were suddenly able to shrink our entire record collections into a little white box smaller than a TV remote control. Over the decade, these ideas – and many others – found new customers in the mobile sector, which fast became the centre of attention for the movie, internet and music industries.

Next year – the start of the second decade of the millennium – will be a significant one in so many ways. HD Voice, which Orange will be rolling out in 2010, will become a standard for voice calling. Just as the current digital calling system we use superseded analogue, so will Hi Def supersede digital, with its crystal clear, superior sound quality - its introduction will herald a new era for mobile communications, and we’ll be quick to forget what life was like before it.

Advertising-funded technology and services will also become more commonplace, with the option to receive more great brand offers, benefits and promotions that are not only timely, but highly relevant to us through our mobile propositions.

We’ll also see even more of the traditional Smartphone technology incorporated into devices to suit all budgets, and it won’t just be mobile handsets, with e-readers and tablets becoming more wide-spread, providing customers with an even richer multimedia experience. Over time, more and more services will be integrated into mobile devices, like digital cameras and sat nav have become today.

The next decade will also see mobile payments become an everyday reality. Today you pay for things by cash or on your credit card. Tomorrow, you’ll use your mobile to buy the things you want, whether that’s on the high street or the internet.

Mobile video calling will take off as companies and consumers start to see the benefit – both environmental and financial – of finding other ways to keep in contact over long distances without having to travel.

Video calling – as well as other services including digital pictures and video – will also benefit from the advent of projector-phone technology. Being able to screen your films or photos on the wall next to you will be a new way of immediately sharing experiences with friends, families and colleagues.

Furthermore, developments in 3D technology will only mean greater multimedia offerings for the consumers. With 3D films already being produced, and 3D TVs currently a reality, it won’t be long before this technology finds its way onto mobile – allowing us to receive the full visualisation experience wherever we are.

SIM cards will also be used to drive more and more appliances around the home. We’re likely to see them in television sets for example, used to replace the traditional ‘red button’ of today. So whether it’s simply voting for your favourite finalists from your remote control, or social networking on the big screen whilst watching your favourite show – our ability to interact will be hugely advanced.

The roll out of Near Field Communications, will also add more convenience to our lives. For example, once you swipe your ticket on the bus or train to return home, your home management system could be alerted of your imminent arrival - turning on your heating, closing your curtains, and switching on your lights - as well as downloading that movie to your TV which you were only reading about on your e-reader earlier that day.

But it’s not just fancy gadgets that will be changing the way we live. Here in the UK, the government’s plans to create a Digital Britain will play a significant part in the evolution of the mobile industry, and the quality of our lives, over the next decade. By 2019, the country will be truly connected and, I believe, will set the standard for other European nations to follow. The advent of 4G will mean that in the forthcoming years we can expect to see a huge leap forward in mobile broadband, and who knows where we’ll be by the end of the decade, with 5G a possibility.

In ten years time, the industry – and the positive impact it has on our lives – will have changed further. The mobile market has done so much to improve our lives over the last ten years – and it will continue to do so. It has changed societies around the world and today we stand on the edge of the next step – one that will revolutionise our lives once more.

Add your own predictions in the comments box below or read those of other industry leaders in
2020 Vision

The role of the operator is prone to change and, in 2020, that role will be much more diverse than it is today. We used to be called network operators, but the ‘network’ bit is not really there now. Already these days we do a lot more than would be conveyed by the term ‘operator’.

Network as the primary differentiator has ceased to be the main story in town. Operators already differentiate themselves through brand, service and distribution channels. Network-based competition doesn’t take into account the fact that customers want a combination of network services; they might want mobile and wifi and television. Our iPhone users are heavily reliant on a combination of wifi and cellular. The big debate is where these services come from. Not everyone will want to live in the Apple cloud or the Amazon cloud; some people will want combinations of these services or clouds. How many clouds will there be in 2020?

In 1995, we were already witnessing the beginning of network outsourcing. And now if you look at the number of staff a licensed operator has, the proportion dedicated to network activity has also diminished in favour of customer care, and sector initiatives to support a much broader audience.

In 2020 we will have to manage different distribution channels. We do that today, but by then they will have a much broader reach. We might be selling more in wireless healthcare or smart metering for the home, and the high street might not be the best way to sell those things. We might work with specialist energy companies or third parties that sell our services.

Health, energy, transport and education will change dramatically. In education we are already seeing the move to ebooks and mobile learning. That will not just be opened up by slates or smartphones but also by the wider availability of e-libraries.

If you look at healthcare, national health services cannot deliver all the care we need. It will cost a fortune and, with the ageing population in Europe, there are not enough carers. So we need new ways of looking at healthcare and an understanding of how communications can help these evolve, We think there will be more focus on prevention rather than cure, on health rather than illness. That means wearable devices, or self measurement. It’s about taking some ideas from the sports field and making them mass market.

For energy we’ll have smart metering by 2020. Wireless broadband will play a bigger part and that leads into the areas of smart grid and smart transport, for example electric vehicles. You need infrastructure to support electric vehicles, which is where location and navigation services are important. Mapping brings in context and relevancy.

Operators will move into sectors where we can offer more help. Scale will be much more important, and will have a bigger impact internationally. Trading of databases will be much more significant. The operators are more likely to consolidate globally, and that will play a part. We don’t know what will happen with the Chinese operators; we’ll have to see how they play out as they’re only in their own country today. But they need a global presence.

The internet changes everything and by 2020 we will be living our lives on the web in an internet 3.0 world. Web 1.0 was very much about looking at the web for information. Web 2.0 is much more about social networking and communities and Web 3.0 will be far more contextual; an environment where you have suggestions sent to you based on your profile, your ideas, things you might want. Equally the word ‘search’ will diversify a lot. We have word search today, but that will change to picture search or voice search.

We support the idea that cloud computing allows for the sharing of information across network. It’s the creation of an information sphere around the individual that is shareable across boundaries. Operators will have a more sophisticated method for exchanging databases, in compliance with data protection rules.

Add your own predictions in the comments box below or read those of other industry leaders in
2020 Vision

Managed services are an increasing part of Ericsson’s business worldwide. For Ericsson UK, 65 per cent of our revenues come from operating networks for operators. In ten years’ time the vendors will be doing even more to run networks. It’s a complementary business to selling kit but we have to be agnostic about the kit that we operate too, because it’s not just our own kit that we work with.

Managed services leave operators free to concentrate more on their core business, and the operators are starting to focus more on their business than on their networks. Having a good proposition for the consumer is becoming a lot more important. If you look at the various operators in terms of customer offering, they are actually quite different. 3’s offering is quite different to Vodafone’s and O2’s. So the operators can differentiate in that sense regardless of the network.

But the regulator will always want to ensure competition at a network level, so it’s unlikely there will ever be a single network market. We’re seeing a lot of consolidation at the moment, with Orange and T-Mobile and MBNL, and maybe a market like the UK could go down to two or three networks, but not one. The regulator would want to see some physical competition out there.

The operators are becoming more data centric, especially since the launch of mobile broadband. Growth here has been exponential. The question now is around the pace of upgrades; how fast the operator wants to move and how much they want to spend. The actual radio access piece, which is currently HSPA, is currently 7.2Mbps in the UK but we can see operators that will enhance that to 21Mbps shortly with the possibility of doubling that to 42Mbps, still using HSPA. And that’s before we get to LTE at 150Mbps.

With LTE what you get is a simpler network, because it’s all IP. There’s no circuit switched element. The headline speeds are faster and we can see a roadmap getting to 1Gbps assuming the spectrum’s available. You also get much reduced latency, which gives a better user experience. The experience will be ten times better.

The consumer behaviour with disk capacity, memory capacity, CPU capacity has always been to fill it up, regardless of how much space is available. The same is true for fixed broadband and it will also be true for mobile broadband. Take the iPhone – a lot of apps are thin clients that continually download from the web, like Google Maps. Video also causes a lot of data to be used. The amount of video use has been creeping up in lots of different forms and will continue to do so. People used to think of mobile video as a full blown video on demand service, but actually we’re getting video in adverts, via the iPlayer, and other ways that it has come upon us by stealth.

Ericsson predicts 50 billion devices connected to the network by 2020. The majority of that is coming from M2M. The IT industry is responsible for two per cent of carbon emissions globally, so we can directly tackle that small chunk. But the big benefit we can bring is to use our technology smartly and start to address the other 98 per cent in other industries. Ericsson predicts there’s a 15 per cent reduction to be had on the 98 per cent by use of advances in the two per cent (telecoms). Smart meters for example could turn off a refrigerator for 15 minutes to avoid peaks in power demand on the grid.

Add your own predictions in the comments box below or read those of other industry leaders in
2020 Vision

Energy is one of the big problems of the future for the industry. We’ve seen a number of studies on internet traffic growth, so one of the first things we did was to confirm that growth rate, because what happens next depends on the assuredness of that data. Then the next thing we looked at was what is composing that growth in terms of energy consumption.

It transpires that the core network piece is not that bad. But when you take into account wireless data things become really problematic. Especially if wireless data is provided in an unchecked way.

Wireless will overtake the rest of the internet in terms of energy consumption sometime between 2011 and 2013. This takes into account new technologies such as LTE, and means that even at best, using technologies we know about today, we won’t be able to keep pace with energy consumption.

So now we have to go back and challenge established wisdom. We need to work out what we can do with physics to reduce the amount of energy we need to transmit information across the wireless channel. We’ve got MIMO, beam-forming and a combination of the two, among other solutions, but none of them offer the kind of energy reductions you can get simply by reducing the size of the cell.

But that’s counter intuitive, of course: If you go from having one large cell to a number of smaller ones, then you are using more processing, which in turn is using more energy. But from here we have to go back and reassess exactly how we do the circuits. Can we go back and change them to give the power to performance ratio we’re looking for? You have to take everything you know to be true, throw it away and start again.

People are going to have doubts about this from a practical point of view. But if you take a city like London, for example, cell sizes are already shrinking. So you’re targeting areas where this is happening anyway. But the method of execution has to be far better than it is today; you have to change your way of thinking. Femtocells are in the right ballpark but you have to reconsider how they are powered, how you get backhaul to them, and how the circuits are made up.

The issue then becomes that, once you’ve sorted the issue for wireless, you then have to sort it for fixed access, because the femtocell is attached to the fixed access network. Then when you’ve figured that one out the next one back it is the core network—the bit we acknowledge as being pretty efficient already—but it still needs to be made more efficient.

The most interesting thing here is that the circuits we employ in the telecoms industry in our equipment are the same circuits used elsewhere, so this has repercussions universally. If we address our networks, it starts to address other business cases that don’t yet exist because you start to change the operating point of the network. When a network is more energy efficient your cost point shifts dramatically, but it can affect adjacent areas, too.

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2020 Vision

I would be very surprised if operators cease to exist, you still need someone to provide the infrastructure, even if you get clever mobiles capable of performing mobile to mobile calls [peer to peer] or self routing calls, they just won’t provide the service people have come to love and expect.

Telecoms has become a commodity now. It’s so cheap. The same thing has to happen in the emerging markets too sooner or later, even if you have a population base of two billion, you’re going to hit capacity sooner or later. This is the challenge. Here in the mature markets, we’re seeing people wanting more and more and faster and faster and yet they’re not prepared to pay for it. That’s the way the internet has developed. We’re all expecting everything for free now and providing all this infrastructure isn’t cheap. People want mobility everywhere they go. It’s become a right.

How will business models evolve? A greater emphasis on consolidation and network sharing. We’re already seeing companies trying to squeeze everything they can out of the fixed costs. This will happen more and more. But on the other hand, you’ve got governments trying to squeeze more money out of spectrum. It’s tremendous pushes and pulls.

But technology is moving ahead. LTE is much more efficient, but the problem there is we have to upgrade our network with all those associated initial costs. Also we need to get our hands on better spectrum, certainly that below 1GHz, that will also help that will need less infrastructure for coverage.

Already tremendous work being done on LTE Advanced. The biggest problem we have is the spectrum – it’s very difficult migrating customers across to different frequency bands. But this is what LTE Advance tries to address by amortising chunks of spectrum across the various bands. That will offer more speed, but customers will always need more and more. It’s like disk space, no matter how much you have you always fill it, and the history of radio tells us that there will always be more demand.

There are suggestions that perhaps TV shouldn’t be on terrestrial spectrum, it should be delivered over cable instead. That would free up spectrum for mobile users. We’re also seeing developments in cognitive radio, which tries to sniff out free chunks of spectrum.

We’ll see much more machine to machine. More devices with built in radio. More cellular capabilities in cars to make them aware of traffic problems and road congestion.

You would have thought there would be much more integration in devices, purely because of cost, but people seem very happy carrying around multiple devices. We’re lucky at the moment because operators subsidise devices. Might see Google subsidising devices to get people using its services.

These new players are quite disruptive. Incumbents are plodding along but these new guys are very innovative. But markets are saturated so we’re all stealing from one another. Where do we go next? Probably more consolidation. Maybe more MVNO brands which have good customer relationships – Tesco, Asda etc.

Regulator would be quite nervous about a single network. Australia had one and that didn’t work out. There needs to be competition at the network level. But it might come down to two networks. Besides, once you hit a certain coverage level competition pretty much vanishes at the network level.

More vendor consolidation. In some ways it’s unfortunate but Huawei’s performance is staggering, they’re just sweeping the board.

Coverage is where a lot of operators will seek to differentiate. Trying to improve in building quality for example. We’re likely to see more work on femtos. The jury may be out, as with intelligent repeaters, but that may well be where the battles are fought. Operators could even hive off certain chunks of their networks and rent it back – we might go the opposite way to having one network and someone like Scottish Telecom might operate part of the network on behalf of Vodafone for example and Irish Electricity might do the same.

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2020 Vision

Apple prevents location-based ads on iPhone

Apple will prevent third party developers from using its iPhone platform to enable location based advertising, in a move which is perhaps designed to protect its own future plans in the mobile ad space.

In a recent posting on its iPhone developer site, Apple informed developers how the Core Location framework for the iPhone allows third parties to build applications which know where end users are and can deliver information based on their location, such as local weather, nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information.

But, Apple warned that if developers use location-based information “to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location,” the app will be returned and will have to be modified before it is accepted.

In January, Apple acquired mobile advertising firm Quattro Wireless, for somewhere in the region of $250m and $275m. Quattro is something of a competitor to Google-owned Admob, with an advertising network offers display advertising, SMS/MMS/shortcodes, rich media, video and custom programs including in-app advertising.

The company has its own Q Deliver ad server, Q Elevation targeting platform and Q Analytics analytics engine, which may suggest that Apple has plans to encroach upon Google’s territory in the mobile advertising space.

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