State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

VNL, a Swedish-Indian start-up claims to have developed a solar powered mobile network designed from the ground up to serve rural populations in developing economies — and do it profitably. Called WorldGSM, their product has been getting attention from the media because of its low cost (about $3,500) and near-zero energy consumption (100 watts) requirements. Another attractive feature is the relatively simple installation, without the need of engineers.

The solution is based on 3 hardware components: a base transceiver station, a base station controller and a Mobile switching center. The core network is supported by software which is a Linux based version of gsm standard. There are 2 versions: one for village center (higher voice traffic) and other near roads. Towers in fields could be put in virtual sleep mode to save electricity when there is no usage.

Such inventions have the potential of making a big positive impact for telecom users at the base of the pyramid – the underserved huge population in developing countries who may not spend much. VNL calls it microtelecom.

Here are some excerpts from a recent article which appeard in Wall Street Journal.

To power mobile networks in remote areas today, telecommunications operators pair base stations — the tower-top radio transmitters that form the backbone of mobile networks — with diesel-powered generators and batteries. These are impractical and expensive: Fuel accounts for 65% of the cost of operating a typical base station.

VNL, which has headquarters in New Delhi and Stockholm, has spent the past four years developing a simplified base station that is powered by solar panels and requires just a fraction of the electricity of typical base stations.

But convincing telecom operators to buy a stripped-down base station made by a little-known start-up won’t be easy. VNL is among many companies trying to develop mobile-phone technologies for poor rural areas. Telecom-equipment giants Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola Inc. are all looking into how they could tweak existing telecom gear to run on less electricity or on renewable energy sources.

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Nokia has an answer to the recent threats from Google and Apple: transform Symbian to an open-source app platform. This is a major development for the developers of mobile applications. One thing is clear: the upcoming battle is mainly about the apps, not about handsets (or the mobile network operators) . From both technology and business perspective, application development teams have an important decision to make: Which platform is their first priority: iPhone, Windows, Android or Symbian? Whoever can convince the best developers to write the killer apps on their platform is likely to be the dominant player. The game just got more interesting!

See this post from GigaOm on this development and the comparison below from TechCrunch (would be nice to have blackberry there).

A very good article from Businessweek on Nokia’s move.

Nokia announced a plan on June 24 2008 to buy the 52.1% of shares it doesn’t already own in London-based Symbian, the leading maker of operating system software for advanced mobile phones. In an industry-shifting move, Nokia will create an open-source foundation that will give away the resulting software for free to other handset makers.

Until now, Symbian has been owned by a consortium of rivals including Nokia, Sony (SNE), Ericsson (ERIC), Panasonic (MC), Siemens (SI), and Samsung. The company was set up a decade ago to develop an independent software platform for smartphones. And indeed, Symbian software is now used in more than half of all such devices, relegating rivals such as Microsoft’s pint-size Windows Mobile to a thin slice of the market.

But in the past year, the complexion of the industry has shifted as a new crop of rivals, most using open-source Linux software, have barged in. Nokia and the newcomers are now locked in a high-stakes battle whose outcome could shape the future of mobile communication—and by extension, of the Internet, as a growing number of consumers around the world access the Web from handheld devices (BusinessWeek.com, 2/12/08).

The new Symbian Foundation will be steered by a board of 10 members: five from phone manufacturers Nokia, LG Electronics, Motorola (MOT), Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, and five from network operators and chipmakers AT&T (T), NTT DoCoMo (DCM), Vodafone (VOD), STMicroelectronics (STM), and Texas Instruments (TXN). The goal? “To be the most widely used platform in the world,” said Nigel Clifford, Symbian’s chief executive, during a London press conference on June 24.

Moving into Mass Market

But there’s more to it than that. In an era of emerging wireless applications, a platform is merely the jumping-off point. The real focus in the industry is shifting from what’s inside the phone to the snazzy online stuff a handset can access over the air—from mobile music and photo sharing to GPS and location-based services. That’s why Nokia is racing to deliver all manner of such offerings through a combination of in-house development and aggressive acquisitions. On June 23, for instance, it bought Berlin-based Plazes, which offers mobile social networking.

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I believe these kind of hardware+software mashups to be very relevant to next generation of location based services and telecom industry. Here’s a video from 2008 O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, the meeting place for upcoming location based services. This talks about a set of open-source hardware modules which can be connected together and programmed to interact as desired – for example to create a proximity-based to-do list. There is more information available at conference proceedings page.

 There are many attempts going on “create your own phone” idea. Here’s one from US startup BugLabs (cool logo I must say). I saw it featured at Springwise. Click here to read the full story.

Would-be product designers start with Bug Labs’ basic module—in essence, a Linux-based mobile computer. Then, they add other modules to give the basic device fresh capabilities. Want a camera that tags photos with a GPS-derived location and then uploads them to the web? All it takes is fitting the necessary components together. The software to run the device is also modular, though customizing it may require some minor coding. Bug Labs aims to start selling both the basic module and the first four add-ons (GPS, digital camera/videocam, colour LCD touchscreen and an accelerometer/motion sensor) by the end of 2007.

I need to watch this and try it out, so please remind me if you don’t see an update on this after a few weeks!

This is related to the series about linux and mobile devices / phones. I believe 2008 will be the year when linux for mobile devices will hit big, partly thanks to android. But Linux has some formidable challenges. This post takes a look at one of them - Symbian (48% owned by Nokia), which is one of the top OS makers for smart phones.

As many know, phones based on Nokia S60 uses Symbian’s proprietary operating system. Nokia N82 is the latest phone (more of a gadget actually because of its slick camera) which is based on S60 and Symbian. Symbian is also behind Motorola (MOT) Z8 slider. The user interface of Z8 was positively reviewed by bloggers. Some of the improvements are attributed to a recent upgrade of the OS by the company.

The graphic above shows the market share of smart phone operating system (source: GigaOm) by various region. Overall Symbian is in high gears and ready to take on its competitors.

Recently Symbian posted good results with 56% year-on-year rise in third-quarter product shipments to device manufacturers and said that its revenue had increased by 30% in the same period.

Symbian’s technology has now shipped in 165 million devices. However, average royalties per unit dropped in the period to $4.8 per unit from $5.2 per unit a year ago.

Symbian reported that shipments of its operating system were up to 20.4 million units, from 13 million units a year earlier, in the three months ended Sept. 30, while revenue increased to GBP52.4 million from GBP40.3 million.

After months of speculation there is an official statement from Google about their mobile phone plans. However the information on the Google mobile phone software stack (which is based on Android platform) lacks many details and the product release time frame of second half of 2008 is long. In the coming days analysts will discuss this a lot so I’ll spare you detailed comments but here’re a few things which come to mind.

The software will run on special handsets from a wide range of partners. Based on what I’ve read the phone will be more of a smart phone with easier and faster access to internet and productivity applications leading to the mashups which created waves for the Internet.  There’s no limit to which the new apps can go but I think speech apps (such as those from Nuance) are going to be a big part here.

The Open Handset Alliance and Open source support is important here. there has been a good momentum going for the open-source linux phone and the google phone announcement will help it a great deal. Countries like Pakistan are embracing linux and open-source and there is potential for some interesting work. However it is not yet clear if the LIMO efforts will converge with this or not. For developers the long lead time is a bit long but being google it is the hope that the wait will be worth it. It may be worth noting here that Apple has also announced opening its iPhone to outside developers.

As opposed to Apple’s iPhone pricey brand the google phone strategy is to create a platform which is widely scalable and seen as the rescuer, the common man’s phone. In that sense it will attract tremendous attention in developing countries. If you look at the partners HTC is the among the first handset maker to come out with an android based device. Large international carriers such as China Mobile are listed as partners as well.

Addendum on Nov 12: See the video about Android and the $10 million prize. Code is here.

The google blog said:

If you’re a developer and this approach sounds exciting, give us a week or so and we’ll have an SDK available.

Through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. We think the result will ultimately be a better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities.

This kicks off a new series of posts about linux on mobile devices. As we explore this topic and track the progress of linux on mobile phones in the world and particularly in Pakistan, I hope that we’ll learn plenty along the way.

I keep hearing about linux for mobile phones and all the great things to expect from these developments. However I’m not sure if linux for mobile devices will meet the same fate as linux for PCs i.e limited penetration but not good enough for the mainstream public. Of course when it comes to servers, linux has done very well so in no way I am doubtful about the powerful impact and the potential. But for mobile devices we are talking about ordinary users who are not interested in a cool technology per se but want a better package of services, without the limitations imposed by today’s phone. Therefore user adoption is key and it will come from a balanced combination of good features, easy-to-use interfaces and cheap, reliable devices. Good luck Tux.

To start off, I am sharing an article from Wireless week, titled Mobile Linux Gets Legs.

A couple of recent analyst reports indicate Mobile Linux is starting to catch on, something also born out by reports that Palm will launch its first smartphone soon running Linux.

News reports have indicated Palm’s Linux phone will launch in October and will use technology developed by Wind River Systems. Wind River built the Linux platform for Palm’s new Foleo. Meanwhile, IMS Research says Mobile Linux will experience a compound annual growth rate of 45% over the next five years.

“The increased focus on Mobile Linux shows the high level of interest from all segments of the cellular handset industry, including manufacturers, network operators and component suppliers,” the research group says. “This is demonstrated pretty clearly by the expanding membership of the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation, an industry group that was established in January of this year with the stated goal of developing a common Linux Platform.”

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