New data from TeleGeography’s 4G Research Service show that there were more than 600 WiMAX networks either live or at the planning/deployment stage by the end of 2009. The number of WiMAX deployments significantly exceeds HSPA and LTE deployments. Only around 300 cellular networks have been upgraded with HSPA technology and fewer than 70 operators have committed to deploying LTE equipment. However one point is note worthy: a relatively small number of these WiMAX systems offer wide coverage areas; most only offer local or regional service. This is certainly true for Pakistan!
Zumbeel played a wonderful part to get top notch telecom industry professionals to speak on trending technology topics at their event ‘Are You Online’.
One of them was Mr.Ahmer Arsalan, Customer Solution Manager from NSN (Pakistan and Middle East). He has worked as a subject matter expert for network planning and also on various projects mainly Greenfield networks and 3G/HSPA in Europe, UK, Middle East and Africa. He delivered a presentation on the most heated topic in our telecom industry, ‘3G and Pakistan’, calling it Pakis3Gstan.
Here’s an interesting video from Cisco about MTop - Mobile Transport over Packet. It provides an ideal backhaul aggregation solution to simplify operations regardless of ‘generation’.
We have been debating a lot on 3G here, its upgrade paths and benefits. We also looked at the other side of the picture, how we can grow on our data services. At once it seemed that the 3G license was just on the edge with PTA conducting workshop on it and promising to support the technology. Now its almost a year now, nothing have happened and the licenses are still not auctioned.
A recent study by Alcatel-Lucent concludes that broadband is recession proof. In other words, people’s attitudes towards broadband have shifted from a nice to have service to one which is a necessity for their information-based lifestyle. The study surveyed more than 3200 participants from Europe, Asia, Latin America and the U.S. to determine consumer spending priorities for specific network-based services – such as Internet, television, data and voice services – against their spending priorities for services that don’t require a wireline or wireless connection. Let me know if you’d like more information about the study.
Another study – see the chart below – looks at the growth of mobile or wireless broadband in the context of new standards and technologies (LTE, HSPA) and the apps which are driving the growth.
Stacey of GigaOm thinks that the trends will continue from Internet to mobile apps. More here.
Social networking has been another beneficiary of faster speeds and greater adoption. With 1 Mbps connections (or better yet, 5 Mbps) checking in on Facebook or even Twitter is a quick and easy process. Faster speeds have resulted in more video online as well, leading to the creation of companies such as YouTube, Hulu and even Skype. We’re going to see a similar trend emerge in the mobile world, with companies that use the faster network plus mobility as the platform on which to build their businesses.
Like I had mentioned in my previous post, the Nokia Bloggers Meet-up was held on 22nd May at The Sports Bar – Karachi. The event wasn’t just a bloggers meet-up but also a sneak-peak of N97.
N97- The new entrant in the Nokia’s flagship N-series is due to launch in Pakistan in first week of June. This time Nokia came different and thus was this pre-launch meet-up with the bloggers.
Mr. Adeel Hashmi, Communication Manager – Nokia Pakistan, started off the event giving an introduction to the idea of meeting the bloggers for the pre-launch and promised more of such meet-ups. The keynote speakers of the evening were Mr. Khurram Pradhan, Product and Portfolio Manager and Ms. Shabana Shahzad, Program Manager.
Khurram Pradhan gave his presentation on the main theme of N97 – Personal Internet. In his presentation he also focused on what’s driving the transformation of converged devices. He discussed that Nokia has been working on converging mobile phone with internet from last decade to enhance the personal internet experience.
At present out of the 1.3 billion internet users 520 million use it on mobile device and research has indicated this figure will go up to 1.5 billion by the year 2012. Nokia being consumer centric is on the move to make the mobile broadband dream a reality.
Not only this Nokia also plans to attract the market where we have 93 million users using the social network services like facebook, my space and twitter on their mobile devices, 82 million downloading maps on their devices, 22.3 million access the internet on devices daily for news and information and where we also have 184 million blogs among which 77% are actively read and commented. In efforts of enriching the networking experience, the N97 comes with third party widgets, which are standalone programs on your mobile home screen.
Nokia’s customer care is a two dimensional strategy, one, devices for connecting people and second devices for connecting places which it achieves along with Ovi Maps.
Foreseeing the future in application development Nokia has acquired all of the rights to the Symbian operating system (OS) and open sourced it under the Eclipse license.
Khurram’s part ended with a Q and A session and then came the most interesting and most awaited SNEAK PEAK at the N97. Ms. Shabana Shahzad conducted it. Bloggers were also given the feel-it experience of N97.
Some of the N97 features are:
- Easy and fast connections to internet services
- Easy text input with QWERTY keyboard and touch screen
- 3.5 inch sliding tilt display
- Live personalized home screen with widgets
- Up-to-date information via RSS feed
- Fully compatible with Oviservices
- Browse real web pages
- Take pictures and videos and share them immediately
- Watch high-quality video on the large 3.5 inch 16:9 widescreen
- Video playback at 30 fps, for a wide array of formats
- Play videos, music and pictures on TV using TV-out
- Access internet video feeds through Nokia Video Center
- Enjoy great audio through standard 3.5 mm jack headphones, built-in stereo speakers or Bluetooth technology
- Digital music player with support for play list editing, equalizer and categorized access to your music collection
- Search, browse and purchase songs online in Nokia Music Store (for availability, please visit www.music.nokia.com)
- Nokia Maps with integrated compass and A-GPS receiver
- Multimedia city guides and navigation services. Drive: voice guided car navigation, or Walk: pedestrian-optimized turn-by-turn guidance. (Navigation may need to be purchased separately.)
- World-class game titles with N-Gage
- Make you home-screen private any time you want
N97 Tech Profile:
System: WCDMA 900/1900/2100 (HSDPA), EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
User Interface: S60 5th Edition
Dimensions: 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm*mm (L x W x H) *18.25 mm at camera area
Weight: Approx. 150 g
Display: 3.5 inch TFT with up to 16 million colorsnHD16:9 widescreen (640×360 pixels)
Battery: Nokia Battery BP-4L, 1500 mAh
Memory: Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board memory, plus 16GB expansion via micro SD memory card slot)
Video playback: MPEG-4 / SP and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264,up to 30 fps, up to VGA resolution Real Video up to QCIF @ 30 fps Windows Media (WMV9) up to CIF @ 30 fps Flash Lite 3.0 / Flash Video in internet browser
Music playback: MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA
Lens: Carl Zeiss Tessar™
Image capture: Up to 5 mega pixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
Video capture: MPEG-4 VGA (640 x 480) at up to 30 fps
Aperture: F2.8
Focal length: 5.4 mm
Flash: Dual LED camera flash and video light
Talk time: Up to 320 min (3G), 400 min (GSM)
Standby time: Up to 400 hrs (3G), 430 hrs (GSM)
Video playback: Up to 4,5 hours (offline mode)
Music playback: Up to 37 hours (offline mode)
The device shall be availabe here in second week of june at an expected retail price of Rs. 60,000.
There is much to hear these days that the latest developments in the LTE technology will leave behind WiMAX. In a broader perspective, the situation is different. The article below from Orange Business Live discusses it.
Although the WiMAX vendor community has been pushing the notion that 2009 is the year of WiMAX, the recession coupled with an aggressive push towards mobile broadband’s LTE (long term evolution) could put the technology’s wider uptake in jeopardy. Nortel, for instance, has left the WiMAX market and Alcatel-Lucent has diverted R&D spend from WiMAX to LTE, although it seems committed to pushing WiMAX and cites this shift as being down to WiMAX now now being productised.
“LTE is our future,” said GSMA chief executive Rob Conway at the recent Mobile World Congress. “You can talk about WiMAX if you want, but it is a sideshow to this main event.”
Scorching words, but with analyst firm ABI Research predicting WiMAX subscriber revenue growth of more than 4,500% this year, the technology is far from over and done with. As ABI principal analyst, Philip Solis, points out; “To ignore a growth market in a down economy would be a mistake.”
Other analysts agree and point out that mobile WiMAX already has commercial deployments while LTE lags behind. Daryl Schoolar, at In-Stat, thinks WiMAX and LTE will take different paths. “Most of the operators looking to deploy WiMAX come to it from the fixed network space,” he says. “Most of the early operators supporting LTE come from the mobile space. These operators want to use LTE to increase capacity and peak rates on their existing mobile networks.”
Instead of LTE being a threat to WiMAX, Schoolar thinks HSPA may well turn out to be WiMAX’s true competitor. From an enterprise point-of-view the battle being teed-up in the vendor industry is divisive and, in many respects, counter-productive. End-users don’t care about the method, only the ease-of-use it offers and the bandwidth it provides. From that perspective, WiMAX is here now and can be used whereas LTE remains a concept for the future with most operators unlikely to be deploy it until 2011 or 2012.
Two recent announcements from Gemalto, a digital security company, caught my attention. First was Smart Device Management service offer for devices such as 3G/HSPA USB modem. As USB modems become popular, there is a need to be able to manage them remotely and efficiently.
This universal solution from Gemalto provides a means for operators to conveniently deploy their mobile services on the PC environments of their subscribers, via a 3G/HSPA USB modem, and remotely update them over the mobile broadband internet connection. The SDMC can also deliver automatic USB modem firmware updates in a manner which is completely invisible to the user.
Second item from Gemalto was SIM-Based Windows Live Mobile Instant Messaging to a South American mobile operator. Just recently the SIM-based mobile banking application was a topic of discussion here.
Now if they had a SIM-based solution for catching fraud and spam, it would be great for Pakistan!
At one end the demand of mobile broadband is increasing and so is the need of 3G and B3G (Beyond 3G), where as at the other end operators as well as consumers have shown reluctance to go 3G. Operators resist in the deployment of 3G as they have invested heavily in existing air-interface infrastructure, while for consumers the cost of using 3G services is high.
As we had discussed earlier in the Evolution towards HSDPA, the migration strategy along the road to the 3G and beyond should be “soft” network evolution that does not render existing installations superfluous. The solutions to this comes as NSN unveils plans for Flexi Multiradio base stations.
Nokia Siemens Networks has today made the evolution path from 2G and 3G to LTE faster, greener and more cost-effective than ever with the launch of Flexi Multiradio Base Station. Building on the company’s market leading Flexi Base Station platform, the new Multiradio Flexi expands its supported technologies to cover GSM/EDGE, WCDMA/HSPA and LTE – all running concurrently in a single unit.
Flexi Multiradio Base Station meets the needs of new and existing 2G and 3G operators who can use their existing infrastructure to deploy new network-wide technologies via simple software upgrade to 3G or LTE. The flexibility of a true multiradio base station removes the risk from balancing investments made in 2G, 3G and LTE, providing operators with future-proof options. The new Multiradio Flexi is also backward compatible with current Flexi Base Station, enabling capacity upgrades to existing Base Station sites.The product also fits CDMA operators who intend to migrate to WCDMA/HSPA or LTE.
For operators coping with cost challenges, running multiple radio technologies in a single Base Station means reduced OPEX from fewer site visits, simplified logistics, reduced maintenance and a smaller requirement for trained staff. The possibility to reuse GSM sites for WCDMA and HSPA also delivers savings from reduced rental costs and maximized reuse of existing infrastructure.
“Flexi Multiradio Base Station makes network evolution faster, greener and more cost-efficient than ever, and this launch makes Nokia Siemens Networks the only vendor which enables future technology evolution steps exactly with the same hardware without radio technology specific boards. Thanks to the industry’s highest degree of integration, Flexi Multiradio Base Station is able to provide three technologies in one compact 3 sector Base Station of less than 75 liters”, said Marc Rouanne, head of the company’s Radio Access business.
Superior energy efficiency – a key feature of Flexi Base Stations – is further improved in Flexi Multiradio. The new Base Station has the lowest energy consumption in the market. An average 3 sector Base Station site running simultaneously GSM/EDGE and WCDMA/HSPA consumes as little as 790W, whilst pushing an impressive 60W output per sector for maximum capacity and coverage. The small and lightweight product is also rugged enough for outdoor use without shelters or air conditioning, further minimising their environmental impact.
“We are very pleased to see Nokia Siemens Networks take concrete steps towards fulfilment of the targets agreed in the context of WWF’s Climate Savers programme” said Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, Director of Corporate Relations at WWF International. “This is a good example of how technological innovation can contribute to improved energy efficiency and profitability, while reducing a company’s ecological footprint. The fight against climate change requires all the ingenuity and commitment that the corporate sector has to offer”.
Flexi Multiradio Base Station features built-in IP/Ethernet connectivity for a unified transport network for the Single RAN. Operators can also benefit from using the common NetAct network management system for planning, optimising and operating the Single RAN. For example, NetAct Optimizer enables easy and high quality refarming of WCDMA or LTE in current GSM 900 MHz frequency band.
Deployments of this new Flexi Multiradio Base Station will start from the beginning of 2010 onwards.
Huawei Technologies announced that its global contract sales of wireless access equipment, core network and auxiliary infrastructure reached US$10 billion in 2008, a growth of 50% from 2007. Huawei counts 35 of the world’s top 50 operators as customers (a few of them are in Pakistan of course), and is registering growth across the board with all wireless technologies. Huawei is progressing on the LTE front as well. Recently, it won the world’s first commercial LTE contract with TeliaSonera along with Ericsson. Head of Huawei’s Wireless Network Branding, Lu Xingang revealed that the company has already deployed LTE trials in Europe, North America and Japan and has completed field tests, including throughput, latency, MIMO, high speed multi-user access and cell hand off, as well as multi-service QoS. At the same time, it is developing both FDD and TDD versions of LTE.
Its success is led by GSM, which registered a 100% growth year on year for 2008. Huawei shipped 1.5 million transceivers inside its GSM base stations during the year, representing around 30% of the total GSM market and number 2 in the world, Lu said. Huawei also registered impressive growth in UMTS and CDMA sales last year. “UMTS also grows very fast. Huawei won 42 new UMTS/HSPA commercial contracts in 2008.
By the end of 2008 we have accumulated a total of 128 UMTS/HSPA commercial contracts, which means Huawei has constructed half of global UMTS/HSPA networks,” Lu said.” Although the CDMA market size is becoming smaller, Huawei CDMA still maintains a 35% growth with 220,000 transceivers new shipments in 2008. Huawei performed particularly well in China, winning 30%+ market share in China Telecom CDMA phase-1 project.”
“The first commercial LTE product will support FDD at 2.6GHz & 700MHz and TDD at 2.6GHz,” Lu said, adding the both FDD and TDD platforms will be launched commercially within 2009. “Huawei is closely working with all of three China operators in the roll-out plan. It is estimated that the first China LTE trial will commence in late 2009. Year 2009/2010 is the most important period for China operators to do LTE trials.”
Another entry to the flagship N series of Nokia is N85, the Definitive Entertainment Package. It sets new standards with multimedia computer made for mobile entertainment, gaming and sharing. Along with an eye-catching 2.6″ OLED screen and smooth, sleek finish, the Nokia N85 not only redefines the mobile experience but also gears to attract consumers looking for one-set entertainment.
The Nokia N85 was created to be more than the sum of its parts, offering a complete mobile entertainment package designed for connecting, sharing and discovering,. The iconic Nokia Nseries dual slider design has evolved to become smaller and sleeker while integrating the newest features and services to deliver the best mobile experience to date.
Juha-Pekka Sipponen
Director Nokia Nseries
The all in one device features N-Gage gaming (with dedicated keys), music with in-built FM transmitter, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics (with dual LED flash) and geotagging (GPS) capabilities blend together with the newest Ovi, Nokia Maps and third party services via 3.5G HSDPA and Wi-Fi connectivity to make discovering and sharing experiences quick and seamless.
Each Nokia N85 comes with an 8 GB microSD card, up to 30 hours of music playback time and its high-fidelity sound means favorite tracks can be enjoyed virtually anywhere.
Now the question is how this hand-set absorbs among the tech-hungry market. Reviews form users are welcome!
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