Showing posts with label Videos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Videos. Show all posts

Saturday 4 June 2016

5G and Future Technologies from Johannesberg Summit

Johannesberg Summit is an annual forum to discuss how Wireless ICT is transforming business and society.  Interesting talks from industry leaders and leading academics are mixed with panel discussions with a broad perspective on technologies, services, business and policy models that may have an impact in the long-range evolution of society and various industries. Topics have over the years included future user behavior and requirements, novel services and applications, new business models as well as policy and regulation. These more general topics have been matched with visions on how wireless technologies and architectures can handle these needs.

The 2016 summit had 4 key topic areas:

  • The transformation of the transport industry
  • The transformation of the manufacturing industry (“Industry 4.0”)
  • Future key technologies
  • Update on 5G year


The best things is that they make all the presentations available online. Initially in the video form and later on the PDF's as well. I am embedding playlist of all video talks below but have a look at the program here.




You can also look at the 2015 program here that includes videos and PDFs of the presentations from last year.

Saturday 2 April 2016

Some interesting April Fools' Day 2016 Technology Jokes

When I posted April Fools' jokes on the blog last couple of years (see 2014 & 2015) , they seem to be very popular so I thought its worth posting them this year too. If I missed any interesting ones, please add in comments.


The one I really liked best is the Samsung Internet of Trousers (IoT) featuring:

Wi-Fly: Gone are the days of unnoticed, unzipped trouser zippers upon exiting the restroom. Should your fly remain open for more than three minutes, the ZipARTIK module will send a series of notifications to your smartphone to save you from further embarrassment.

Get Up! Alert: Using pressure sensors, Samsung’s intelligent trousers detect prolonged periods of inactivity and send notifications to ‘get up off of that thing’ at least once an hour. Should you remain seated for more than three hours, devices embedded in each of the rear pockets send mild electrical shocks to provide extra motivation.

Keep-Your-Pants-On Mode: Sometimes it’s easy to get carried away with the moment. The Samsung Bio-Processor in your pants checks your bio-data including your heart rate and perspiration level. If these indicators get too high, Samsung’s trousers will send you subtle notifications as a reminder of the importance of keeping your cool.

Fridge Lock: If the tension around your waist gets too high, the embedded ARTIK chip module will send signals to your refrigerator to prevent you from overeating. The fridge door lock can then only be deactivated with consent from a designated person such as your mother or significant other.



Microsoft has an MS-DOS mobile in mind for this day. I wont be surprised if a real product like this does become popular with older generation. I personally wouldn't mind an MS-DOS app on my mobile. Here is a video:





It would have been strange if we didnt have a Robot for a joke. Domino's have introduced the Domimaker. Here's how it works:





T-Mobile USA is not shy pulling punches on its rivals with the Binge On data plan where it lets people view certain video channels without using up their data. Here is the video and more details on mashable.



Samsung ExoKinetic helps your phone self-charge

Google had quite a few pranks as always. I will ignore 'mic drop' which backfired and caused them headache.

Google Express has a new delivery mechanism, just for the April Fool's day. (There has to be one drone idea)





Google Cardboard Plastic is an interesting one too. Here is the video:


Finally, its the Google Fiber Teleportation.



Other interesting ones:

Thursday 31 March 2016

Smartphones: It came, It saw, It conquered


Smartphones have replaced so many of our gadgets. The picture above is a witness to how all the gadgets have now been replaced by smartphones. To some extent hardware requirements have been transferred to software requirements (Apps). But the smartphones does a lot more than just hardware to software translation.

Most youngsters no longer have bookshelves or the encyclopedia collections. eBooks and Wikipedia have replaced them. We no longer need sticky notes and physical calendars, there are Apps for them.

Back in 2014, Benedict Evans posted his "Mobile is Eating the world" presentation. His presentation has received over 700K views. I know its not as much as Justin Bieber's songs views but its still a lot in the tech world. He has recently updated his presentation (embedded below) and its now called "Mobile ate the world".

Quite rightly, the job is not done yet. There is still long way to go. The fact that this tweet has over 600 retweets is a witness to this fact. Here are some of the slides that I really liked (and links reltaed to them - opens in a new window).
While we can see how Smartphones are getting ever more popular and how other gadgets that its replacing is suffering, I know people who own a smartphone for everything except voice call and have a feature phone for voice calls. Other people (including myself) rely on OTT for calls as its guaranteed better quality most of the time (at least indoors).

Smartphones have already replaced a lot of gadgets and other day to day necessities but the fact is that it can do a lot more. Payments is one such thing. The fact that I still carry a physical wallet means that the environment around me hasn't transformed enough for it to be made redundant. If I look in my wallet, I have some cash, a credit and debit card, driving license, some store loyalty cards and my business cards. There is no reason why all of these cannot be digital and/or virtual.
A Connected Car is a Smartphone on/with wheels.


A connected drone can be considered as smartphone that flies.
The Smartphones today are more than just hardware/software. They are a complete ecosystem. We can argue if only 2 options for OSs is good or bad. From developers point of view, two is just about right.
Another very important point to remember that smartphones enable different platforms.

While we may just have messaging apps that are acting as platforms, there is a potential for a lot more.

Here is the presentation, worth reflecting on each slide:



If you haven't heard Benedict Evans speak, you can refer to a recent video by him on this topic:



Related posts on the web:



Monday 29 February 2016

The Internet of Me: It’s all about my screens - Bob Schukai


I had the pleasure of attending the IET Turing lecture last week and listening to Robert Schukai. He gave a brilliant talk on how Smartphones are changing the way we do things. Its a very interesting talk but its nearly 87 minutes long. Slides are not available but the video is embedded below.


Thursday 21 January 2016

IET Lecture: 5G – Getting Closer to Answers?


I was fortunate to be able to hear the IET Appleton lecture last week. The good thing about these lectures are that the speakers get plenty of time to talk about the subject of interest and as a result they can cover the topic in much greater depth.

Some interesting tweets from the evening:




Here is the video:



As I was sitting in the front, I managed to ask a question - "5G is going to be evolution and revolution. Will it be revolution first then evolution or vice versa". If you cant wait to hear the answer, you can jump to 1:21:30 in the video.

The answer also ties in nicely with my Linkedin post on '5G: Mine is bigger than yours'. 

Wednesday 13 January 2016

Interesting gadgets from CES 2016

Here are some gadgets from the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016. These are all collected from the tweets and there is a Youtube video below if you are interested. There are just too many interesting things to list but do let me know which ones are your favourites.





Saturday 2 January 2016

End to end and top to bottom network design…


A good way to start 2016 is by a lecture delivered by Andy Sutton, EE at the IET conference 'Towards 5G Mobile Technology – Vision to Reality'. The slides and the video are both embedded below. The video also contains Q&A at the end which people may find useful.




Videos of all other presentations from the conference are available here for anyone interested.

Saturday 12 December 2015

LTE-Advanced Pro (a.k.a. 4.5G)

3GPP announced back in October that the next evolution of the 3GPP LTE standards will be known as LTE-Advanced Pro. I am sure this will be shortened to LTE-AP in presentations and discussions but should not be confused with access points.

The 3GPP press release mentioned the following:

LTE-Advanced Pro will allow mobile standards users to associate various new features – from the Release’s freeze in March 2016 – with a distinctive marker that evolves the LTE and LTE-Advanced technology series.

The new term is intended to mark the point in time where the LTE platform has been dramatically enhanced to address new markets as well as adding functionality to improve efficiency.

The major advances achieved with the completion of Release 13 include: MTC enhancements, public safety features – such as D2D and ProSe - small cell dual-connectivity and architecture, carrier aggregation enhancements, interworking with Wi-Fi, licensed assisted access (at 5 GHz), 3D/FD-MIMO, indoor positioning, single cell-point to multi-point and work on latency reduction. Many of these features were started in previous Releases, but will become mature in Release 13.

LTE-evolution timelinea 350pxAs well as sign-posting the achievements to date, the introduction of this new marker confirms the need for LTE enhancements to continue along their distinctive development track, in parallel to the future proposals for the 5G era.


Some vendors have been exploring ways of differentiating the advanced features of Release-13 and have been using the term 4.5G. While 3GPP does not officially support 4.5G (or even 4G) terminology, a new term has been welcomed by operators and vendors alike.

I blogged about Release-13 before, here, which includes a 3GPP presentation and 4G Americas whitepaper. Recently Nokia (Networks) released a short and sweet video and a whitepaper. Both are embedded below:



The Nokia whitepaper (table of contents below) can be downloaded from here.


Wednesday 3 June 2015

'The Future Inter-connected Network' and Timing, Frequency & Phase requirements


I had the pleasure of doing a keynote at PhaseReady 2015 in London today. My presentation is embedded below along with some comments, followed by tweets some of which I think are important to think about. Finally, I have embedded a video by EE and Light Reading which was quoted and maybe its important in the context of this event.


My main focus during this presentation has been on how the networks have evolved from 3G days with the main focus (unconsciously) on speeds. While the networks are evolving, they are also getting more complex. The future ecosystem will consist of many Inter-connected (and in many cases inter-operable) networks that will work out the requirements in different situations and adapt to the necessary network(technology) accordingly.

An example of today's networks are like driving a manual car where we have to change gears depending on the traffic, speed required and fuel efficiency. Automatic cars are supposed to optimise this and achieve the best in all different cases. The future inter-connected networks should achieve the best based on the requirements in all different scenarios.

While it is easy to say this in theory, the practical networks will have many challenges to solve, including business and/or technical. The theme of the conference was timing, frequency and phase synchronisation. There are already challenges around them today, with the advanced LTE-A features. These challenges are only going to get bigger.

The following are the tweets from the day:



Finally, here is the link to video referred to in the last tweet. Its from last year but well worth listening.

Monday 4 May 2015

New LTE UE Categories: 11, 12, 13 and 14 in 3GPP Rel-12

While checking 3GPP TS 36.306, I noticed some new LTE categories have been defined. We now have all the way up to category 14. I also noticed that Wikipedia page has up to Category 15, not sure how/where they got it from. 


The LG Space page has some more details for anyone interested in exploring further.

A Qualcomm demo from MWC for LTE Category 11, if interested.



Finally, other related posts:


Sunday 12 April 2015

LTE-Hetnet (LTE-H) a.k.a. LTE Wi-Fi Link Aggregation (LWA)


We have talked about the unlicensed LTE (LTE-U), re-branded as LTE-LAA many times on this blog and the 3G4G Small Cells blog. In fact some analysts have decided to call the current Rel-12 non-standardised Rel-12 version as LTE-U and the standardised version that would be available as part of Release-13 as LTE-LAA.

There is a lot of unease in the WiFi camp because LTE-LAA may hog the 5GHz spectrum that is available as license-exempt for use of Wi-Fi and other similar (future) technologies. Even though LAA may be more efficient as claimed by some vendors, it would reduce the usage for WiFi users in that particular spectrum.

As a result, some vendors have recently proposed LTE/WiFi Link Aggregation as a new feature in Release-13. Alcatel-Lucent, Ruckus Wireless and Qualcomm have all been promoting this. In fact Qualcomm has a pre-MWC teaser video on Youtube. The demo video is embedded as follows:



The Korean operator KT was also involved in demoing this in MWC along with Samsung and Qualcomm. They have termed this feature as LTE-Hetnet or LTE-H.

The Korean analyst firm Netmanias have more detailed technical info on this topic.

Link aggregation by LTE-H demonstrated at MWC 2015 (Source: Netmanias)

As can be seen the data is split/combined in PDCP layer. While this example above shows the practical implementation using C-RAN with Remote Radio Head (RRH) and BaseBand Unit (BBU) being used, the picture at the top shows LTE Anchor in eNodeB. There would be a need for an ideal backhaul to keep latency in the eNodeB to minimum when combining cellular and WiFi data.

Comparison of link level Carrier Aggregation technologies (Source: Netmanias)

The above table shows comparison between the 3 main techniques for increasing data rates through aggregation; CA, LTE-U/LAA and LTE-H/LWA. While CA has been part of 3GPP Release-10 and is available in more of less all new LTE devices, LTE-U and LTE-H is new and would need modifications in the network as well as in the devices. LTE-H would in the end provide similar benefits to LTE-U but is a safer option from devices and spectrum point of view and would be a more agreeable solution by everyone, including the WiFi community.

A final word; last year we wrote a whitepaper laying out our vision of what 4.5G is. I think we put it simply that in 4.5G, you can use WiFi and LTE at the same time. I think LTE-H fulfills that vision much better than other proposals.

Friday 3 April 2015

Some interesting April Fools' Day 2015 Technology Jokes

Here is a quick roundup of some interesting tech #AprilFools day jokes from the web. Click on the links to learn more

Samsung Galaxy Blade Edge - Chef's edition






Selfie Shoes by Miz Mooz - Shoefie



com.google - You can try it in chrome browser, it was working


Smartbox by Inbox: the mailbox of tomorrow, today - by Google




HTC Re-Sok - the "world's first truly smart sock"






Bing's Palm Search technology




Introducing #MotoSelfieStick - By Motorola



Twitter’s Twelfie Stick




Domino’s Domi-No-Driver Service

Iltasanomat news on April 1st 2015 (source not available): Finnish Police is having their own air forces with 250 seagulls with TETRA radio and camera


And finally, these old style pranks still work :-)

If you like them, you will enjoy the last year ones too. Here.

Sunday 15 March 2015

Air-Ground-Air communications in Mission Critical scenarios

In-flight communications have always fascinated me. While earlier the only possibility was to use Satellites, a hot topic for in the last few years has been Air-Ground-Air communications.

Some of you may remember that couple of years back Ericsson showed an example of using LTE in extreme conditions. The video below shows that LTE can work in these scenarios.



Now there are various acronyms being used for these type of communications but the one most commonly used is Direct-Air-to-Ground Communications (DA2GC), Air-to-Ground (A2G) and Ground-to-Air (G2A).


While for short distance communications, LTE or any cellular technology (see my post on Flying Small Cells) may be a good option, a complete solution including communication over sea would require satellite connectivity as well. As I have mentioned in a blog post before, 75Mbps connectivity would soon be possible with satellites.

For those interested in working of the Air-Ground-Air communications, would find the presentation below useful. A much detailed ECC CEPT report from last year is available here.



The next challenge is to explore whether LTE can be used for Mission Critical Air Ground Air communications. 3GPP TSG RAN recently conducted study on the feasibility and the conclusions are as follows:

There is a common understanding from companies interested in the topic that:

  1. Air-to-Ground communications can be provided using the LTE standards (rel-8 and beyond depending on the targeted scenarios).
  2. 3GPP UE RF requirements might need to be adapted
  3. It may be possible to enhance the performance of the communications with some standards changes, but these are in most cases expected to be non-fundamental optimizations
  4. Engineering and implementation adaptations are required depending on the deployment scenario. In particular, the ECC report [1] comments that from implementation point of view synchronization algorithms are to be modified compared to terrestrial mobile radio usage in order to cope with high Doppler frequency shift of the targeted scenario. In addition, some network management adaptations might be needed. From engineering perspective the Ground base station antenna adjustment has to be matched to cover indicated aircraft heights above ground up to 12 km by antenna up-tilt. It is also expected that the inter-site distances would be dominated by the altitudes to be supported [5].
  5. A2G technology using legacy LTE has been studied and successfully trialed covering different kinds of services: Surfing, downloading, e-mail transmission, use of Skype video, audio applications and Video conferencing. Related results can be found in several documents from ECC and from companies [1], [2], [3]. The trials in [1] and [2] assumed in general a dedicated spectrum, and the fact that the communications in the aircraft cabin are using WIFI or GSMOBA standards, while LTE is used for the Broadband Direct-Air-to-Ground connection between the Aircraft station and the Ground base station.
  6. It is understood that it is possible to operate A2G communications over spectrum that is shared with ground communications. However, due to interference it is expected that the ground communications would suffer from capacity losses depending on the deployment scenario. Therefore, it is recommended to operate A2G communication over a dedicated spectrum.
  7. It can be noted that ETSI studies concluded that Spectrum above 6 GHz is not appropriate for such applications [4].
  8. LTE already provides solutions to allow seamless mobility in between cells. Cells can be intended for terrestrial UEs and cells intended for A2G UEs which might operate in different frequencies.
  9. Cell range in LTE is limited by the maximum timing advance (around 100km). Larger ranges could be made possible by means of implementation adaptations. 

Wednesday 14 January 2015

IEEE Globecom 2014 Keynote Video: 5G Wireless Goes Beyond Smartphones


Embedded below is a video from the keynote session by Dr. Wen Tong of Huawei. I do not have the latest presentation but an earlier one (6 months old) is also embedded below for reference. It will give you a good idea on the 5G research direction





You may also be interested in this other presentation from Huawei in IEEE Globecom 2014, 5G: From Research to Standardization (what, how, when)

Sunday 16 November 2014

Is mobile eating the world?

Another interesting and thought provoking presentation by Ben Evans. His earlier presentation which was very popular as well, is here. The video and slides are embedded below.


How Mobile is Enabling Tech to Outgrow the Tech Industry from Andreessen Horowitz on Vimeo.




And a recent interview by Benedict Evans with Bloomberg TV on the same topic as follows:


Sunday 13 July 2014

Case Study: LTE for real time news gathering by Sky News

Back in May, I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by Richard Pattison from Sky News where he talked about how they have managed to start replacing their Satellite trucks (which are extremely expensive to own and run) with the new solutions using LTE.

One of the advantage of LTE over 3G/HSPA+ is that the uplink is as good as the downlink which wasn't really the case in earlier generations. What this means is that you can use your phone to do a live video call and use that for broadcasting of real time information. The Sky News Tech team has some interesting tweets on this.




An example of the video quality could be seen from this clip here:

The Dejero App is an interesting one that can allow bonding of Cellular + WiFi and provide a combined data rate.


I was having a discussion yesterday on Twitter because we term this bonded cellular and WiFi as 4.5G. There are many proprietary solutions available for using them together but the standardised one is coming in standards soon.

Sky news have managed to set up new standards by having 12 feeds simultaneously broadcasting  (all based on Iphones and Ipads) during the European elections.



All this has been possible due to an amazing 4G network by EE and being able to negotiate a 500GB (0.5TB) data package.


Anyway, you can read the complete paper below:



Saturday 14 June 2014

AT&T on Mobile Security


Nice presentation from Ed Amoroso from AT&T outlining how the security is evolving to cope with the new technologies and threats. He points to encryption, containerization, proxy & virtualization as the four key pillars of technology for enabling operators to protect the network in a mobility era where the perimeter can no longer do the job it used to do.

Here is the video:

If you cant see the video, click on this link to watch it on Light Reading's website.

Saturday 5 April 2014

Some interesting April Fools' Day 2014 Technology Jokes

Its very interesting to see all the companies proposing very interesting concepts on the 1st of April. I was told that not everyone knows what April Fools day means so here is the link to Wikipedia.

Samsung Fly-Fi: Samsung has come up with some interesting ideas, the first being Wi-Fi for everyone powered by Pigeons. They have a website here with Video.

Power of Pigeons


Looks like since we have Pigeons everywhere, so they are always used in one way or the other. The best prank ever in my opinion was the PigeonRank by Google, back in 2002. I spent a few hours that day trying to figure out how they were actually doing it.

Smart Wear was always going to be the big thing. Quite a few smart wearables this year.

Bonobos has done a good job with with TechStyle. See video below:



Samsung has a glove called Samsung Fingers here. The best thing I liked was 'Talk to the Hand'

Samsung Fingers_Talk to the hand

HTC came up with similar concept called Gluuv



Toshiba's DiGiT is as interesting. See the video:


Virgin Mobile, Canada has come up with SmartKicks. See here.



Roku Watch is not too bad:


Virgin America even convinced Sir Richard Branson to appear in the April Fools ad along with Tony Faddell, the CEO of Nest. Funny Youtube video here.

Sony Power Food was just okay, video here.

Toshiba Spehere is a funny Gaming concept, see here.

Nokia reviewed its most popular phone 3310 with modern day features here. Coloured screen with 41Megapixel camera.

Google wants to Emojify the web here.

Google Japan has a magic hand here.

Selfiebot by Orbotix is a cool concept, here.

Twitter Helmet didnt make me laugh though. See here.

Is there some others that I missed? Please feel free to add it in the comments.

Saturday 15 March 2014

HSPA+ Carrier Aggregation



Came across Qualcomm's HSPA+ Carrier aggregation video (above) and whitepaper. Interesting to see that HSPA/HSPA+ is still growing. As per my earlier post, half of the connections in 2018 would be HSPA/HSPA+.

As can be seen in the picture above, there are quite a few features that may be of interest to the operators. Scalable UMTS is one such feature as I have put in the blog before.


You will notice that upto 4 bands can be aggregated. It would be interesting to see which operators have these bands available and if they would be willing to use HSPA+ CA with upto 4 bands. The presentation by Qualcomm is embedded below and is available to download from here.



Related posts:



Saturday 1 March 2014

Mobile, Context and Discovery - Ben Evans


An Interesting presentation and Video from Benedict Evans, both embedded below:



There is an interesting Q&A at the end of the talk in the video. You can directly jump to 27:30 marker for the Q&A. One of the interesting points highlighted by him, that I always knew but was not able to convey it across is there is no real point comparing Google and Apple. I am too lazy to type down so please jump to 45:10. One of the comment on the Youtube summarises it well:

"Google is a vast machine learning engine... and it spent 10-15 years building that learning engine and feeding it data"

So true. It is not Apple vs Google; it is not about the present. It is about the future (see Google's recent acquisitions for context). As Benedict says, if Google creates beautiful, meaningful and unique experiences for users, why would they do it only for Android, they would also have it on Apple devices. 

In the end, comparing Apple and Google is like comparing Apple(s) and Oranges :)