Phemtophobia
29 June 2007
It's been a week of hot, filthy femtocell action, as proponents of (deep breath) asking the public to put a mobile base station under the telly struggled to counteract the news that T-Mobile USA's UMA-driven converged service has been launched. Femto fans announced the creation of a Femto Forum as an industry shindig club while Ubiquisys got a jersey from Softbank (ex-Vodafone Japan), which wants to experiment with their stuff.
The Informer recalls that, on the last night of 3GSM this year, he was drinking in a sordid dive in the Barrio Gotico when he practically fell over a pair of strange and ragged characters who turned out not to be the anarchist likedeelers or opium hawkers they appeared to be, but instead to be a couple of Ubiquisys engineers busy discussing the joys of femto over a beer or fifty. Good people, clearly.
(It's incredible what you learn about the business if you stay out long enough) he also recalls sharing a cab with the folk from Mobile Monday the year before, rather like being trapped in a mobile sauna with six beered-up Vikings.)
However unsanitary their habits, these people are highly valuable to the generality - and just to show it, they are working as of this week with wifi gadget maker Netgear to get their femtos dragged. Tcha!
Sprint-Nextel
, meanwhile, rebranded this week to remove all traces of "Nextel" and emphasise the role of speed - that'll be the WiMAX you can taste, then, even if the firm may be struggling to fund it (see AWIW 276). Perhaps the financial problems might not be as serious had it saved money on the new logos, headed notepaper, and such...Speaking of WiMAX, there was a fair bit about. Rethink Research's crystal ball team reckons, apparently, that some $13bn will be spent on whizzy new radio networks between now and 2012, with the lion's share going on WiMAX, although LTE spending is likely to kick in by 2011. Ron "WiMAX Forum" Resnick was in town for a chat with the Informa augurers, too.
He didn't spare the words, lashing out at Qualcomm for allegedly spreading FUD with regard to intellectual property, the 3GPP world for allegedly rigging the LTE spec to please a certain European vendor, the IEEE for letting Qualcomm get away with gerrymandering the 802.20 committee, and more besides.
Unsurprisingly, he thinks WiMAX is pretty good. Perhaps more interestingly, he was very keen on TDD and went so far as to say that the WiMAX Forum is "only interested in 2.5GHz TDD spectrum."
Speaking of spectrum, the GSMA this week went on the warpath for 900MHz refarming, brandishing some statistics that purport to show a huge boost in the number of subs to 3G and beyond if this is permitted. The costs could be dramatically lower given the range boost (did we mention that Resnick apparently still hopes for 700MHz WiMAX?), and with any luck that'll mean that Vodafone will not do ... this.
The press release said that the carrier would replace "complicated per-megabyte pricing with a simple new tariff for laptop access", but it's a tariff that is both simple and extremely expensive. As well as last week's £95-a-month data roaming package, you can now pay "just" £12 a day for your data on any Vodafone network.
Including, perhaps, the new one Airtel and Vodafone are starting in Jersey. Jersey, you say, island of sweet-natured tax lawyers and rich cows? Yes. The Indian network operator is coming, with a small joint venture with Voda. As far as anyone can tell, it's an experiment in using some of Bharti-Airtel's fancy network management techniques developed for low-ARPU India on some of Europe's richest tax exiles.
It's got to be interesting. Among other things, you'll be able to have voicemail sent to your email account.
Fancy SIP-related thingies like that are what BT's 21CN project is meant to be about. This week, a large-scale test network used by the 21CN team was shut down, officially because its mission was complete. And at the same time, BT exec Paul Reynolds, who was responsible both for 21CN and also for setting up the arms-length DSL unit, Openreach, quit - he's off to New Zealand, it turns out.
Disgrace? Exile? Not really. It's more like "it's good to be king", as he's off to become CEO of Telecom New Zealand, a carrier that was recently restructured along the lines Reynolds used for Openreach.
Speaking of SIP, fancy things, and big incumbent telcos, AT&T was much in the news this week. Everyone wanted a bit. The video-sharing service went live, but there's a serious problem - it's being suffocated in the tentacles of the Immense, Menacing Squid. Consider this. So you can stream video from your gadget to other gadgets. What if you want to show someone who hasn't got a fancy phone? Or isn't an AT&T customer? Or if you want to keep the output?
What if you wanted to send it to a website? SIP should provide for all of this. Anything with a SIP address that can be resolved by the DNS can be contacted, and open-source software exists to interface a Python server-side application with a SIP media server. With one of the various LAMP web frameworks on the other side, mobilevids.com should be a goer.
But AT&T won't let you - the IMS Home Subscriber Server has been configured to provide a list of people who can haz vide0, and nobody else gets any. Remind us again - what's this thing for?
You could, of course, just run around it. But there's some bad news for you from Sony Ericsson, where the firmware updates for the fancyphones have been dropped, to the horror of many users who were deeply disappointed with the bugs that littered their P990s. Perhaps there's better luck at Nokia?
Over tbere, the white cat strokers just amused themselves by reorganising. In 2004, Nok split up the phones division into separate groups for cheap phones, the N-series, and the E-series. Now they are being reintegrated into one terrifying phone-making beast, in order to diffuse ideas from the top-line gadgets into the cheapies. Similarly, there's a new Software and Services group, and a new Markets group containing all manufacturing, sales, marketing and logistics. Tall antennas and grey boxes will of course be found in Nokia Siemens Networks.
Siemens, eh? Not that it's a telecoms company any more, but we had to share this. After the big scandal that saw off "Klever" Klaus Kleinfeld (you know - the one where the execs were caught stealing the bribe fund), Siemens appointed a Chief Compliance Officer to keep an eye on the sweeties. He's now been fired, having apparently failed to grasp the structure or deal with the various American law firms Kleinfeld brought in to inquire into the affair.
Possibly they could have chosen better. He may have been a prosecutor for the city of Stuttgart, but he was in charge of the road traffic cases...
Take care,
The Informer.
PS
: There's some sort of rumour going round that Apple's launched a device of some sort. Can anyone confirm?To comment on any articles, please contact us at chatback@telecoms.com or have your say on our blog.
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