LTE will come to Vienna first

Hutchison Whampoa’s Austrian 3G operation, 3 Austria, on Wednesday switched on its commercial LTE network in Vienna, with a plan to roll out to other major cities in coming months.

3 Austria took delivery of the LTE and HSPA+ network equipment from Chinese vendor ZTE, which will also provide management and maintenance for the network.

The LTE network deployment will dramatically reduce operating expenses and introduce flexible and efficient networking through the use of self-optimising networks (SON) functionality, the manufacturer said.

The LTE basestations used are said to support a maximum uplink throughput of 300Mbps and a maximum downlink throughput of 900Mbps, with capability to support a future LTE-A protocol.

3 is the smallest operator in the country, with 1.3 million users at the end of September. It falls behind Orange with 2.1 million, T-Mobile with nearly four million and market leader Mobilkom, owned by Telekom Austria, with 5.2 million users.

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New Ofcom rules mean UK networks can now plays swapsies with their spectrum

UK regulator Ofcom, has announced that, from June 20th, mobile operators are permitted to trade the rights to spectrum amongst themselves. The new regulation covers 900MHz, 1800MHz and 2100MHz spectrum and mean operators will be able to bid for the use of spectrum they believe the have greater need for than other operators.

“By allowing operators to trade their spectrum, Ofcom believes that there will be greater opportunity to use it more efficiently. Ultimately, it is believed that this will bring benefits to citizens and consumers in terms of improved mobile services,” the regulator said in a statement.

The UK government directed Ofcom to make the move in December 2010 in a bid to improve competition in mobile services, and Ofcom started the consultation process in February 2011.

Auctions for UK LTE spectrum derived from the sought after 800MHz digital dividend will take place in 2012, with roll-out’s expected in 2013.

O2, the UK arm of Telefonica, recently objected to the plans, complaining the requirement for caps on potential spectrum band acquisitions was illegal under European law. The operator was more enthusiast about today’s spectrum trading news however stating simply that, “O2 welcomes the announcement made today by Ofcom that it has given the go-ahead for mobile phone operators to trade the rights to the radio spectrum they hold.”

Fifth-placed 3, part of the Hutchinson Whampoa group, was less enthusiastic however, stating:”Spectrum is the lifeblood of smartphones and the mobile internet and for those with surplus holdings it is also a strategic asset, so voluntary trading is the exception. This move simply allows those who have been gifted access to public spectrum to profit from it, with no benefit for UK taxpayers. Ofcom’s ambition to deliver faster and more capable services to consumers is best served by a truly competitive allocation of this public asset.”

Irish communications Minister Pat Rabbitte has announced details of rural broadband and next generation network schemes

Irish Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte has announced details of a rural broadband scheme for the country. The scheme is geared towards ensuring universal broadband access in Ireland before the end of 2012. According to the Minister, individual premises in rural areas that have been unable to obtain a broadband service will be able to avail of one on request.

The completion of the Irish Government’s National Broadband Scheme (NBS) in 2010 saw most of the country’s rural locations covered by services implemented by Hutchison Whampoa’s mobile arm, 3. The contract, granted in 2008, focused on specifically targeted areas where broadband services were deemed insufficient. Under the terms of the contract, 3 is obliged to offer services to all premises in the NBS area who seek it. In order to encourage competition in under-served areas, 3 was also required to provide wholesale access to any other authorised operator wanting to roll out services in NBS areas.

Under the new scheme, applicants in underserved areas now have three months in which to apply for connection. Where existing carriers are unable to provide a direct service, the Department of Communications has said it will seek to procure them. According to a statement from the Department, this combination of public and private sector programmes “will ensure that Ireland reaches the EU target of ubiquitous broadband access ahead of the 2013 deadline.”

In addition to announcing the scheme, the Minister also announced his intention to push ahead with discussions with the telecoms sector “with a view to establishing a roadmap for the delivery of next generation broadband.”  Under the terms of the country’s National Recovery Programme, a co-investment commitment  by  the private and commercial semi-state sectors to provide next generation broadband throughout the country has been agreed. To this end, the first formal meeting of the Next Generation Broadband Task Force will be convened “over the coming weeks,” said the Minister.

The deal is the first instance of network sharing in Ireland

The second and third-placed mobile operators in the Irish market, incumbent Eircom and Telefonica’s O2, have announced that they are to share networks in a deal that Eircom described as the first of its kind in Ireland. Eircom said that the deal will “result in an unrivalled mobile experience for customers” as the two carriers seek to meet growing demand for high bandwidth services.

The firms said they plan to collaborate on areas such as power supply and site equipment as well as transmission sharing. Existing sites will be consolidated where possible, they said, and new sites jointly built. But the carriers were at pains to point out that the deal did not herald any more formal consolidation.

“While O2 and eircom will work closely together, there is no transfer of assets and spectrum will not be shared under the new arrangement. All mobile operations supported by O2 (O2 and Tesco Mobile) and eircom Group (Meteor and eMobile) will continue to compete with each other, ensuring that customer choice in the market is maintained, “ Eircom said in a statement.

With the Irish economy in dire straits, cost cutting strategies such as network sharing are likely to be crucial for the nation’s operators. The two carriers did not reveal the scope of the savings they expect to reap from the new initiative.

Eircom sits in third place in the Irish mobile market, closing out 2010 with 1.05 million customers, according to Informa’s WCIS. O2 sat second, with 1.66 million customers, while Vodafone led the market with 2.22 million. In fourth place, 3 Ireland has seen its customer base decline over the last year and had just 300,000 subscribers at end December 2010. While Eircom and O2 ruled out any amalgamation at the ownership level, it seems unlikely that Ireland, a nation in financial trouble, with only 4.5 million inhabitants, will be able to sustain four mobile operators.

Darren Silvester, information management architect at 3 UK

The sudden and explosive growth of mobile data is well documented and networks in mature markets worldwide are creaking under the strain. So it felt timely that telecoms.com should have a meeting with Darren Silvester, information management architect at 3 UK, on the eve of the launch of Apple’s iPhone 4.

As the UK’s smallest and youngest mobile operator, 3 often plays the role of market disruptor, fighting its corner with lower prices, innovative partnerships and bigger bundles. The company claims that it benefits from having a 3G-only network infrastructure, with UK roaming partner Orange carrying the operator’s 2G voice traffic. But the firm has also consolidated its 3G network infrastructure with T-Mobile through the Mobile Broadband Network Limited (MBNL) joint venture.

When it was announced in 2007, the 50:50 joint venture represented the world’s largest known active 3G network sharing agreement. Under the agreement, masts and the 3G access networks were combined, but each company’s core network and T-Mobile’s 2G network were not to be shared. Both parties retained responsibility for the delivery of services to their respective customers and continued to use their own spectrum. The venture currently has 11,500 masts in operation and is on track to hit its target of 13,000 masts covering 98 per cent of the UK population by year-end.

And it was 3′s network that was the subject of discussion at the meeting. Silvester explained that he shares the outlook of Informa Telecoms & Media (which recently gave a presentation on the topic) that the network is, always has been, and will continue to be the most important differentiator for mobile operators. The first thing Silvester did was to show telecoms.com the video from 3’s latest advertising campaign (available below) for which the theme is “bringing you an even better network”.

“Our current advertising campaign is all about bringing you an even better network and this is a very topical subject,” he said. “It’s also the reason why analytics is important. The key foundation for all mobile operators is the network and you’ve got to focus on understanding what’s happening on the network. As you know, there’s been some very public reports about what’s not happening on some networks in the UK, US and worldwide.”

Silvester didn’t name names; he didn’t need to. Both AT&T in the US and 3′s UK rival O2 have fallen victim to their eagerness to sign up high-ARPU iPhone users, with Nigel Purdy, head of technology at O2 UK, recently admitting: “There is unprecedented demand on mobile networks, particularly in dense urban areas.”

Silvester is tasked with making sure 3 UK doesn’t fall foul of those same issues, even though its network was designed from the outset with data traffic in mind. “My job is to arm all the senior executives with information,” he said. “I was set the challenge by our CTO, in the wake of very public reports about networks that were struggling with smartphone related data. So one of the key things we needed to understand was the subscriber network experience – on voice whether they were experiencing dropped calls and on broadband and data on smartphones, what the throughput was – and what experience they were getting overall. Because if the performance is not good you’re going to get a lot of very unhappy subscribers and a lot of calls into the contact centre and potential churn.”

3 UK selected an analytics platform from IBM and went from signing a purchase order to running a live system in three months. Silvester’s job is not only to collect and manage all the data published by this system, but more importantly, to derive useful and insightful information from it.

It’s not a new or unique concept, but as Silvester pointed out: “A lot of companies get great analytics out of their systems but they don’t actually do anything with it. We’re looking at subscriber behaviour, looking at social networks, seeing how usage patterns change. For example, it might be there’s high churn in a certain sector because there’s another offering or because the users there are early adopters and they just follow the latest handsets. It will be interesting to see the impact of the iPhone 4 as well,” he said.

Silvester’s  team can now look at activity over the last hour or the last day and have the ability to track trends, of which one of the most interesting is dropped calls.

“So we are analysing that data by subscriber by location, and finding areas of the country where we’re seeing high volumes of dropped calls, sometimes at certain times of day, and sometimes when there’s an event on like Twickenham, or sometimes it’s by device, or even by service,” he said.

“We found dropped call rates were higher with some interconnects, so we passed this on to the operational team and they did some investigation. I can’t give any details about this, but I can say that the dropped call rates improved dramatically.”

Silvester also found that dropped call rates were higher to some international destinations and he praised analytics as a powerful tool in highlighting a fault or problem in an area, or whether there are just a large number of people in a location. “What people don’t realise is that there’s two ends to a mobile phone event and the problem might be at the other end where we don’t have visibility of it,” he said.

With all of 3′s 2G voice traffic carried by Orange, the assumption could be made that 3 has very little visibility into that particular part of its offering. But this is not the case, said Silvester: “3 receives data from Orange as a national roaming partner, so we can do a lot of the similar analytics on Orange carried 2G traffic as we can on our own network,” he said.

Silvester is also fighting a battle over the public’s perception of how a 3G network should perform. “I was on the train the other day and a guy got a 3 dongle out. So I was speaking to him about it and he expected that dongle to do exactly the same as his Virgin Media cable at home,” he said. “So we’ve got users expecting wireless broadband to perform the same as optical fibre, because it’s got the word ‘broadband’ in it.”

The best tool Silvester has to fight with is the information derived from his network analytics, he explained. “Because of the growth in data and smartphones we needed something that was scalable and able to support a service layer above the data and feed the data up to it. So now we have real time analytics and we can arm call centre agents with more information.”

As well as allowing 3 to deal with end user queries more efficiently, the platform also helps Silvester in his day to day role. “Data is genuinely available at our fingertips. I used to go into meeting with senior managers and try to find out what they wanted to know beforehand. Now I can confidently go in without having a presentation and get on the platform and get the information there and then.”

These benefits are what 3 is trying to capture in its advertising campaign, Silvester explained. The key foundation for 3 is the network and the company’s main focus is understanding what’s happening on that network. In the video advertisement 3 network engineers are seen in a variety of environments testing and upgrading the mobile network. The activity is dramatised, of course, but Silvester said that his work in the analytics department has bearings on whether the vignette of two men dragging network kit up a hillside becomes a reality.

“We’ve worked out who to get up in the morning, where the van is going, how much kit is in the van and how many people we need to do the job,” he said. “It’s all about optimisation. So we use all this analytics data to work out literally which mountains we want to climb with this kit, or which rivers we need to wade through and how much kit we need to drag with us. We find out where our bottlenecks are and where our congestion areas are as we need to make sure we roll out this kit in the right areas.”

Put simply, Silvester can look at the platform and find out where 3 has issues. He puts this in context when he forecasts that the operator is looking at tripling data volumes by this time next year. “We’re only just touching the tip of the iceberg and were finding more and more ways to leverage the platform. Network analytics help us optimise the network in a cost efficient manner,” he said.

The hope is that this will keep everyone happy, from the subscribers all the way up to the board.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3 UK tries to spark price war over iPhone 4

Trust the UK’s smallest mobile operator, 3 UK, to try to start a price war over the latest Apple device to hit the shelves. We say ‘try’ to start a price war because it’s become apparent that the UK has sold out of iPhone 4s, at least for now anyway.

Still, 3 is allowing users to register their interest on site, and will let consumers known as soon as it has devices in stock. On paper, the pricing looks like it will be attractive to consumers and may even spark a price war in the UK, given that almost every carrier is now offering the iPhone 4.

3 appears to be subsidising the cost of the device more than the other players on a 24 month contract, charging just £99 for the 16GB device on a £30 or £35 per month tariff, £169 on a £35 per month tariff and giving it away at £45 per month.

The company is also bundling 1GB of mobile data usage with all its service plans, one upping the competition in most cases, as well as beefing up the bucket of minutes to 2000 across its higher end offers.

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T-Mobile, Orange get green light for UK merger

On Monday the UK mobile subsidiaries of Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom got the green light from the European Commission to go ahead with their proposed merger.

Integration measures are expected to start immediately, with the closing of the transaction expected before the Spring is out. The deal, announced in August 2009, is to be conducted as a merger of equals, with T-Mobile and Orange folded into a 50:50 joint venture. This move will create a new market leader, with over 34 million subscribers and a 43 per cent share of the UK market, compared to current leader O2’s 22.4 million strong user base and 28.5 per cent market share, according to the latest figures from Informa Telecoms & Media’s WCIS.

The new player will also benefit from the inclusion of Orange’s fixed broadband subscriber base and the potential to deliver converged services.

As previously outlined, the joint venture is expected to generate estimated synergies with a net present value in excess of €4bn.

By way of concessions, the companies have agreed with the EC to divest 2x15MHz of their joint GSM spectrum in the 1800MHz band by the end of 2011. Of the divested spectrum 2x10MHz needs to be cleared by September 30 2013 at the latest and further 2x5MHz need to be cleared by September 30 2015.

T-Mobile’s existing network sharing deal with 3UK was also reinforced. Through Mobile Broadband Network Ltd, formed by 3 and T-Mobile UK in 2007, the two firms share their masts and 3G access networks. 3UK is supportive of the proposed merger between T-Mobile and Orange, and is expected to want to share in the synergies afforded by the agreement. It should be noted that Orange UK already hosts 3’s 2G traffic and, in a statement released shortly after the merger announcement, 3UK said: “Our network infrastructure joint venture with T-Mobile inevitably makes us an interested party.”

A combined brand is ultimately expected, but this week the companies said the T-Mobile and Orange UK brands will continue to operate in the UK for at least 18 months after the completion of the transaction.

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3 UK launches 10,000th cell site

Mobile operators continue to feel the pain from explosive growth in data demand, prompting network expansion to boost capacity. On Wednesday, UK operator 3 activated its 10,000th cell site and announced its intention to switch on 3,000 more over the course of 2010.

The 10,000th site was connected in Shooters Hill, London, bringing 3G population coverage to nearly 93 per cent.

Alongside the network expansion, Graham Baxter, CTO of 3 UK said the operator is rolling out a consumer policy designed to better advise customers of their coverage opportunities and resolve issues if customers find they do not have coverage at home.

3 UK is in the process of consolidating its 3G network infrastructure with T-Mobile through the Mobile Broadband Network Limited (MBNL) joint venture.

When it was announced in 2007, the 50:50 joint venture signalled the world’s largest known active 3G network sharing agreement to date. Under the agreement, masts and the 3G access networks are being combined, but each company’s core network and T-Mobile’s 2G network will not be shared. Both parties retain responsibility for the delivery of services to their respective customers and use their own spectrum. MBNL was given the aim of making 13,000 combined base station deployments, and around 7,000 are currently in operation.

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But seriously…

The bash was well attended by industry luminaries who were present back when it all began and it prompted one analyst with whom the Informer found himself in conversation to muse: “Isn’t this good. It makes me feel so young.”

The keynote was delivered by the right honourable Stephen Timms, minister for Digital Britain, who made a quick exit after his speech, just before the shouts of: “Give us more spectrum” reached crescendo. At least the Informer thinks he made an exit. There were reports of him getting a good shoeing in the cloakroom from the five operators present.

After listening to Mike Short, CTO of O2 Telefonica, Emin Gurdenli, technical director of T-Mobile UK, Ed Candy, CTO of Hutchison 3, Graham Fisher, head of R&D at Orange Labs, and Jeni Mundy, CTO of Vodafone UK, one thing was clear: The days of voice are over. Candy trotted out some astonishing figures, including the fact that 94 per cent of network traffic is internet or data related. And Mundy said that 30 per cent of Vodafone customers access the internet on their handset every day. This trend shows no sign of slowing up but, as some operators are finding out the hard way, how do you deal with the data explosion? According to the bigwigs at the event we’re approaching the limits of physics, and it may be that LTE is squeezing the last few drops available from technology. What’s needed, according to all the operators and vendors, is more spectrum (are you listening Mr Timms?), and, according to T-Mobile’s Gurdenli, a new architecture.

Femtocells got a lot of mentions at the event, which coincidentally took place the same week Vodafone UK re-launched its own femtocell offering. The Big V became the first European carrier to make femtocells commercially available, in July 2009 under the name of the Access Gateway. It was a name that didn’t ring true with consumers so Voda has seen fit to re-label its offering Sure Signal to better explain the concept of paying to install a cellular base station in your house. The newly rebranded offering costs £50 in a one off charge, or £5 a month for 12 months on price plans of £25 or more; or £120 in a one off cost, or £5 a month for 24 months on price plans of less than £25, making it only available to contract customers. The devices are probably quite heavily subsidised but it remains to be seen if consumers will bite at these prices. Still, it’s in the operator’s best interests if they can effectively shift some of their traffic onto another provider’s network with no associated cost.

Vodafone started pushing its femtocell service just days after it made the Apple iPhone available to its customers. It’s well known that O2 was caught off guard by the sudden spike in data usage prompted by the iPhone so the Informer wonders whether the two Vodafone initiatives are linked.

On the subject of mobile data usage, Finnish handset giant Nokia is adding to the problem by making mapping and turn by turn navigation available for free to a potential 83 million users worldwide. Earlier this week the company revealed what it’s been up to with location and mapping firm Navteq which it bought in 2008 for $8.1bn. At a launch event hosted by Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia, the company removed all costs associated with its Ovi Maps offering.

And the Finn reckons it’s got a fancy solution to avoid network congestion by making maps available both in on- and offline mode. They can either be downloaded on the fly over cellular or wifi, or sideloaded in advance from the PC. Any maps that are downloaded are also cached so they don’t need to be downloaded again. The company claims that the vector mapping technology used by its platform is ten times more efficient than the bitmap-based offerings from other providers.

The new Ovi Maps features car and pedestrian navigation including turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries in 46 languages, and traffic information for over ten countries. Through a partnership with Facebook, Nokia has also introduced a ‘share my location’ feature to use with the social networking service. The move threatens to destroy the PND (portable navigation device) market, and also sticks the boot into any other paid for navigation offerings as well as making an attractive alternative to offerings like the iPhone, which boasts native mapping using Google Maps, but does not allow for caching or offline usage.

When asked about the potential revenue loss from making features such as turn-by-turn navigation available for free, Vanjoki said the intention was to make a little money from a much bigger pool of users, rather than taking a lot of money per user from a smaller base. He also hinted that, in the long term, the platform would be good for mobile advertising, suggesting another revenue stream.

In fact, it certainly looks like a good time to be in the mobile advertising business, where companies are being snapped up like hot cakes. On Wednesday mobile browser king Opera acquired AdMarvel for a reported $8m in cash and the promise of a further $15m if targets are met. AdMarvel, based in California, is a startup firm running a mobile advertising ecosystem with service offerings including mobile web, WAP, SMS and in application advertising.

Opera intends to combine AdMarvel’s monetisation and analytics platform with the Opera browser and widget platform to offer advertising options to mobile operators and content partners on any Java capable handset including Symbian, BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile and various flavours of Linux.

Don’t forget that earlier this month Apple acquired mobile advertising firm Quattro Wireless for somewhere between $250m and $275m and late last year Google purchased AdMob for $750m.

We’re just about out of the January gloom and heading towards the bright sunshine of Barcelona for another Mobile World Congress, where nobody can hear you scream. Which also means it’s results time!

First up we have Google, which is definitely basking in the fiscal sunshine with 17 per cent year over year growth taking its revenues to $6.67bn, while fourth quarter net income came in at $1.97bn, compared to $382m in the fourth quarter of 2008.

At the other end of the spectrum is Sony Ericsson, which to be fair, is moving in the right direction. Fourth quarter loss shrank to €167m in 2009, from €187m in 2008, but sales also shrank from €2.9bn in the fourth quarter of 2008 to €1.7bn in 2009. Units shipped in the quarter hit 14.6 million, a sequential increase of 3 per cent and a year on year decrease of 40 per cent. Yikes!

Still, it can happen to anyone. There was a slightly uncomfortable moment back at the Cellular 25 event when Motorola senior vice president Alain Mutricy delivered his ten minute presentation on the evolution of the handset, leaping from the Dynatac to the RAZR in about six minutes. Just how was he going to fill the remaining four? Fortunately he then reminded the attendees that Motorola has been back on its game of late with the recent launch of the Droid. It’s also taking its game to South Korea where it this week unveiled the first smartphone in Korea to be powered by Android version 2.0.

The MotoRoi is offered in partnership with SK Telecom and boasts a full touch screen with a 3.7″ high definition WVGA (480X854) display, wifi, an eight megapixel camera with Xenon flash and a 720p HD camcorder, HDMI capabilities, 8GB of storage and a UI that offers five different virtual input methods including a 3X4 keypad, full QWERTY, half QWERTY, hand writing and writing pad. It looks a bit like an attack on the home turf of local vendor LG Electronics, which currently holds third position in the global handset vendor rankings. LG recently said that more than half of its 20 smartphones to be released in 2010 will be based on Android, in a bid to become one of the top two mobile device manufacturers by 2012. The company plans to do this with a strong push into the Korean and North American markets where it wants to be recognised as a provider of customised smartphones.

The Informer was always told that ‘I want’ never gets.

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The Informer

3UK bundles Spotify with Android HTC Hero

The UK’s smallest but most disruptive mobile operator, 3UK, said Monday it has struck a partnership with online music service Spotify, bundling the offering with the Android-based HTC Hero.

From November, 3 will bundle Spotify’s premium mobile service with the HTC Hero for £35 a month over 24 months and an upfront fee of £99.

The package includes unlimited Spotify usage, 750 minutes, unlimited texts, and unlimited email, internet browsing and Facebook.

Charlotte Blanchard, director of products and services at 3 said: “As a first step we’ve built this service into an attractive, well-priced package with the HTC Hero. Over time our deal with Spotify will extend across a range of our products including Mobile Broadband.”

Recently, Spotify was forced to rein-in new subscriptions to its free service after being overwhelmed with demand following the launch of its mobile applications.