The HTC Velocity will be the first LTE handset available in Europe and available on Vodafone Germany

Vodafone D2, the German arm of the UK-based carrier, has revealed that it will soon have an LTE ready smartphone from Taiwanese handset maker HTC available on its network. German publication Computer Week has said that the Vodafone press office in Germany has confirmed that the HTC Velocity 4G will soon be coming to market, though the exact launch date and pricing has not been confirmed.

The HTC Velocity 4G is powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm chipset and will run Android 2.3. A Velocity supporting 1800MHz LTE is already available in Australia and the handset had already appeared on the AT&T 700MHz LTE network as the Vivid. This version is being brought to market for Vodafone Germany to support its 800MHz and 2600MHz LTE network.

The device will offer download speeds of up to 100Mbps and upload speed of 50Mbps and 42.2Mbps HSPA+ is also supported. As VoLTE has yet to be implemented, calls will be routed over the 3G network via circuit-switched fall-back.

Vodafone Germany launched its LTE network in December 2010 and so far its customers have been limited to USB dongles and Mifi devices to make use of it. The Velocity becomes the second LTE phone to be available in Europe, with Telia in Sweden recently offering the Samsung Galaxy SII LTE. Other than this, the only LTE-ready handsets have so far only been available on US networks such as Verizon and AT&T.

HTC will be hoping that LTE will help it gain ground in Europe after poor fourth-quarterly 2011 results and low forecasts for the first quarter of 2012 cent earlier this week caused its share price to drop by 6 per cent.

Vodafone Germany will be speaking at the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your interest.

We are addicted to internet devices Philippe Keryer, executive vice president of networks at Alcatel Lucent has told the Broadband World Forum

Philippe Keryer, executive vice president of the networks operating segment at vendor Alcatel-Lucent revealed that in a recent study 84 per cent of Germans admitted that they would rather give up their cars or their partner than be deprived of their internet connection.

Speaking in a keynote address on day two of the Broadband World Forum in Paris, Keryer said that the data is proof that consumers have become addicted to internet devices, causing a shift in influence in the telecoms industry. “The power has shifted from the operator and carriers into the hands of the end users, which is why you see device addiction,” Keryer said.

On a healthier note, Keryer also said that telecoms operators were more than just providers of data pipes. “Broadband is an engine of social and economic development. We are not just providing telecoms – we are an enabler of growth.”

He also said that while fibre was important, copper still had an important role to play. “We need to accelerate the deployment of broadband and use fibre where it makes sense, but we should be very wise to use the existing connectivity in your home to improve the business case.

Keryer also highlighted the importance of small cell technology. “Initially, there was a lot of scepticism about femtocells, but now there is no discussion about metro cells – it’s absolutely a must.”

Samsung has been told it can no longer sell the Galaxy tablet in Germany

Apple has won a case in Germany to prohibit the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 device in the country.

A Düsseldorf court upheld the preliminary injunction secured by Apple, which claims that Samsung had infringed its intellectual property and copied the iPad.

Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hoffmann ruled that there was a “clear impression of similarity” between the Apple and the Samsung devices.

Apple declined to comment on the judgement, but Samsung wrote in a statement:

“We are disappointed with this ruling and believe it severely limits consumer choice in Germany.”

The company added that it will “actively and immediately” appeal the ruling and will likely go to a higher court, the Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf.

Colin Fowler, associate at specialist IP law firm Rouse, said that the practical effect of the ruling will be limited to Germany, rather than the EU-wide ban – with the exception of the Netherlands – that Apple had initially secured.

“The skirmish over the injunction is important not just for Apple and Samsung, but also for other tablet manufacturers, as well as consumers, because it means the product stays off the market in Germany. Apple is reportedly now also pursuing the Galaxy Tab 7.7 so the dispute between the two companies appears to be escalating,” said Fowler.

“However, the two central issues of whether Apple’s design survives a validity attack and whether Samsung’s product is too close to Apple’s design and therefore infringes it will not be finally decided for many months. If Apple is eventually successful Samsung will have to redesign or abandon the affected products and future designs for tablets from all manufacturers would have to steer clear of Apple’s design rights.”

Carrier billing plays on the operator relationship with the end user

Right now it seems like operators are falling over themselves to establish direct carrier billing functionality. Telefónica, which already signed up Boku earlier this week, seems to be spreading its bets through a secondary deal with PaymentOne.

The agreement is limited to the German market, but PaymentOne’s merchant customers can now offer Telefónica Germany subscribers the option to charge services up to €30 directly to their mobile phone bill. The functionality is geared towards one time transactions, recurring subscriptions, in-app billing and web billing.

“Previously, merchants and publishers were not able to reach the many consumers that could not or would not transact with traditional credit cards online,” said Brad Singer, executive vice president of PaymentOne. “Our vision of enabling all consumers to participate in the digital economy still drives the company today. For the more than five billion global consumers with a mobile device, fixed-line or broadband connection, PaymentOne says ‘put your wallet away’ and use your phone number to pay.”

Earlier this week, Telefónica group released a new billing API designed to cater to carrier billing functionality for app developers for Telefónica’s global API program, BlueVia.

The carrier selected online mobile payments firm Boku to support BlueVia’s in app payments with its bank-grade mobile payments technology, reducing the barriers to users for making in-app purchases, which can be linked to mobile operator bills without additional authentication.

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Vodafone Germany has become the latest European LTE cheerleader, having accomplished the impressive feat of launching LTE service on December 1, 2010, a mere seven months after acquiring the relevant spectrum under auction. Ahead of his appearance as one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming LTE World Summit 2011, Hartmut Kremling, Vodafone Germany’s chief technology officer talked to Telecoms.com about the deployment.

“We are now well on track,” says Kremling, “and I am really, positively surprised regarding the stability and performance of this generation of this technology.” However, he said that the speed of the rollout presented greater challenges than 3G, where there was a three year gap between the acquisition of spectrum and the rollout of the UMTS network. “The key challenge with LTE was more or less, the speed [of deployment]. One of the key challenges was to parallelise eight development and test streams together – it was not possible to do it sequentially. It’s a new technology to put in place, from the transmission tower to the handsets.”

But LTE handsets are yet to hit the European market. “At the moment we’re working with modems and dongles. The good question at the summit will be: ‘when will the handsets come?’ We have seen LTE handsets in the US and I’m in direct contact with our partner Verizon Wireless,” he says. The US carrier already has a commercial LTE handset on sale – the HTC Thunderbolt. But Kremling explained that Verizon’s handsets can’t be simply brought over to Europe due to spectrum frequency differences. “Its 700MHz for the US market and 800MHz across Europe,” he says, yet he is still very confident that it is but a short hop for 4G handsets to come to market. “The developments are on the way – it’s just the next step in the chipset, it’s simple. It’s on the roadmap. The key question is more or less when will we see multi-band, multi-system handsets, for 2G, 3G, EDGE, wifi and 4G”.

While many industry pundits are predicting that LTE will enable radically new types of applications, for Vodafone’s LTE customers right now the benefits are quite straightforward. “It’s simple,” Kremling said. “It’s just speed. 3G is really fast in Germany, but [LTE] is another [level] of user experience. The delay time is much, much less, and the round trip is in the range of 30 milliseconds, drastically faster than 3G.” However, Kremling wouldn’t be drawn on the details concerning real world LTE speeds. “Let’s leave this as a secret for the summit,” he says. “The message today though is that I have been positively surprised at the throughput.”

As part of its spectrum auction win in May last year, Vodafone acquired 10MHz of 800MHz bandwidth. Under the licensing requirements, all winners of this frequency were required to provide service to rural communities first and Kremling confirmed that this rollout is well under way. “We have started out commercial service in the rural areas. There are so called ‘white spots’ – without broadband – fixed or mobile – and LTE 800 is a perfect technology to cover these wide areas quickly and efficiently. And we really have great feedback from the people there. There was no fast internet there at all and now it’s very fast,” he says.

But the high cost of deploying LTE networks prompted some talk of network sharing in Germany, particularly in the rural areas, however, Kremling scotched talk of network sharing.

“The network is entirely our own. There were some discussions, but in the end the question is what the business case is. There was a famous external benchmark – a connect test. We won this in 3G and 2G over the last six/seven years and it gives us an opportunity for differentiation in networks. Why should we give this up for the next generation of technology?”

Adopting the stance that competition is driving performance, Kremling also implies that LTE could pose a threat to fixed line operators too. “The key question from the customer’s point of view is: do I want the highest speed in just the living room, or high speed broadband all over? LTE is the perfect solution for high speed broadband all over. In Germany we can make that change with 800MHz and we have the chance to add capacity to the spectrum we have, paired or unpaired.”

But Kremling admitted that deployment might not be as simple in other places in the world, although Vodafone Germany will be keen to impart the learnings from its experience to others in the group. “A lot depends on available spectrum. There is no one fits all strategy. Therefore it’s important to look country by country. It depends on competitiveness and coverage applications. But the foundation of the technology – that it is all-IP, the core issues, the planning tools and basics – we are developing knowhow to give to our group colleagues.  There is a lot of key learning for the whole Vodafone group we can collect in Vodafone Germany. Of course we are very connected to all of our colleagues, that it’s a common approach for us – teamwork.”

Hartmut Kremling will be giving a keynote presentation on Vodafone’s initial LTE experiences on day two of the LTE World Summit.

The off grid base station is powered by a combination of sun and wind

German operator E-Plus has claimed a first for a mature market, setting up an off grid base station powered by a combination of sun and wind.

E-Plus tapped Nokia Siemens Networks to roll out the green site, which the carrier has implemented as part of its environmentally friendly initiative to increase energy efficiency by five per cent by the year 2012, and by 20 per cent by the year 2020.

The site relies on a combination of solar and wind power, supported by fuel cell and deep cycle battery technology and incorporates a solar tracking system, which follows the sun and turns the maximum surface of the solar panels toward it, to increase solar energy production for the site operation. The deployment also enables the operator to remotely maintain and install new software remotely, which obviates the necessity of visiting base station sites, thereby further preventing CO2 emissions.
“With this innovative energy concept, we show how mobile phone transmission sites can become carbon neutral,” said Rafal Markiewicz, chief technology officer of E-Plus Group, adding that ABI Research has found that 86 per cent of the energy needed by an operator is consumed by its networks.

Denis Gautheret is VP of NGMN introduction for Deutsche Telekom in Germany

Deployment of LTE in the German 800MHz Digital Dividend band carries with it some unusual requirements. The winners in the May 2010 spectrum auction had to pledge to provide coverage to remote and rural communities before addressing the more densely populated and therefore financially attractive urban areas. It was a neat innovation by the German regulator and one that will bring much-needed internet connectivity to citizens who have hitherto been forced to live without it.

While it was not a deployment strategy that the operators footing the bill would have been likely to choose for themselves, they had little choice but to embrace it. And, says Denis Gautheret, vice president for NGMN introduction at Deutsche Telekom’s German operation, his firm’s imminent launch (Gautheret says as we speak in late March that the switch-on is “weeks away”) is generating excitement.

“This is about real customers finally being able to get internet, where before they had none—and no ability co communicate through a technology such as LTE, with such low response times. It’s enlightening their lives, and they’re reacting in a very positive way.”

Taking a brand new communications technology to rural-dwelling consumers with little previous experience of the internet is not the accepted way of doing things in this industry. But it chimes with DT’s desire to shift the focus away from the technology and onto the customer benefits and experience—because only if that experience is truly valuable, will people pay the premium that DT, like call carriers, hope and require that LTE will command.

“What we say in DT is that 4G is all about customer experience; we want to be able to offer quality to the customers who want it,” he says. “We saw it with the iPhone in 2009; the price people were paying wasn’t important. What was important was that they wanted to have the iPhone—the experience was the most important factor. 4G is a new experience, so they will be ready to pay a bit more than they would do to other operators.”

Denis Gautheret is participating in a Keynote Panel Discussion on day two of the LTE World Summit in Amsterdam.

Gautheret prefers to talk about NGMN, or 4G, rather than referencing LTE as a technology. This, which is reflected in his executive title, is part of a wider movement within DT, to distance the fourth generation from the third, when more than €50bn was spent on spectrum licences by German carriers and when the technology was slow to evolve into a service. Focusing on the NGMN alliance allows DT to participate in LTE deployment as part of a far larger community. There is safety in numbers, it seems.

Gautheret was involved in DT’s UMTS deployment as well, although not as the lead. It was the lack of cohesion across the ecosystem that was the biggest problem a decade ago, he says.

“With UMTS we had a network available for two years without any devices working on it,” he says, by way of example. “This time we were really careful to make sure that what we were doing with the network manufacturers was based on a similar roadmap to the one we were following with the device suppliers.”

A similar approach to spectrum has also paid dividends: “I can tell you that for this 800MHz spectrum it would not have been possible to get so far without a real concerted effort from the industry, all the operators, device suppliers and network suppliers. It worked because it was on the roadmap two years ago.”

Despite this spectrum allocation actually coming later than DT had anticipated, Gautheret says DT has been able to bring LTE to market in half the time it took to deploy UMTS. This has been aided by a cross-functional internal programme that has kept all areas of the DT business involved in the preparations for launch. What would once have been left to the technical departments for much of the project has had input from senior management across the board, he says.

And DT has worked closely with its competitors to get the technology ready for market, which has enabled them to drive their suppliers harder than they were able last time around. “For the first time we said to the suppliers, in a concerted, non-competitive way, that what they gave us for UMTS was not only very expensive, it was very much proprietary. We have to stop this, because we need to save cost. Traffic is up and revenue is down, this is what regulated the message from the operators to the suppliers and without this working together, we couldn’t have got LTE up so fast,” he says.

It has cost less, too. While he doesn’t want to share numbers, he says the cost of deploying LTE has been “cheaper by far than the cost of deploying 3G ten years ago.”

Time to market is crucial for operators that are looking to position LTE as a competitive differentiator, but undue haste can be counterproductive, Gautheret argues. Collaborative and exhaustive testing of LTE, across a range of configurations, has been essential—although not every player, by his assessment, has paid heed.

Gautheret asserts that LTE pioneer Telia Sonera rushed LTE to market at the expense of thorough testing. This is not how DT wanted to approach it, he says. “Through the testing work that was done we gained a lot of knowledge about where to improve which parameters, and the speed at which 800MHz was to be rolled out and how the network will function. So the customer satisfaction, for us, will come faster than it did for Telia Sonera back in 2009.”

And this is the theme to which Gautheret returns most frequently; LTE as a customer experience first and foremost.  “We want to go away from the technology and towards the experience because, in a few years time, all of the technologies will be together in one box and the devices will be intelligent enough to choose the right spectrum for wherever you are.”

Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone Germany and O2 Germany have started talks focused on the rolling out of a joint LTE network

Leading German mobile operators, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone Germany and O2 Germany have started talks focused on the rolling out of a joint LTE network in the country.

Head of Deutsche Telekom, Niek Jan van Damme, has said he expects cooperation to start before the end of this year, following approval from the necesary authorities.

The three operators acquired LTE spectrum at a spectrum auction in May 2010. The regulator stipulated that less populated areas should be covered first and the operators don’t see a need for multiple network rollouts in these areas.

TeliaSonera sees price as the only differentiator to LTE deployments

Nordic carrier TeliaSonera continued to spearhead the adoption of LTE, with an announcement on Monday that the company’s Uzbekistan subsidiary, UCell, has constructed a 4G network.

As of June 2010, UCell is the second largest mobile operator in Uzbekistan, with a total of 5.4 million subscriptions, trailing market leader MTS with 7.5 million users. UCell was awarded a 4G license by the government of Uzbekistan in July.

The company contracted Chinese vendor ZTE to deploy its SDR technology and Uni-RAN solution for the LTE network deployment, which UCell claims able to achieve a downloading peak rate of up to 100Mbps.

During tests in the nation’s capital of Tashkent, UCell demonstrated internet access, streaming video, file uploads and downloads, and VoIP.

The choice of ZTE as the infrastructure vendor for this deployment is interesting, given that TeliaSonera has handed out other LTE contracts to Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens. However, the company has made no bones about the fact that it will go with the cheapest vendor as it sees no technical difference between the offerings.

In related news, NSN has scored a deal with Telefónica O2 Germany to supply a pilot LTE network in Halle, East Germany, with deployment to start in September in the 2.6GHz and 800MHz bands. The network will go into operation by the end of the year.

NSN  will deploy the complete LTE overlay network comprising of Flexi Multiradio Base Stations and the Enhanced Packet Core (EPC) nodes Flexi NG and Flexi NS. The network will provide broadband capacity and coverage in Halle and its suburb Teutschenthal, an area where there is currently limited broadband access. The vendor will also manage and operate the network.

O2 Germany recently won both Digital Dividend (800MHz) and 2.6GHz spectrum licenses to launch nationwide LTE services.