Vodafone’s high-speed mobile broadband will actually deliver high speeds
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, smartphone, Networking, Mobile on
Three years ago, when WiMAX looked like the best way to get faster mobile data, the then head of Vodafone made a point of stating the obvious at the Mobile World Congress; the networks would rather stick to 3G, the HSPA enhancements and eventually the ‘Long Term Evolution’ standard because evolving your network may be painful, but it’s better than ripping it out and putting in a brand new one, especially when they’d need twice as many base stations to provide the same coverage. But if HSPA and LTE didn’t show signs of showing up and speeding up to match the 100Mbps WiMAX promised in the long term, the convenience wasn’t going to stop the networks abandoning 3G.
3G speeds have been creeping up ever since, from 1 to 3.6 to 7 and now to 14.4Mbps. On the face of it that sounds faster than the average 2Mbps DSL connection in the UK; faster even than the 8Mbps you get on a faster exchange. But there’s a dirty little secret about most mobile broadband connections. It’s not just that the quoted speed is always a theoretical maximum and just as you never get a gigabit of data a second over gigabit Ethernet, you need to take off a quarter to a third from the maximum speed. It’s not just that the actual speed is shared with everyone else using data on the same cell; it’s that the speed quoted and the actual speed delivered are both only the speed to connect to the base station - not the Internet. And a surprising number of 3G base stations connect on to the Internet over 2Mbps DSL (and remember; you’re still sharing that speed with up to 50 other users in the same cell).
Not Vodafone; backhaul matters, says Vodafone CTO Jeni Mundy. “The pipes we put into the cell sites are key for anything you want to do on the Vodafone network or going out to the Internet; the bandwidth of those pipes is critically important and we’re absolutely doing not just a base station upgrade, we’re making sure we put the right backhaul in place to carry that traffic.”
In this case, rather than a single 2Mbps line, each Vodafone base station has eight 2Mbps E1 fibre connections adding up to 16Mbps of bandwidth. That’s courtesy of the deal Vodafone did last spring to connect to BT’s 21 Century Network and it means there’s slightly more than enough backhaul to deal with the incoming connections.
Vodafone’s press release about the launch was far more honest than most discussions of mobile broadband, which often suggest that no-one could tell the difference from DSL. Instead of trumpeting that Vodafone has the first 14.4 network in the UK, it pointed out “whilst 14.4 Mbps is the theoretical peak rate, customers can expect to see typical speeds of anything between 1 and 4 Mbps with a practical maximum speed of 10.8 Mbps.”
Mundy was equally frank about what that actually delivers: “As you improve the speed it works in two ways. If you look at the purest end, you can get up to 10.8Mbps -but in reality, few users get all the bandwidth. Where you have a number of users, we’re able to have those users further away from the cell because we’ve got more capacity. We can either have a broader cell coverage area or a much higher speed for single users, so you get advantages either way and the smarts of our technology will optimise that to maximise the benefit for users at any one time.”
The 14.4 network is live in the “busy areas” of London, Birmingham and Liverpool already; other areas - like London suburbs - will have the faster speeds by next March and Vodafone estimates that 80% of the 3G handsets and dongles that currently connect to their network can use the faster speed. And for once, a faster speed really will give you a faster connection.
-Mary
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Would Vodafone want T-Mobile for backhaul?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, smartphone, Telecoms, Futures, Networking, Internet, Wireless, Mobile on
It’s probably about buying market share and reducing the competition that drives down prices, but there’s a new problem for mobile operators to think about these days - bandwidth and backhaul.
No matter how fast the 3G chipset in your mobile phone, you’re not getting on the Internet at that speed; you might have 3, 7 or 14Mbps between your phone and the base station but that base station is connected into the net at the same DSL speed as your home broadband. And you’re sharing that with everyone else connected to that base station; say the 50 people in the same mile radius on the same network. Wimax and LTE promise speeds of 80-100Mbps; that means backhaul will have to get much faster and wider - according to a recent In-Stat report, backhaul capacity has to triple by 2013 to a worldwide total of 90,000Gbps to match demand. To get faster speeds needs faster physical connections; faster DSL, expensive fibre optic cable or laser links. And that costs money…
Vodafone and T-Mobile both use BT for backhaul. Last year Vodafone started rolling out Tellabs’s Ethernet-based backhaul to replace the legacy voice network it was previously built on top of (getting an IP network for next-generation services at the same time);or rather BT is doing it for them (it’s all part of the ’21st Century Network’). O2 is taking the same service, and T-Mobile had signed up for it a year before that. Currently the system promises to deliver up to 60Mbps (a big improvement on the 2Mbps at most base stations). If T-Mobile is further along with the rollout, buying them could give Vodafone better bandwidth faster - and in the long run that could be worth as much as buying market share.
T-Mobile users might want to cross their fingers that the deal goes through (which is far from certain). Coverage and the weather and device configuration and the number of other people around and whole bunch of other variables make it hard to compare networks precisely, but of all the networks I test phones with Vodafone consistently gives me the best connection and coverage.
-Mary
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BlackBerry and the lizard brain
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in smartphone, Telecoms, Enterprise, Futures, Email, Wireless, Mobile on
What’s the difference between me walking down the hall, head down and totally absorbed in reading email on my BlackBerry because I didn’t stop to do it before I left the hotel room (well, the coffee is downstairs), and Jim Balsillie co-CEO of RIM walking down the hall so absorbed in reading email on his BlackBerry that he doesn’t hear me say good morning? Mainly that he has the good manners to have a member of staff walk with him so he doesn’t walk into anyone; I’ve never noticed anyone leaping out of my way to avoid getting trampled because you simply don’t notice when you’re that absorbed but I have taken some sudden swerves in railway stations to get out of the path of an oncoming commuter with their eyes fixed on their device so I assume it works both ways.
If your users carry BlackBerrys you can give them a little more to get absorbed in by rolling out the new BES 5. you’re going to want to; if the automatic failover for redundancy, manual failover for maintenance and 64-bit support don’t grab you, you’ll like the full Web-based remote admin (although it does need ActiveX in the browser). They’ll like email flags, being able to file messages and manage folders and - if you enable it - better access to fileshares behind your company firewall.
That’s all instant gratification of a sort, which appeals to the lizard brain. After the other CEO of RIM, Mike Laziridis, introduced BES 5 and celebrated ten years of BlackBerry (and 25 years of RIM) and Bob IBM of RIM showed off some very IBM-centric predictions about the evolution of enterprise collaboration based on smartphones and contextual information (which would have been visionary a year ago and now are just documenting established trends), ex-Disney Imagineer and US intelligence service CTO Eric Haseltine talked a lot about the lizard brain and how to take advantage of it to move your company in the right direction, because it isn’t going away any time soon.
Concept cars matter to the car industry because they show you a physical object you can imagine using rather than describing a service you can’t. The concrete, visual, tactile, tangible prototype appeals to the other big part of the brain, the visual and processing area. And given that in every enterprise the urgent trumps the important and most decisions are the emotional lizard brain arguing with the rational brain, you can do with getting more of the brain on your side.
At Disney Haseltine worked on the Park PDA; back in the 90s this was a handheld device that did everything from video conferencing to games. Of course the killer app wasn’t any of the big concept ideas; it was the text message that told you where in the park Mickey Mouse was so you could go get a photo of your kids with the rodent. Your smartphone can do a lot of that today, but Disney still does great business selling the Pal Mickey; a gadget that knows when you’re standing in line for a ride and likely to be bored, buzzes to offer your kids a secret message and uses a proximity sensor so that when they hold it up to their ear it can whisper at them about the ride they’re queuing for.
Haseltine’s point isn’t so much that your big idea is never go to match what users actually want but that the sooner you can give them something to try out, the sooner you’ll find out what they do want - and then you can use that to move a little further in your long-term direction, supported by users who are getting what they want as well. The people who will be most likely to take the time to try your prototype and give you useful reactions are not just the early adopters but the ones who are actually suffering in some way because they can’t do what they need; there’s always more incentive to get out of the discomfort zone.
And for support, don’t turn to executives or the formal development process; he suggested looking to the counterculture, the “underground informal rebel alliance who think the bureaucracy doesn’t get it”. Every company has them, and if you’re in IT you’ll probably have quite a few working with or for you. They’re going to be doing some unapproved skunkworks projects, so they might as well be something that suits your agenda.
His favourite recent example is the billions of dollars that the various US intelligence agencies spent on knowledge management and collaboration tools which had the same success as any other KM project; utter failure. (When we first watched Criminal Minds we assumed the show didn’t want to reveal the sophisticated IT the FBI must be using; I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that a technical analyst who could retrieve information from a variety of sources is something most FBI teams only dream of). Over at the CIA, a handful of agents got together and set up a completely unapproved and doubtless career-limiting copy of MediaWiki. Helped by the fact that a third of CIA officers are now what Haseltine calls “the Facebook and MySpace generation” (no figures on how many CIA agents are actually on Facebook), Intellipedia became something of a sleeper hit, delivering the knowledge sharing all the formal systems never managed.
Smartphones came into business the way that PDAs and PCs did; because users who thought they would be useful just started using them and demanding that IT support them; social networking and IM arrived the same way. The best way of getting some control over whatever comes next is to be involved in bringing it into business; your counterculture revolutionaries will be in the thick of that and if you can give them enough rope to drag your agenda along you could kill two birds with one stone.
-Mary
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Smartphones: how to manage the worst of computing and networking
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, support, Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Wireless, Mobile on
If you think about it, whatever platform they are, smartphones are a horrible combination of complex networking and primitive computing, squeezed into a pocket-sized security threat. I wouldn’t be without mine, but whatever smartphone I happen to be using I always wish it worked better; at the moment I’m using an HTC Touch Pro and I wish I could tell why it sometimes runs so slowly it can’t rotate the screen when I slide open the keyboard. I might have got an answer to why an app I was testing kept giving me a blank screen rather sooner if I’d been able to show the software developers what I was (or wasn’t) seeing on screen. The problem was that they’re in California - and that week we were in Las Vegas. Your users might not travel that far, but they’re far more likely to have problems on their phones when they’re not in the office.
Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager is a good start for managing smartphones; but it doesn’t have a remote control option, which is a lot faster when you would rather check a setting or make a change yourself rather than talk the user through how to do it - and wait for them to take the phone away from their ear to do each step of the process and then tell you what they’ve done. Odyssey showed off its Athena mobile management software at the Microsoft Management Summit last week, which plugs into SCMDM and adds remote control and monitoring of everything from memory and processor usage to which applications are actually running. (Or you can use it to add mobile management to System Center Configuration Manager.)
Suppose you want to roll out a new version of the Compact Framework to all your Windows Mobile devices (or a line of business app that needs a new version); you can’t install it on a phone that’s currently running an app that uses the framework (like Live Search) so you can choose between having the update fail or rebooting phones that don’t need it (and upsetting any users who had unsaved data in a badly-written application). Athena can check registry keys, tell you what apps are running - and close them, or just terminate the key DLL for the Compact Framework.
Athena also has a range of ‘feature packs’ that you can add in to get everything from details of phone calls (so you can complain to the mobile operator with proof if users complain they keep losing the connection halfway through an important call) to how many text messages users are actually sending (so you know whether you’re on the best value tariff for what users actually do). One customer tracked data connection problems for some users down to a handful of mobile phone towers; it turned out the operator had forgotten to update them when it did a network upgrade. Because the problem you’re trying to track will probably make it hard to retrieve data from the phone at the time, the Athena agent on the phones can collect data up to every 15 minutes, although it usually only sends data once a day to stop it tying up the data connection.
The GPS pack tells you where a phone is - handy if a user doesn’t know if it’s lost, stolen or left in their desk drawer (and where it’s been - the historical data means at least you know where it was before it was taken inside and lost the satellites).
If you’re using Wi-Fi for a secure connection, Windows Mobile will happily switch to an open access point if it happens to be a stronger signal, taking the device off the corporate network - so users no longer have access to the resources they’ll be trying to use. One manufacturing customer had the rugged handsets workers were using in the warehouse randomly drop off the network; they set up an event in Athena to take a snapshot of the system when the network changed and send that to System Center Configuration Manager as an event System Center Operations Manager could trigger. Next time the handsets switched off the network, the reports came back with the SSID of the access point they were connecting to - revealing that one of the employees was hiding an access point under a desk so they could work in the break room (which suggests to me that the company needs either better network coverage or comfier desk chairs).
And before you say that iPhones don’t have all those problems, think about managing a device where you can’t run anything in the background - so your agent can only work when the user asks it to - and the only people who can retrieve a catalogue of what applications are on the device are Apple. Every smartphone platform has its problems; Athena can help on Windows Mobile (and the company is considering BlackBerry support next - handy as we’re going to be at RIM’s Wireless Enteprise Symposium).
You can get a copy of Athena packaged up in a VHD ready to try out from www.odysseysoftware.com (although you have to sign up for a sales email rather than just being able to download it). The price varies with what feature packs you want, but if mobile support is costing you a lot, Athena could be a bargain. Another customer had users shipping ‘broken’ devices to the support department, 90% of which turned out to have nothing wrong with them, which is a waste of time as well as postage. Giving the helpdesk Athena’s remote tools reduced the number of devices sent in by over 85% - and the percentage with no fault found went down to 5%. And instead of spending 40 minutes on the phone on the average support call, the support team were off the line with the problems fixed in around 8-10 minutes.
-Mary
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Arizona, Utah and the myth of the perfectible network
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Networking, Telecoms, Wireless, Email, Mobile, Internet, Uncategorized on
Why bother with local storage and heavyweight applications when you could just use the cloud? Because they always work, that’s why.
To prepare for six solid days of meetings and presentations, crowds, queues and the three-ring CES circus, we’ve been driving through the quiet, cold American southwest. It’s been extra quiet and peaceful without email and phone calls. It’s not that we swore off connectivity to take a holiday. It’s not that there isn’t 3G and HSDPA coverage out in the wilds. We didn’t forget to enable roaming or run out of battery and I have a bag-ful of handsets to try out… It’s that the cellular networks that serve the Navajo Nation and many of the surrounding counties don’t have international roaming agreements.
Yes, there’s hotel and motel Wi-Fi - but you’re often sharing a very slow DSL connection with everyone else in the hotel that everyone else is using to upload their photos to Flickr. Plus, you don’t want to be tied to the hotel when you’re wanting to explore.
Cloud services and cloud storage are great for collaboration and for having files available on any machine you happen to pick up. But switching entirely to the cloud assumes that the network is always there, always working, always fast enough, always cheap enough and doesn’t run down your battery too much. Back in the real world, it’s too easy to run out of power or drive out of range for online to be your only option. And don’t say it’s a contrived case and only a few people will be driving around wanting to do email or update their diary in Monument Valley: there are plenty of places in Las Vegas where you can’t get connected either.
-Mary
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T9 through your menus as well as texts
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, Beta, Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Mobile on
Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.
The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…
Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.
Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary
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Always check the cable!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Telecoms, Networking on
It’s a simple rule, and one that fixes a huge proportion of IT problems. I’d have done well to remember it when the door to the office NAS neatly unplugged a network segment, and I spent a happy half hour trying to debug just why the wireless printer wasn’t working.
It’s also one that might have saved us several days of little or no phone connectivity, and an extremely flaky DSL connection that has yet to train back up to full speed. Still, at least now that the BT engineer has visited, we have a new cable between us and the street furniture, hopefully ensuring a faster and fault free connection in future.
BT’s online fault tracking service is well designed, and surprisingly helpful. Log on and report a fault with a line, and you’ll be
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