State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Transfers of large amounts of data across the Internet to wireless devices suffer from a major problem: The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used to send and receive that data can be unnecessarily slow. Aspera, a new company, has now announced an alternative protocol designed to accelerate wireless transfer speeds. Called fasp-AIR, it includes new proprietary approaches to addressing problems of data transfer that are unique to wireless communications.

This story appeared at Technology Review.

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A recent article in Technology Review provides an interesting account of a wireless network that uses reflected infrared light instead of radio waves. This wireless network has transmitted data through the air at a speed of one gigabit per second–six to 14 times faster than the fastest Wi-Fi network.

Such optical networks could provide faster, more secure communications and would be especially suitable for use in hospitals, aircraft, and factories, where radio-frequency transmission can interfere with navigation equipment, medical devices, or control systems. Another possible application is wireless networking for home theaters; a system that transmits data at 1.6 gigabits per second could broadcast two separate high-definition TV channels across a room, a capacity that exceeds the bandwidth of any existing radio system. Read more »

The next in series of smartphones, Nokia E72 is in the market now. This is a device tailor-made for business and personal messaging and follows the traditions of E71 which has become quite popular because of its nifty features. To coincide with the arrival of the Nokia E72, Nokia has also released research revealing that more people rely on email than on traditional phone calls or text messaging when sending and responding to critical information. Nokia responsiveness research can be seen here.

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Cellular companies along with Fixed Line companies will now onwards contribute 0.5% of their gross revenues to R&D fund. As reported by Business Recorder an uniform rate of R&D contribution is being approved for all fixed line and cellular operators as this will maintain the spirit of fixed line policy 2003 which states that none of the licensees be at any position of disadvantage.

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A lot is being expected from Mobile Money since the launch of easypaisa, primarily offering bill payments and promises to offer more services soon. People are looking froward to mobile banking potentials especially the un-banked population for their socio-economic empowerment. According to new analysis from Juniper Research, consumer demand for mobile money transfer services will see users exceed 500 million globally by 2014, principally in developing countries.

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IPv6 or Internet Protocol Version 6 is the next generation protocol for the Internet. It has been designed to provide several advantages over current IPv4, like increased address space, more efficient routing, reduced management requirement, improved methods to change ISP, better mobility support, multi-homing, security, scoped address: link-local, site-local and global-address space, etc.

In this regard, CoReNeT is arranging a seminar (through video conferencing) on “IPv6 Protocol – Its Features and Capabilities” from 6 – 7 pm, October 20, 2009, at M. A. Jinnah University, Blue Area, Islamabad. Presenter of this seminar is Dr. Mudassir Tufail of Cisco Systems, USA, who is an accomplished and experienced telecom professional. The contents of the seminar are designed for employees of technical organisations and covers important new developments within IPv6 and the potential applications. Hence, we invite the members of your organization to participate in this seminar. Registrations for this workshop can be done via email [corenet@jinnah.edu.pk] latest by October 19, 2009.

Email: corenet@jinnah.edu.pk
Web: http://corenet.jinnah.edu.pk

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Venture Beat has an interesting post about the missing piece from phones today: the role of voice activated actions. After a long wait, there are indications that voice is about to get more useful and user friendly. Let’s see if these developments will help ease the frequent interactions with phone.

As mobile device owners demand more user-friendly interfaces, speech-powered applications are seeing a boost in popularity. Last month’s acquisition of Jott by Nuance is a good indicator of this – as is the launch of Google Voice and Google Voice Search; a new Voice Control feature in the iPhone 3GS; and the emergence of startups like Vlingo, Yap!, and Ribbit, which all share a common goal of capitalizing on the power of human speech and the mobile web.

Individually, each of these has something useful or exciting for consumers, but the benefits are limited in terms of scalability. (Look no further than the controversy surrounding Spinvox and its use of outsourced call centers to transcribe voice messages, rather than the technology it claimed was doing so). They’re also hamstrung by the inability to reach the millions of mobile users who do not have a smartphone.

The next logical step would be for something to emerge that tied all voice apps together; a way for the average mobile user to access all of them at once without the hassle of memorizing seven different usernames or figuring out one more user interface.
‘Voice Web’ technology is starting to let users do just that.

Companies (including Ditech Networks) are developing Voice Web services that incorporate an open API, allowing developers to create a unique application marketplace, similar to what we’ve seen with the iPhone. Early apps focus on speech -enabling popular web activities like calendaring, to-do list management and social networking. Long term, though, Voice Web could facilitate just about anything we do on the web today.

Speech-based applications like Google Voice Search and Yap are obvious choices; others might leverage a mobile device’s GPS functionality to create voice-powered mapping/directions apps, or tap into a phone’s mp3 collection to play a song for a friend during a phone call.

Voice call control is another area of interest. Voice dialing, of course, is currently available – but it’s a poor user experience since it’s tied to a specific application or device and fails to offer continuity to the user. For example, once a call is initiated via voice, the user is forced to regress to keypad entry for subsequent phone interactions – such as call waiting or including a third party. This is essentially a broken user experience. The latest versions of Voice Web take the logical step of making these actions completely voice-enabled. As our lives become more and more device-centric, pausing to navigate through a series of less-than-intuitive steps in order to switch between calls (and often dropping one) seems ridiculous.

Computer scientists are developing ways to use mobile phones to exchange data without using the phone’s network, instead of communicating directly with cellular towers, base stations, and the occasional wireless network.

These scientists  believe that spreading data virally could open up a whole new manner of applications on peer-to-peer mobile device networks, known more formally as “pocket-switched networks.” Such an ad hoc network–sort of a Sneakernet on steroids–could allow victims of a natural disaster to pass messages from one person to another even if the cell towers are destroyed. In another scenario, visitors to specific locations could have important information forwarded to them via the local folks’ devices. And groups of friends could poll each other on where to eat dinner that night, without using the Internet.

Technologies such as pocket-switched networks are a form of delay-tolerant networking, such as the Interplanetary Internet. Delay-torrent networks are part of a class of infrastructure that includes any collection of occasionally connected nodes that could be disconnected from the network for a long time and forward messages opportunistically.

Pocket-switched networks typically consist of a sparse collection of devices that are disconnected much of the time and are, of course, mobile. Communications are accomplished through Bluetooth or wireless connections between devices using a publish-and-subscribe technique dependent on the content preferences of the device’s owner.

“It is an infrastructure-less approach,” says Kevin Fall, a principal engineer at Intel Research Berkeley and an expert on delay-tolerant networking. “You don’t need base stations, you don’t need cell towers, you just have to carry around a device that can connect to other devices.”

Yet, what the technology does not have is simplicity. Crowcroft and his team from the University of Cambridge hope to solve that problem.

Via Technology Review. Read more after the break.

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An interesting development in how SIM cards can be used for better data collection and services.

A change in the SIM standard has opened up new opportunities for measuring mobile network performance at the subscribers’ handset.

Mobile network operators (MNOs) have traditionally measured the quality of their networks through techniques such as drive testing, network probing and analysis of engineering data from various network elements. However, to measure true service quality, it is also necessary to evaluate the users’ experience from the handset. Until recently this has not been possible, but some interesting changes in SIM card standards have provided a potential solution to this problem.

Users’ perception of service performance is very much influenced by the performance of their handset. If the performance of the radio aspect of the handset is poor, then events such as loss of access and dropped calls can be wrongly attributed to poor performance of the serving network; MNOs have often, until now, been blind to these issues with network-centric measurement systems.

However, a functionality of SIM cards that enables the recording, storing and forwarding of data relating to all handset activity has now been unlocked by recent changes made to the SIM and (U)SIM Application Toolkit standards by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and Smart Card Application Toolkit standards by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). This relates in particular to the ability of the card to handle the transfer of handset activity data back across the air interface to the host network.

As a result, monitoring solutions based on SIM cards now appear to be gaining traction in the wider industry. With these solutions, MNOs should be able to detect, for example, service-related problems by collecting feedback on call attempts, dropped or blocked calls, call success rate, SDCCH/TCH capacity and handover failure rates in line with existing base-node-probing techniques.

Via Analysysmason.com

A British student,  Caroline Tagg, aged 33, has become the first person in Britain to produce an 80,000 word thesis on the topic of text messaging. Reported here.

The University of Birmingham student spent the last three years analysing the use of phrases like “c u in a bit” or “wot r u up 2?” to prove just frequently such words appear in text chat and how the medium has become a language in itself.

She recruited a small army of texters who sent and recorded 11,000 messages, which were then put through a computer programme that identified words used most often.

“People have different abbreviations of words that the computer programme did not recognise as unique, such as the letter ‘u’ being used to represent the word ‘you’.

“But, my work is different to existing research as I explored the occurrence of everyday speech-like creativity. The use of language is different in different situations, for instance, words used in an email would be different to those used in a newspaper or in a conversation. What I found was that texting is like a language in itself, with people using a mixture of spoken and written language.”

She discovered that people text in the same way as if they were talking, using unnecessary words such as ‘oh’, ‘erm’ and often use grammatical abbreviations like ‘dunno’.

“I saw these in a lot of messages,” she said. “People deliberately use words like this when they don’t need to.”

Caroline said the average text contains 17.5 words. And she discovered from her 80,000 word thesis that there is more to texting that just abbreviations – something most people associate with texting.

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It has been a long time that I have been hearing about machine to machine services but as reported this time it looks lke it will get some where. US mobile operator Verizon Wireless has teamed up with Californian silicon vendor Qualcomm to form a joint venture focused on machine to machine (M2M) communications and ‘smart services’.

The joint venture, which is as yet unnamed, will be equally owned by the two firms and will have offerings targeted at a wide variety of market segments, including healthcare, manufacturing, utilities, distribution and consumer products.

In the future it might be that M2M helps to realise the vision long championed by industry experts and leaders alike that everything in our lives will be connected. Never mind dimming the lights and popping on some mood music, we were told that our cars would be able to find their own way home and our fridges would be automatically ordering food from the supermarket when we started to run low. But the truth of the matter when it comes to telematics, at least for now, is much more pragmatic: supply chain reporting, fleet management, electronic point of sales devices, remote metering for utilities, offender monitoring and security are all popular, if low key, machine to machine implementations.

The move follows a similar announcement from Verizon Wireless investor Vodafone, which is launching a global service platform to help companies deploy and manage large, wireless M2M projects.

Vodafone and Verizon have a technology sharing and development agreement with Softbank and China Mobile under the umbrella of the Joint Innovation Lab.

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Take a guess – or if you need to know right away, do a search for cell phone microscope and find out.