Data cards that let laptop users connect to the internet over the mobile network have been one of the quiet successes of 3G, with business people being able to work from almost anywhere there is a mobile signal.
Orange's latest data card brings the added promise of connections that, at up to 1.8mbps, approach the speed of fixed broadband, using a technology known as HSDPA. Just as importantly for UK-based mobile workers, the card also supports the Edge network. This is not quite 3G, with a maximum speed of around 0.2mbps, but it is significantly faster than conventional 2.5G or GPRS data.
Source Read more!Despite recent data suggesting mobile search is taking off, the current reality is less-than-thrilling, says AdAge. Citing Forrester Research, the article points out that 80 percent of marketers say they either use or plan to employ Internet-based search marketing, yet less than one-third of retail marketers and one-half of consumer goods marketers expect to use mobile search as part of that plan. The reason? Traffic. Only about 5 percent of the nation's 190 million mobile phone subscribers have ever used mobile search, according to M:Metrics. The reason: (wait for it….) bad user experience.
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Yahoo has made its Yahoo Go for Mobile service available as a download for Windows Mobile powered phones worldwide. Yahoo Go for Mobile includes Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and Yahoo Photos, among other services. It also is working to strike deals with manufacturers to embed the service suite in new phones still in development.
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Security researchers say they have found a flaw in WiFi drivers that could give hackers access to passwords, bank accounts and other sensitive information when the system isn't even connected to the Internet. David Maynor, senior researcher at network security firm SecureWorks, and fellow researcher Jon "Johnny Cache" Ellch said the problem is with the software built into wireless-networking hardware that allows it to communicate with a computer's operating system.
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Telecoms regulator Ofcom has published the methodology that it proposes to use to determine the extent to which the 3G mobile network licensees - O2,Vodafone, Hutchison 3G, T-Mobile and Orange - have complied with their obligation to roll out services. Under the terms of their licences, each is required to cover 80% of the UK population by 31 December 2007.
Ofcom's proposed approach is intended to measure the availability of each licensee's service which should, under normal circumstances, be able to provide a range of applications such as voice, text, video and multimedia services.
Ofcom's methodology, which is subject to consultation, is as follows:
Ofcom will assess coverage on the basis of data about base stations supplied by the licensees and population data from the 2001 Census. It will use planning tools to perform an engineering analysis of the signal strength receivable at outdoor locations. This will be supported by sample measurements around to the UKto verify the results.
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Twenty-seven percent of UK 3G mobile subscribers download full track music on their mobile phones, according to Telephia. The latest research from Telephia shows that full track music download penetration is more than 11 percentage points higher among 3G subscribers, as compared to non-3G subscribers at 16 percent. On average, 3G subscribers in the UK download 4.1 music tracks per month and spend an average of 8.3 hours per month listening to full track music on their mobile phones.
The study shows many 3G subscribers prefer to use their PC for storage and transfer of music to their mobile phone, revealing that the PC remains an essential part of the music experience.
Forty-four percent of 3G subscribers would prefer to transfer computer music files that have been ripped from their home music collection to their phone. Nineteen percent would prefer to transfer computer music files that have been downloaded from a peer-to-peer or file-share site, and 14 percent prefer to transfer computer music files that were downloaded from a paid website.
Read more hereDespite all the hype and ballyhoo over mobile commerce, one of the largest barriers to market for such services is the unaware public: My phone can do what? With that in mind, PayPal has hired top ad agency Zimmerman Advertising to launch a campaign aimed at educating the public on the ins and outs of PayPal's new Text2Buy. The service allows users to buy actual CDs, DVDs, shoes, etc. I think examples like CDs and DVDs are poor choices, but most releases and other articles seem to cite those first--why go through the trouble of texting and waiting for the mail to arrive when you can get the same content through a mobile music service? Other non-mobile content items should be stressed, and Text2Buy may lead the mobile commerce charge in the U.S., anyway, as promised.
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Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan has sunk the boot into the much talked about high-speed mobile broadband service known as WiMax, saying it will play a secondary role to 3G in Australia in the coming years.
A key restraint of the emerging WiMax technology at the moment is its lack of mobility. While users can get fast Internet wirelessly, the moment they are in motion, for example, on a train, the signal drops out.
According to Frost & Sullivan analyst Tony Tu, this is one major hurdle the wireless industry needs to overcome if it intends to pick up customers.
In the meantime the ability of the current 3G networks by Vodafone, Optus, Telstra and Optus across metropolitan Australia to provide reasonably fast data speeds weighs against WiMax, limiting it to a supporting role, he claims.
"WiMax is complementary to 3G data services as it provides high bandwidth. But we see it as a nice offering," he said.
Furthermore, the ability of 3G to scale to the even faster HSDPA, known as 3.5G, may be a more worthwhile proposition for subscribers as the basic infrastructure already exists.
HSDPA is High Speed Downlink Packet Access, a mobile broadband standard capable of reaching downlink speeds of 14.4Mbs. In real life, users can expect actual download speeds of between one and 1.8Mbs, with peak upload speeds of 384Kbs.
"It is unlikely existing mobile carriers will invest in WiMax. HSDPA is a cost-effective alternative to existing mobile carriers," he said.
One of the key players in the wireless broadband, and soon to be WiMax space, Unwired, disagrees with Tu's assessment. Unwired's CTO Eric Hamilton said the assumption that WiMax will be in a supporting role is not proven.
"In fact, the question that needs to be considered is whether WiMax will intrude into 3G territory by offering voice, video and other applications."
Hamilton says WiMax will have better performance compared to 3G-based technologies. "This will be the case in terms of all three Cs - Coverage, Capacity and hence Cost."
He said this will be most apparent when customers seek to use a "true" broadband service, where significant uplink (from the customer to the network) capacity is used as well as downlink capacity (from the network to the customer). "In these circumstances the WiMax technology has a significant advantage," he said.
"If a large number of customers choose to take up wireless broadband services, the amount of spectrum and infrastructure needed to support services will be important. At this time suppliers of 3G-based services have significant spectrum limitations, while Unwired and Austar are extremely well placed to take advantage of their spectrum holdings to provide a wide range of broadband services to fixed, portable, nomadic and mobile users across Australia."
Tu said mass adoption in Australia of WiMax should take place in 2009, predicting 500,000 Australians will be subscribed to the technology. This is when chipset-embedded notebooks and Customer Premises Equipment drop to more affordable levels.
Samsung Electronics and Debitel (A major German Mobile telephone provider) are offering the first European Mobile TV phone and service. The offering willl allow subscribers to watch 2006 World Cup games on their Samsung P900 handsets in ladnscape view. The service will be available in 5 major cities - Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt - and will extend to more cities thereafter. Samsung has already provided satellite and terestrial DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) phones to the Korean market.
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Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo says it is planning a big expansion into Asian markets like Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam in an effort to capitalize on the expected demand for 3G services. DoCoMo doesn't have a stellar track record when it comes to international acquisitions. In 2000, the company committed about $23 billion in acquisitions to port its i-mode technology, including more than $15 billion for a share of AT&T Wireless, an investment which turned out to be ill-timed. Problems signing up i-mode subscribers in Europe and the tanking of the telecom industry in 2001-2002 took a heavy toll on DoCoMo's international investments. The firm wrote off almost $15 billion in international share value in 2001-2002 and stopped international expansions in early 2002. It ended up making technical alliances with operators in Europe and Asia to push i-mode. Now DoCoMo faces a super-saturated market in Japan and needs to find growth elsewhere.
For more about NTT DoCoMo's international plans:
- read this article from the Financial Times
High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is a new mobile telephony protocol and is also known to as 3.5G (or “3½G”) technology which is one step higher for 3G. In this respect it extends WCDMA in the same way that EV-DO extends CDMA2000. HSDPA provides a smooth evolutionary path for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) networks allowing for higher data capacity (up to 14.4 Mbps in the downlink). It is an evolution of the W-CDMA standard, designed to increase the available data rate by a factor of 5 or more. HSDPA defines a new W-CDMA channel, the high-speed downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) that operates in a different way from existing W-CDMA channels, but is only used for downlink communication to the mobile.
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The HS-DSCH channel does away with two basic features of other WCDMA channels - the variable spreading factor and fast power control - and instead uses 1. Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC), 2. fast packet scheduling at the Node B (Base Station) and 3. fast retransmissions from Node B (known as HARQ-Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request) to deliver the improved downlink performance. The concept of “incremental redundancy” is used in HARQ, where retransmissions contain different codings of the user data, relative to the orignal transmission. When a corrupted packet is received, the user device saves it, and combines it with subsequent retransmissions, to formulate an error-free packet as quickly and efficiently as possible. Even if the retransmitted packet(s) is itself corrupted, the combination of the sum of the errored transmissions can yield an error-free packet.
The HS-DSCH downlink channel is shared between users using channel-dependent scheduling to take advantage of favourable channel conditions to make best use of available radio conditions. Each user device periodically transmits (as many as 500 times per second) an indication of the downlink signal quality. The Node B uses this information received from all user devices to decide which users will be sent data on the next 2 ms frame and, for each user, how much data should be attempted. More data can be sent to users which report high downlink signal quality.
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Nokia is reportedly adding Google's Talk application to its Internet Tablet device, which has become a popular WiFi device with consumers. According to reports, Nokia plans to announce tomorrow an upgraded version of the device that will come pre-loaded with Google's Talk service to allow voice services and IM capabilities. Last week Google executives said they weren't interested in launching an MVNO or creating a Google phone, but the company does want to extend services to as many wireless devices as possible. Google Talk can already be used on BlackBerry mobile devices from Research In Motion. Read more!
The Nokia Research Center is well under way on a project to put a web server on a handset. Nokia's grandiose vision: "If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves." That impact may very well be that every time a commuter goes into a tunnel their personal Web site goes down until their handset reconnects with the network.
Nokia is one of the few big companies that still invests in "blue sky" research, but the project is still one worth exploring seriously. However, until networks are more rugged, Nokia's vision is a long way off. Rumors of the project started circling the Internet in early January, but Nokia has just made the client available for public download.
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MULTIMEDIA Prospect Sdn Bhd recently announced the availability of the Sierra Wireless AirCard 850, a PC Card for accessing 3G HSDPA services.
The AirCard 850 works on HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) networks, and it utilises the 2100MHz frequency band for Asian users.
Multimedia Prospect said the product has been tested with the 3G services offered by local telcos Maxis and Celcom.
The AirCard 850 is also backward compatible with EDGE, GPRS and GSM networks, on all four frequency bands – 850, 900, 1800, and 1900MHz.Read More at SOURCE
The Walt Disney Internet Group said it's creating a mobile phone service in the U.K. similar to what it announced in the U.S in the fact that its targeted at families. Disney Mobile will use the O2 network and will launch later this year. Like the service in the U.S., Disney's service will include family entertainment content and the ability to control children's access to the Internet and chat rooms as well as control voice access and airtime.
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LG Electronics announced the launch of the LG-U900, the world’s first commercially available UMTS (WCDMA) DVB-H phone, at a ceremony in Rome, Italy. The LG-U900 will be available early May through Hutchison, a leading global telecommunications services provider, in time for the 2006 World Cup.
Hutchison Italy, the country’s largest 3G telecommunications provider, has exclusive DVB-H broadcasting rights for the 2006 World Cup. The company will provide video footage of all World Cup matches beginning June 6, through the Hutchison’s service channels, ‘La3’.
Hutchison plans to offer the LG UMTS (WCDMA) DVB-H phone to customers world-wide, after initially establishi ng a base in Italy.
Mr. Mun-Hwa Park, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company, said: “We are so proud that LG is supplying the world’s first commercially available UMTS (WCDMA) DVB-H phone through Hutchison Italy. LG has already proven its unrivalled mobile multimedia technology in 3G markets by introducing a seri es of first-of-their-kind models including SDMB and TDMB handsets. LG will continue to introduce advanced te chnology that is second-to-none in the mobile TV industry.”
Mr. Vincenzo Novari, the CEO of Hutchison Italia said at the ceremony, “With support from LG Electronics, our company will strengthen its leadership in the 3G mobile communication market.”
LG’s new LG-U900 DVB-H handset features a 2.2-inch ‘wide-swing’ screen for mobile TV viewing. Its premium digital broadcasting functions include ESG (Electronics Service Guide) and CAS (Conditional Access System).
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LG Electronics has launched its LG-U900, the world’s first commercial WDCMA phone which can receive terrestrial digital video broadcast (DVB)-H in Rome at the end of April, and it will be made available in time for the 2006 World Cup this month.
Unlike IP-TV which is streamed over the 3G network, DVB is transmited one-to many from TV station to phone like regular TV, except that it’s digital, and it’s received directly by a separate DVB receiver in the phone, much like current FM radios in or attached to GPRS phones do today.
Thus DVB can be received independently of mobile networks and only your feedback and selections, requests, voting, etc are sent back over the network, which forces operators to think of other ways to make money.
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