pre-CTIA event summary 31 March ‘09

Here are interesting happenings from the halos of CTIA Wireless site in Vegas (the event starts tomorrow but there were interesting pre-event conferences/announcements)

• Skype released on iPhone and BlackBerry. We downloaded it and really like what we see. Only issue : it works only on WiFi networks. For now TruPhone wins on this one as TruPhone works on operator network also using its AnyWhere service. We are sure Skype will provide that later. Skype for BlackBerry to be made available this summer.
• RIM to unveil the BlackBerry App World (mobile app store). Nokia Ovi Store comes this summer. MSFT Windows Mobile App Store called Sky Market is later part of this year.
• Handango, one of the initial mobile app developer, launches App Store Accelerator, yet another app store for mobile.
• MSFT thinks that mobile devices are fashion accessories. As such it is teaming up with top designers for designing mobile phone colors and schemes.
• MSFT is collaborating with AT&T for its PlayReady triple-play content management software for synchronized content delivery on three channels – TV, broadband and mobile.
• Go2 Media to create app like experience in mobile browsers like Safari
• AT&T to launch in-vehicle satellite TV service called CruiseCast. If you have seen Uverse from AT&T, you know what AT&T has mastered TV
• Samsung launches first WiMAX device for ClearWire. It is an internet tablet PC.

Stay tuned for more from CTIA as the conference kicks off tomorrow in Vegas.

Airtel’s Unique Business Model

Airtel today, is probably one of the best run companies in the world (most definitely in India). It is the largest telecom player in the country and has the advantage of both massive size and a very high-growth industry. It’s worth about $25 billion and growing fast.

The secret of its success (as per laymansmba) has been its model. Airtel focuses only and solely on two things – customer acqusition & servicing (retention) and business development/expansion. ALL other functions – hardware, network management, backend applications (billing etc), value added services and even telecom infrastructure – are outsourced. Airtel pioneered this in the Telecom game. It was the first to give up network management to companies like NokiaSiemens and Ericsson, IT and backend applications to IBM, billing to someone else etc. It was also the first to divest it’s hard assets, i.e. – its telecom towers – to a separate company and lease them back themselves as well as monetize surplus bandwitdh by selling to other operators. This was the ultimate act in putting the faith in the brand rather than in iron and steel.

Of course, having seen Airtel succeed with this, a number of the other operators are now trying to follow in some way or the other.

Because of this focus on the customer experience and on business development, Airtel has been not only the fastest growing but the most innovative of operators. It has realized the importance of having access to the consumer at all levels, and therefore is going from core mobile to landline internet, Digital TV (DTH) and even digital cinema (theaters). Its taking AT&T’s triple play and making it quintuple (5x)-play and more.

It is also one of the few companies that has realized the importance of value added services (VAS) early on in the game and is gearing up to provide compelling applications and content for when the explosive subscriber growth in India eventually slows (as it surely will).

Top Trends in Mobile Space

Next 2-3 will see radical changes happening in mobile space, making smartphones, netbooks and yet-to-be introduced devices even more indispensable parts of our lives. Here I am quoting ( from CIO Zone) some of the developments in US and will also try to give my views from India’s persective that will power this next phase of evolution?

Long Term Evolution (LTE)

The so-called fourth generation of mobile (4G) is expected to be rolled out across North America over the next three years, making it possible for corporate users to run business applications on their devices simultaneously with Voice over IP (VoIP) capabilities. Where as in India 3G is yet to roll out for masses. People are eagerly waiting for the same as slowly people are switching on to smart 3G phones.

WiMax

As LTE and WiMax networks are deployed in the U.S. through 2012, expect to see more netbooks and laptops equipped with built-in radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless support. We sometimes get queries in India for development of applications in healthcare etc. but simple are not able to serve these clients due to unavailability of wimax infrastructure India wide.

3G & 4G interoperability

Sprint has developed a dual mode card which will enable mobile device users to work on both 3G and 4G networks. Other carriers are expected to follow suit.

Smartphone applications

Third-party software vendors will increasingly make enterprise applications available for smartphones, including inventory management, electronic medical records management, warehousing, distribution and even architectural and building inspection data for the construction industry.

GPS

Global Positioning Systems will increasingly be used to identify end users by their whereabouts and also to analyze route optimization for delivery workers and service technicians.

Security

As new and different types of mobile devices are introduced, corporate IT departments will find it increasingly challenging to identify and authenticate individual end users. As such, expect to see a combination of improvements in both Virtual Private Network (VPN) software and hardware-based VPNs to support multiple device types.

Tody, I was in Nokia Forum and there I came to know that last year, they had selected an pplication in International level competition where in with the use of cell-phone, you can convert your television into a touch screen device. These are the kinds of technologies that will change the world and bring all kinds of functionality of operating virtually anything, right in the hands of the mobile device owner.

Road-Traffic Chaos in Indian metros to decrease by end of 2009

Yesterday, I was in EmTech India-2009, the first MIT conference in India. They have launched their first Indian edition by the name of  “Technology Review India” yesterday in New Delhi.

As part of this conference and launch, many speakers from various technologies presented their views on new and emerging technologies in many concurrent sessions. The topics ranged from cloud computing to biotechnology to technology in healthcare sectors and varied others.

In one of the sessions, Mr. Vishy Poosala, Head of Bell Labs from Alcatel-Lucent Technologies India told about a new traffic management system that they are working on and have recently test tried in Mumbai, India. It looks like an amazing system with combination of many technologies like femtocells, wifi, bluetooth etc. One may imagine that the solution will be quite costly but it will cost merely about US$ 250-300.

I was talking to Mr.Vinay Chopra from GVC Systems in the evening in the same conference and he told me that they are test trying systems to manage traffic lights in day to day manner effectively by wireless technologies. Initially, test trials and few deployments have been done just for alert system where if any traffic light stops functioning, the concerened maintenance department will be alerted by SMS system. Some deployment has also been done in North East India in one of the railway stations where a system controlling a set of lights will be operated through SMS. A patent has already pending for this technology. It also seems similar to my earlier post on lights control system through SMS in Germany.

All this and many other similar technologies suggest that India is going to see great improvements in all kinds of traffic and infrasrtucture management in near future with the use of wireless technologies.

World’s First Commercial 3G Femtocell Service launched in Singapore

­Singapore’s Starhub has launched the world’s first commercially-available 3G femtocell service. StarHub is making all local outgoing voice, video calls and SMS free for customers using the ‘Home Zone’ service, ensuring that users, who make frequent mobile calls and SMS from home, can enjoy significant cost-savings on their mobile phone bills.

This kind of plans will surely make anybody fall for femtocells. May be this is a bait for subscribers to switch operators and become addicted to these services before they are made to pay for the same maybe only some miniscule amount but which will add to huge sums overall for the operators. And when these plans and services become the norm, it may lead the operators to start reducing infrastructure costs as given in my earlier post here.

Forget Cell Towers…

Yes, you read it right…

Forget Celltowers… This will be the mantra of companies for reducing the company costs of deployment and maintenance of huge celltowers.

World is undergoing a recession…many well established companies are going and many have already gone bankrupt like the most recent Lehman Brothers. Also, many companies around the world are cutting costs by cutting down their man power around the world…

Seeing all this, it is very clear that in times to come, telecom companies too will follow the same route with continually decreasing voice and data rates and thus, decreasing margins.

In my opinion, to reduce costs, telecom companies would some how like to pass on more and more costs to the consumers and what better way will there be, then to pass on the cell tower costs to consumers. WHAAT??? Cell tower costs to consumers…Am I joking here!!! NO…I am not. It’s easily possible…

HOW? Ofcourse by using femtocells technology that will be used when 4G comes into play provided by LTE (Long Term Evolution). Now people may ask…What is that??? For this…you may like to see one of my earlier posts in this blog on femtocells and additionally…you may want to read the white paper on Femtocells written by our company experts.

To tell you briefly…how it will minimise the cost to companies, I would like to mention that femtocells will eradicate the network costs and also eliminate some, if not all, problems of backhaul that stymie 4G networks. It seems theoretical now, but when LTE comes in…people will be able to get whooping speeds of upto 150Mbps. Femtocells are small devices which can be installed by a group of houses or even a single house as a stand alone unit. It costs miniscule in comparison to a celltower and maintenance costs too are almost nill.

It’s already being deployed in US, Europe and since recently, idea is being explored by Russians too and looking for good vendors to supply them the same so that they don’t get left behind. Even I came in contact with some people who are looking to deploy these femtocells asap…mainly because of these reasons i.e. costs less, give better connectivity and last but not the least can be great where houses are in congested spaces and tower signals there, are weak or compeletly missing.

But inspite of having said all of the above…I do feel that it will remain a complimentary technology in 4G and not all countries will be able to shift so fast to femtocells…so we will still see the cell towers for some years to come…

Vishal

Indian Government to open Internet – Fixed Line Telephony…

Indian Government is going to give its consent for web – mobile/ fixed line calling. It has been hugely appreciated by Indian ITES – BPO industry group as this will further bring the call rates. Call rates for individuals will plunge too making it easier and cheaper for common man to call with ease and in cheap.

Vishal

Wireless Carriers will always need Internet as a Savior…

Yes, This is a fact considering the current scnario. Major chunk of revenues the wireless carriers are generating, is coming from web browsing on mobiles.

People around the world are increasingly becoming busier day by day and thus everybody wants to be able to check mails or other stuff while they are on the move so that they can concentrate on more important things when they are at their work places. Hence, they are increasingly using web on their mobiles.

Verizon, which leads U.S. wireless operators with its 60 percent 3G subscriber penetration, saw the most growth in 3G usage and the most data revenue — $2.6 billion for the quarter. However, AT&T the exclusive provider to the Internet-friendly iPhone, had only 25 percent 3G subscriber penetration but also saw its data sales come close to Verizon’s at $2.5 billion, proving that the Internet on the phone is a powerful driver of data revenue.

If you want deeper insight on this post…you may want to check out a related blogport here.

Vishal

Sprint all set to launch its own Femtocell Base Station…AIRAVE

Sprint is providing some subscribers with an update of the release plans for their Airave Femtocell Base Stationon August 17th. Sprint AIRAVE™ is a device that creates a CDMA signal for your mobile phone (like a miniature cell tower). AIRAVE provides enhanced and reliable mobile phone coverage in your house or office even if your existing wireless coverage is poor. This works with any Sprint phone (Nextel style excluded) with some important quirks:

Sprint Airave Base Station

1. No EVDO data (only s-l-o-w Vision data is supported)
2. Cannot seamlessly transfer from normal cell tower to Airave.
3. Only works where Sprint has native coverage (it checks via GPS)
4. Supports only 3 simultaneous users (according to Sprint email)

Vishal

3G iPhone creates buzz

The new 3G iPhone is creating substantial buzz. Check out Om Malik’s interview with Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility.

http://gigaom.com/2008/06/09/att-mobility-ceo-new-3g-iphone-game-changer/

One of the concerns is that increase in mobile data usage for social networking, LBS or streaming video apps is going to cause a lot of network congestion on AT&T wireless network. Mr de la Vega is confident that AT&T network can handle it. For more power users of mobile data, the hope is that they are smart enough to use WiFi connection on the iPhone to download large data files instead of congesting the wireless network. A future filled with FMC devices like Femtocells only makes sense here. Femtocells will allow bandwidth hogging home wireless to pass on broadband wireline connections allowing the wireless network to remain somewhat available.

AT&T is taking some hits on its earnings estimates due to the lowered iPhone price and Apple is taking a hit as well as AT&T will no longer share the subscription revenue. But overall sales volume is expected to increase dramatically with the lower price and that is expected to more than compensate for the lower price on the device.

The new iPhone is loaded with good stuff. The App Store will allow for a slew of cool consumer and enterprise apps. The enterprise support is great with MS-Exchange integration. GPS is cool for LBS accuracy.

Nokia and RIM need not fear however. iPhone will only increase smartphone penetration increasing the size of the market for everybody. We feel the smartphones will cannibalize the non-smartphone cellphone market to some extent.

MT