Mobile Operators Want Yet Another Standard

Wireless

from the not-enough-yet... dept

How very typical… After all the hype about 3G — which so far has failed to live up to expectations, and all the impending hype about other wireless broadband technologies such as WiMAX and FLASH-OFDM, it looks like a bunch of mobile operators have decided to toss all that and get to work on a completely new standard for mobile broadband, with the aim of being 10 times as fast as 3G. While it isn’t really surprising, this is the type of thing the industry is famous for. They overhype a technology way beyond what it can do, then when people realize it really isn’t that impressive, they move on to a new standard that they’ll hype up for years. While there are some big players joining up to work on this project, expect it to take quite a long time for anything to actually come of it. By the time this offering reaches a commercial launch, the requirements of users are likely to have changed drastically. The competitive marketplace will also be very different. So, before people go off and declare this new, completely imaginary standard to be the wireless broadband technology of the future, it might make sense to wait a few years and see how far it’s really progressed.

Does A Mobile To VoIP Bridge Break Any Laws?

Wireless

from the only-in-the-heads-of-mobile-carriers dept

The concept of a mobile to VoIP bridge is nothing new. We wrote about a company doing exactly that back in May. The idea is that most VoIP plans have unlimited calling within the US (and sometimes Canada) and cheap international rates. So, if you could call into your VoIP phone from your mobile phone, and then redirect the call outbound, you could, in some circumstances, save money. Of course, it’s fairly limited circumstances. An increasing number of mobile phone plans include virtually (i.e., thousands and thousands of minutes) unlimited US calls already. So, this sort of thing really only makes sense for someone who makes a ton of phone calls from their mobile phone, and often makes international calls — where mobile rates are likely to be much higher. However, last month, a company named Xcelis, who is selling a similar VoIP bridge box made a lot of news for trying to offer the same thing as a service. That is, rather than hooking up a box to your home VoIP system, they hooked up the box to their own VoIP system and to a mobile phone. Since Cingular and T-Mobile offer unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling, the $10/month service lets you then redirect out your calls. Yes, if you read all of this and think it’s only useful for a small group of people and sounds somewhat complicated, you’re probably right. However, the mobile operators are a bit nervous that they might lose out on some international and airtime revenue and are suddenly trying to see what they can do to stop such a service. The answer is probably “not much,” for now. It’s not breaking any laws, though Verizon seems to think it constitutes a violation of their network (though, it’s unclear how). What’s more likely is that mobile operators will start putting terms in their contracts that explicitly forbid people from doing something like this — which is unlikely to stop the few people who this is actually useful for.

Cable Companies And Mobile Solutions…

Wireless

from the cutting-the-wires... dept

The fact that Time Warner is looking to add a mobile phone solution (via an MVNO arrangement) isn’t a surprise. They mentioned it in March, confirmed it in June and talked more seriously about it in November. So, it’s not entirely clear why everyone is making a big deal out of the fact that the company is now talking to Sprint about using their network. Sprint, of course, has jumped into the MVNO market in a big way, providing the network for most of these new offerings, from Virgin Mobile to the new ESPN mobile phone offering. It’s also not surprising that cable companies are looking to add a mobile phone solution — that too many people are calling a “quadruple play,” when it’s really more about making the triple play mobile. However, what’s more interesting is that it finally appears that other carriers are waking up to the possibilities of the MVNO market. While lots of people picked up on the fact that T-Mobile USA wasn’t looking to team up with any other carrier, it didn’t receive quite as much attention that part of their strategy to stay relevant is to offer their network to cable companies in an MVNO-style relationship. For all of those who were afraid that the Sprint-Nextel merger was going to mean less competition, the market is rapidly filling up with new companies who are simply using existing networks to offer service. While it does raise questions about the network provider competing with its own virtual operators, it looks like there’s still going to be plenty of competition.

SMSable For Sale Signs

Wireless

It seems like a fairly obvious use of the technology, but real estate “for sale” signs in one city in Florida will soon be getting SMS codes that people can plug in to get more info about the house they’re standing in front of at the moment. It’s sort of a modern update on the old paper fliers that are often found attached to “for sale” signs. Yet another example of how, with mobility added, the analog and digital worlds start to meet.

Pacemakers Safe From WiFi

Wireless

from the phew dept

While there’s been some concern in the past about various wireless devices interfering with pacemakers, it appears that WiFi is pacemaker safe. The Mayo Clinic ran a study testing pacemakers in the presence of a variety of WiFi enabled PDAs, and couldn’t detect any issues with them. Of course, the description of the test the Clinic ran doesn’t make them sound all that thorough. Basically, they testing a pacemaker around a few WiFi-enabled PDAs and nothing happened and, thus, they decided everything must be safe. While it’s probably fine, it would seem that a more convincing test could be run.

The Paradox Of HDTV Capacity

Wireless

Usually, being a first mover is an advantage, but in the satellite, digital cable, and Over The Air (OTA) broadcast TV world, having digital compression at the network core is impeding Satellite and Cable’s move to HDTV. I’m linking this post to one Mike wrote on Cablevision’s Voom HDTV satellite service, because the idea behind Voom was to focus on HD content, and beat out Dish and DirecTV, who would offer less HD. Why is it that these very modern, all-digital, ‘space-age’ companies are not offering all HDTV? It’s because of network capacity. Classic analog broadcast TV uses about five times the bandwidth of HDTV, and only delivers a fraction of the image resolution. So an OTA broadcaster can upgrade to HDTV, and actually reduce the bandwidth that they use. However, to keep costs down, satellite providers were always looking for ways to increase the system capacity of their networks, so years ago they got smart and took the analog TV signals, compressed them to MPEG2 digital signals, and then send them to your set-top box, which decodes the MPEG2 back into your old analog TV. But now when TV programs upgrade from low def analog to HD digital, the satellite guys have a problem – they were already gaining the compression benefits of digital, and had already filled their capacity with many, many channels of digitally compressed low def. They don’t have the capacity to increase the resolution of those channels to HD. This is why digital cable, DirecTV, and Dish all have only a few select channels available in HD. They will need to launch additional satellites, and build the core capacity needed before they can provide a full range of HDTV programming. Meanwhile, OTA broadcasts, by virtue of being wasteful and out-dated, suffer none of these problems, and thus to leap into the future and get HDTV, many people are going back to the future by installing rabbit ears and rooftop antennae to pick up OTA HDTV signals.

Licensed Vs. Unlicensed – The Debate Rages On

Wireless

Over at The Broadband Daily, Jesse Kopelman makes a case for unlicensed networks over the classic licensed networks, ostensibly for use as wireless broadband networks. Kopelman says that it’s six of one, or a half-dozen of the other: in licensed networks, the carrier spends money on licenses, in un-licensed the carrier spends money on additional base stations to get similar coverage. Of those two choices, Kopelman then says that it’s (socially) better to spend money on hardware than to give it to government for licenses. This is where there is room for disagreement. It’s easy for weary taxpayers to think that money given to the US Treasury is pure waste, but money collected for spectrum is money that will not have to be collected by taxes. Public spending on services like public transport, airport infrastructure, roads, etc. all pay functional dividends for years and years to come. Funds to the treasury are better for the country than buying radios manufactured in Asia(especially now that the US balance of trade is deep in deficit). A further weakness in the pro-unlicensed network argument is that Kopelman fails to discuss the massive real-estate rights acquisition story that goes hand-in-hand with every access point that needs to be installed. An independent business would find it prohibitively expensive, and organizationally cumbersome to install the 500 to 9000 WiFi access points it would take to cover the same area as one licensed cellular tower. But other than those two points, Kopelman does take some very astute jabs at the licensed spectrum crowd, and at Verizon Wireless in particular.

Storing Your Banned Phone May Cost You

Wireless

from the just-hide-it-in-the-bushes dept

With the backlash against cameraphones growing rapidly, many different places have banned mobile phones — including some courthouses. No, we don’t know what it is with courthouses and wireless technologies today, but they’re getting a lot of attention. Textually is pointing out that a new industry of sorts has been built up outside of buildings that ban cameraphones. For $10, a hot dog vendor outside a federal courthouse in Miami will store your contraband cameraphone behind the hot dog buns in his cart. Down the street, a shopowner charges $2, but gets annoyed that they keep ringing. Many who show up at the court without realizing the ban was in place, and who don’t know about the local merchants’ “side business,” simply end up burying them in the dirt or hiding them under garbage cans. If you’re looking to pick up some free mobile phones, apparently digging around outside of federal courthouses may be the way to go.

Mobile Spam In Korea Outnumbers Desktop Spam

Wireless

While mobile spam still isn’t as big a problem in the US, in Korea it’s getting to be overwhelming. A new report says that there’s now more mobile spam than desktop spam. Korean operators are trying to control the spam, but so far, it appears they’re not having very much luck. For those of us in places where mobile spam isn’t really a problem, just remember that Korea has been leading the world in various good uses of mobile technology — and expect this bad use to start becoming a pain elsewhere as well.

More Ringback Tones

Wireless

While the bigger carriers are starting to offer ringback tones in the US, the first version in the US was from a smaller carrier using a system from Preferred Voice. It looks like Preferred Voice is trying to push this to a number of smaller regional carriers and have now signed up another one in Oklahoma. What will be interesting is to see whether or not things like ringback tones really do help to differentiate smaller regional carriers, especially in places that aren’t thought of as being particularly early on the tech adoption curve.