Motorola's loss, whose gain?

In an earlier post, I mentioned about Motorola closing down its handset business. In a news item couple of weeks back, there was an announcement that the company will be breaking into two:

Motorola announced plans to separate its struggling handset business from other operations forming two separate publicly traded companies after months of agitation from frustrated investors. The suburban Chicago-based cell phone maker has been under pressure from billionaire investor Carl Icahn for changes meant to revitalize its cell-phone business. The cell phone unit has seen its sales and stock price plummet with the company unable to produce second act to the once-popular Razr phone.

Motorola said the handset business will operate separately from another company that will encompass its home and networks business, which sells TV set-top boxes and modems, and its enterprise mobility solutions, which sells computing and communications equipment to businesses.

"Our priorities have not changed with today's announcement," Chief Executive Greg Brown said in a statement. "We remain committed to improving the performance of our Mobile Devices business by delivering compelling products that meet the needs of customers and consumers around the world."

Schaumburg-based Motorola said it hopes the transaction will be tax-free, allowing shareholders to own stock in both of the new companies. If the deal is approved, the two units would be separated in 2009.

Brown said Motorola will launch a search for a new chief executive of the Mobile Device business as it works to regain favor with customers and its No. 2 position in the cell phone market.

Motorola lost that spot last year to rival Samsung Electronics Co.
Finland's Nokia Corp. is the industry leader.

"We believe strongly in our brand, our people and our intellectual property, and expect that the Mobile Devices business will be well-positioned to regain market leadership as a focused, independent company," Brown said.

Wednesday's announcement was just the latest shake-up at Motorola, which rode the success of the iconic Razr phone from 2005 to 2006, but has stumbled since amid stiff competition.

Already the layoffs have started:

Motorola Inc. is laying off 2,600 employees across the company, resulting in a pretax charge of $104 million for the first quarter, the Schaumburg-based telecommunications equipment-maker disclosed in a regulatory filing Thursday. In a separate statement, Motorola said the layoffs are part of a previously announced plan to cut costs by $500 million this year. Executives had disclosed the cost-reducing program at the beginning of 2008 and warned that it could mean job losses. Motorola's employee head count totaled 66,000 at the end of 2007, according to the annual report it filed in February.

There are rumors linking Dell and ZTE to a buyout of the handset business part but we dont know for sure.

So who will gain from this?

There are many upcoming handset manufacturers who may benefit directly from this. Apple, ZTE, RIM and HTC are the obvious candidates that come to my mind. A somewhat old (Feb) news item from my Inbox can give us some clues:

RIM and ZTE took places among the world's top ten largest mobile phone makers in 2007, new research from Gartner claims.

Despite only being available in four markets: US, UK, Germany and France, the iPhone transformed Apple into the tenth largest handset maker in the fourth quarter of 2007, the analysts informed.

RIM took sixth place while low-cost handset manufacturer ZTE, which specialises in delivering devices to emerging markets, took seventh place.

Apple holds 0.6 per cent of the market while sixth-place RIM has 1.2 per cent. Motorola saw its share fall to 11.9 per cent from 21.5 per cent. Nokia (40.4 per cent) and Samsung (13.4 per cent) continue to dominate global handset sales.

Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi observed: "The global mobile devices market will remain relatively immune to a recession in the US and Western European economies as the majority of growth in 2008 will come from emerging markets. The mature Western Europe and North America markets are driven by operator contract terms and replacement cycles and will account for just 30 per cent of the global mobile devices market in 2008.”

700 MHz Spectrum - Google: Loser or Winner?

Google on last Thursday revealed for the first time that it had been among the bidders for the federal 700-megahertz spectrum auction, which provides access to the Internet via mobile devices. Didnt we already know?

But the Mountain View-Calif.-based company now says that was all part of the game plan.

Google had said last July that it would guarantee a minimum $4.6 billion bid if the Federal Communications Commission would grant four license conditions the company sought for the spectrum. The FCC granted just two, giving open access to outside applications and devices, but Google proceeded with a bid.

"Google's top priority heading into the auction was to make sure that bidding on the so-called 'C Block' reached the $4.6 billion reserve price that would trigger the important 'open applications' and 'open handsets' license conditions," wrote two of the company's lawyers on the corporate blog. "We were also prepared to gain the nationwide C Block licenses at a price somewhat higher than the reserve price; in fact, for many days during the early course of the auction, we were the high bidder. But it was clear, then and now, that Verizon Wireless ultimately was motivated to bid higher (and had far more financial incentive to gain the licenses)."

Most observers had already assumed that Google had, in fact, bid, and some had even worried that the company would win the auction, which could have added risk to the company's business operations.

The company's lawyers said that the auction "doesn't mark the end of our efforts toward greater wireless choice and innovation."

"We will weigh in at the FCC as it sets implementation rules for the C Block, and determines how to move forward with a D Block re-auction," they wrote on the blog.

The FCC plans to use the D block for public safety networks.

It appears everything went as planned for Google. It didn't have to cough up any money in the 700 MHz auction but it ensured the open-access provisions (at least most of them) that it fought for at the FCC. But with the same faces, namely Verizon and AT&T, emerging as winners in the auction, the auction isn't going to change the face of the wireless telecom industry as industry pundits had hoped.

As exciting as it would have been to see a newcomer to the wireless landscape, incumbents such as Verizon have the wherewithal to spend billions on licenses and billions more to build out network infrastructure. That's their core business. And with the 700 MHz band the last of the so-called beach-front property, operators were prepared to drive the price up to a hefty level, especially given the fact that new 4G networks need a nice chunk of extra spectrum, about 20 megahertz, to deliver the broadband data speeds that are advertised.

Verizon Wireless was the big winner for the 700 MHz auction after winning the Upper C Block of spectrum, which is laden with open access provisions. Google did not win any licenses. Satellite television company EchoStar subsidiary Frontier won a significant amount of licenses in the E Block--enough to give the company a nationwide footprint. Verizon Wireless not only won the coveted C Block, but also most of the A Block and 77 licenses in the B Block, which contained the smallest licenses in the auction. For its part, AT&T managed to scoop up 227 of the smaller slices of spectrum.

FMC + M-to-M at home and outside

I was lent a copy of Fixed Mobile Convergence book that was recently released by McGraw Hill. Very interesting book if you are involved in some way or other in FMC world. If you think you missed out on many conferences on FMC (and saved thousands of pounds) then investing in this book will provide you with far more information and may make you an expert.

Here is a snippet of something I always like reading and think will be big in future:

Improved availability, reachability, and cost savings enabled by FMC can be applied not only to communication between humans or humans and machines, but also to communication between machines themselves, for instance, intelligent devices with microprocessors running applications—machine-to-machine (M-to-M)—with far-reaching consequences.

To date, the solutions offered by telecom service providers have almost always involved a human user at one endpoint of a communication session. With the mass deployment of wireless networks and microprocessor-based remote sensing devices, this paradigm is about to change, with literally millions of devices capable of connectivity
being readied by manufacturers in different industries.

The solution in Figure above allows persons and remote applications to monitor the status of stationary and semistationary objects in the home zone and control their behavior based on policies, changing conditions, and other factors. The home-zone objects may interface with the home-zone M-to-M controller via low-power, close-proximity technologies such as ZigBee, defined in IEEE 802.15.4 specifying Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN), and Z-wave (a proprietary standard developed by a company called Zensys), or more mainstream Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies (depending on specific implementations).

The applications relying on such a symbiosis of M-to-M and FMC may include inexpensive and easy-to-install,8 standards-based, remote monitoring and control equipment. In residential applications, for example, communicating thermostats, security systems, and lighting, as well as numerous mobile assets belonging to a household such as vehicles, pets, and family members, can be enabled to maintain uniform connectivity and create an M-to-M ecosystem, as depicted in Figure above.

If this interests you then information on the book as follows:

Also check, Fixed Mobile Convergence Alliance website.

CTIA Wireless 2008

When: April 1-3, 2008
Where: Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada

I am collecting links on CTIA08 on this page. Please feel free to contribute yours.

• CTIA08 Live by Fierce Wireless
  

Just keep texting

Last year I blogged about SMS being the killer App and it seems to be still going strong. Sprint recently launched $99 plan known as Simply Everything allows unlimited voice and texts. These plans will make people more addicted to texting.

A recent study by Portio Research confirms continued healthy SMS growth. ABI predicts the overall mobile messaging market will grow to become a US$212 billion market opportunity by 2013, while Portio Research argues SMS will be least a US$67 billion revenue opportunity during the same period.

Yet while it’s clear SMS growth is showing no signs of slowing down, wireless operator margins have not grown with the wireless consumer’s appetite for low-priced service sets. Industry research points out SMS revenues will only see a 28 percent increase from 2007 to 2012. This means all-you-can-eat plans by Sprint and other wireless operators, coupled with increasing competition, will minimize the rise of new SMS revenue.



A quick search about SMS news gave some very interesting results:

• Anam Mobile and TR2 Communications Launch Global SMS Money Transfer Service
• Man divorces two wives in three minutes using SMS
• Finnish foreign minister sacked over SMS scandal
• Buy Stuff On Amazon With An SMS
• Nuance announce Voicemail to Text message transcription system
• Psychiatrist voices SMS addiction concerns
• Surge in SMS traffic on election day
• SMS to remind you of payment dates

Interesting list, isnt it?

No Mobile Phobia

This one is very interesting. From The Independent:

Being out of mobile-phone contact is as stressful as moving house or breaking up with a partner for nearly one in five phone users, according to a survey which suggests many Britons are in the grip of "nomo-phobia".

Anxiety over running out of battery or credit, losing one's handset and not having network coverage affects 53 per cent of the UK's 45 million mobile-phone users, according to the study by YouGov.


Read the article here.

IMS rolling on! Quiet and Steady

IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is expected to provide mobile telephone operators with a forecasted $300 billion in extra revenue over the next five years, according to a new study from ABI Research. Major operators such as Sprint, Verizon and British Telecom (BT) will increasingly deploy IMS across their networks in a quickening tempo starting this year.

“Until recently IMS was mainly the province of fixed-line operators,” says senior analyst Nadine Manjaro, “but now it is essential to the success of mobile and fixed operators who are losing revenue from traditional sources. IMS enables rapid development and deployment of new services.”

Some firms – notably Verizon and BT – are facilitating this process by offering an open IMS interface allowing third-party developers easy access, as a way of ensuring a flow of new applications. This means faster testing and deployment of services, which will be critical to their success.

“Operators are forced to look at IMS and similar solutions because they need to start generating more revenue,” notes Manjaro. “With recent moves by Sprint, Verizon and AT&T to offer less profitable flat rate services as a way to fight subscriber churn, that need becomes more acute.”

One impediment to IMS’s success in the past has been the difficulty of proving the business case for it. But Manjaro suggests that planners were incorrectly considering IMS as a service rather than a platform. In fact IMS supports multiple services, and it takes several of them to make a valid business case. To use the hackneyed phrase, there has been a paradigm shift in operators’ strategic thinking.

The major remaining challenge for operators is to integrate IMS without seriously disrupting existing services. That need is being met by the major infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson, Alcatel, and Nokia-Siemens, which have been packaging IMS (at additional cost) with the network upgrades they provide to operators. Manjaro points out that, “It’s easier to quantify the opportunity for operators because you can look at it in terms of potential revenue. It’s more difficult with regard to vendors, because they’ve been bundling it with the air interface, the base station, the architecture upgrade.”

In other new IMS pulse-taking – Forward Concepts’ ‘Femtocells: The Emerging Solution for Fixed Mobile Convergence’ report – it’s predicted that IMS-powered femtocells will capture the dominant fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) market share by 2010. The argument here is that Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) is a transitional technology and cellular carriers will ultimately transition to IMS-enabled femtocells. Forward Concepts calculates that global femtocell equipment revenues will grow at a CAGR of 126% from 2008 to hit US$4.9bn in 2012. Western Europe will be the largest market, driving 32% of the revenue, followed by North America with a 22% share.

Check my old blog on IMS and UMA.

The IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and the NGN (Next Generation Networks) Forums announced recently the successful completion of interoperability testing at the IMS Forum Plugfest 4 and plans for the NGN Plugfest 5. Plugfest 5, scheduled for June 2008 at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL), will test consumer and enterprise M-play interoperability.

The IMS and NGN Forums are dedicated to interoperability and certification of M-play, mobile multimedia services, and applications for wireless, wireline, and cable broadband over IP networks.

The IMS Forum's Plugfest 4, held at the UNH-IOL Feb 25 - 29, was the latest in a series of events designed to deliver IMS and NGN interoperability and certification. Participating companies tested a number of leading technologies and services for interoperability, including triple play, VoIP (voice over IP), fixed mobile convergence (FMC) from multiple vendors, test and measurement equipments, SIP (session initiation protocol), class-5 features (voicemail, etc), Diameter IMS stacks, and instant messaging with presence support. Plugfest 4 was the first successful IMS call between mobile UE (user equipment) devices and core network elements P-CSCF servers, S-CSCF, and HSS, all from separate vendors.

Plugfest 4 was expanded to include billing interfaces for charging for IMS services. Tests included an IMS-compliant charging/billing system working with multiple network configurations, as well as interoperability of operational support systems and business support systems (OSS/BSS). This is a major milestone since the charging/billing systems are a major component for network operators to deploy IMS.

More than 15 companies participated in IMS Plugfest 4, including Intel as a platinum sponsor, HP, Amdocs, Acision, Alpha Networks, Aricent, Data Connection Ltd., Empirix, Mavenir Systems, Mu Security, NextPoint Networks, Radvision, Shenick Network Systems, Sonus Networks, Starent Networks, Tekelec, and UNH-IOL. PulverMedia and IMS Magazine served as media sponsors.

Finally, Ericsson has announced an agreement with Beijing Netcom, a branch of China Netcom, to provide the company with a Command Supporting System based on Ericsson's IMS solution for the Beijing Olympic Games.

China Netcom is the official fixed-telecom service partner for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Under the agreement, Ericsson will be the sole supplier and systems integrator for an IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) platform to enable personal multimedia communication.

Ericsson's IMS solution enables the convergence of data, speech and network technology over an IP-based infrastructure. It supports fast and efficient management and coordination of value-added services, including voice, text, pictures and video, providing end users with a personalized, richer communications experience.

Deployment and systems integration has started and is set to be completed by March 2008. It will span the six Olympic Games cities in China.

The agreement is an extension of a contract signed between Ericsson and Beijing Netcom in April 2007 to build the first commercial IMS network in China.

Beijing Netcom says: "As an official partner for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this agreement emphasizes our commitment to providing telecom-quality IP multimedia services that combine voice, data, audio and video. This move will bring an enhanced communications experience to users in Beijing and across other Olympic cities."

Mats H. Olsson, President of Ericsson Greater China, says: "Ericsson is extremely proud to build on its longstanding relationship to provide Beijing Netcom with the first IMS-based multimedia service for the 2008 Olympic Games. This contract confirms that IMS has come of age, enabling volume deployment supporting multimedia capabilities within the fixed-network operator's service."

Ericsson is the world's leading provider of technology and services to telecom operators. The market leader in 2G and 3G mobile technologies, Ericsson supplies communications services and manages networks that serve more than 185 million subscribers. The company's portfolio comprises mobile and fixed network infrastructure, and broadband and multimedia solutions for operators, enterprises and developers. The Sony Ericsson joint venture provides consumers with feature-rich personal mobile devices.

Do we need mobile on Planes

One of the last refuges from annoying ringtones and anodyne phone conversations is likely to disappear after communications watchdog Ofcom cleared the use of mobile phones on aircraft yesterday, with some airlines ready to launch services in time for the summer holidays.

The prospect of passengers shouting "I'm on the plane" at 11,000 metres (37,000 ft) may fill many with dread, but for the airlines it could be a real moneyspinner to charge passengers a hefty premium to make and receive calls in the air.

Passengers will still be banned from using their mobile or Blackberry email device at take-off and landing. Once at 3,000 metres the cabin crew will switch on equipment to pick up the signal from a mobile and relays it to the ground via satellite.



Ofcom confirmed plans to enable airlines to offer mobile communication services on UK-registered aircraft, if they wish to do so. This will be subject to approval by the relevant UK and European aviation authorities - the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the UK.

The decision has been developed jointly with other EU countries and will enable use in European airspace. It follows an Ofcom consultation on the proposals published in October 2007.

The safety of passengers is paramount and mobile systems on aircraft will only be installed when they have secured approval by EASA and the CAA in the UK. If such approval has been secured it will be a matter for individual airlines to judge whether there is consumer demand for these services.

The proposed system utilises an on-board base station in the plane which communicates with passengers' own handsets. The base station - called a pico cell - is low power and creates a network area big enough to encompass the cabin of the plane.

The base station routes phone traffic to a satellite, which is in turn connected to mobile networks on the ground.

A network control unit on the plane is used to ensure that mobiles in the plane do not connect to any base stations on the ground. It blocks the signal from the ground so that phones cannot connect and remain in an idle state.

Calls will be billed through passengers' mobile networks. "

The story of WiMAX in India

Read an article on WiMAX in India in Rediff:

On March 4, India's Tata Communications, an emerging broadband player, announced the countrywide rollout of a commercial WiMax network, the largest anywhere in the world of the high-speed, wireless broadband technology.

Already 10 Indian cities and 5,000 retail and business customers use the product, and by next year Tata will offer service in 115 cities nationwide. The folks at Tata can hardly contain their excitement. "WiMax is not experimental, it's oven-hot," says Tata's Prateek Pashine, in charge of the company's broadband and retail business.

Of course WiMax is not new. Most everyone in the industry has been talking about it for years. Intel chairman Craig Barrett has been propagating its virtues in pilot projects across the world, including India and Africa.

Sprint will be rolling out a WiMax network in Washington next month, and in other US cities next year. Until now the most advanced use of WiMax has been in Japan and Korea, where Japanese carrier KDDI and Korea Telecom offer extensive WiMax networks.

However the Japanese and Korean services are not available nationwide - KDDI will have its major rollout only in 2009 - and most people use them as supplements to the wired services.

It's in emerging economies like India, where there is little connectivity and where mobile usage is soaring because of the difficulty in getting broadband wires to homes and offices, that WiMax is likely to see its full potential as a commercially viable technology.
Intel, whose silicon chips power WiMax, has been pushing for this technology for some years and its executives are practically salivating at the thought of the successful rollout in India.

"The more countries and telcos that get behind this technology the better," says R. Sivakumar, chief executive of Intel South Asia. Predicting that the new technology will make other types of Internet access obsolete, he boasts "Tata will set the cat among the pigeons."

Tata Communications has been working on setting this up for a couple of years, and successfully completed field trials last December. It has used the technology from Telsima, a Sunnyvale (Calif.) maker of WiMax base-stations and the leading WiMax tech provider in the world.

For now, the technology will be restricted to fixed wireless, but Tata plans to make it mobile by midyear. The company has invested about $100 million in the project, which will increase to $500 million over the next four years as it begins to near its goal of having 50 million subscribers in India.

The world is watching

Global tech analysts are will be watching carefully. Though WiMax is prevalent in Korea, the Korean service is a slightly different version, says Bertrand Bidaud, a communications analyst with Gartner in Singapore. It's a Korea-specific pre-WiMax technology called WiBRO.

But the Indian market is where the conditions for a WiMax deployment are the best, he says, because of limited fixed lines. That means Tata has fewer hurdles to overcome. And as WiMax scales up fast, it will give service providers greater flexibility and costs will drop equally rapidly.

"If it doesn't succeed in India, it will be difficult (for it to succeed) anywhere else, and Bharti, Tata has been virtually asleep, with a limited subscriber base for its limited product. In fact, even with as many as seven broadband providers in the market, the total Indian subscriber base is just 3.2 million and there is no clear market leader.
But with the WiMax rollout Tata can gain a leadership position and add "a few thousand subscribers a day," says Alok Sharma, chief executive of Telsima. Tata is, of course, going for the heavy-billing corporate customer - a target audience that is beginning to make big investments in technology.

Temple service via WiMax

But also important is the ordinary Indian retail customer who can watch movies via WiMax and enjoy Tata's other unique offerings. For instance, users can take in an early morning worship service at the famous Balaji temple in South India.

The temple permitted Tata to install cameras so that Hindu devotees from around the world could watch the proceedings in the temple around the clock. To get connected initially, users will simply have to go to a store, buy a router, install it, and then they become instantly connected. It will be as easy as buying apples, Tata executives promise.
The Tata rollout is a chance for India to become cutting-edge in mobile Internet services, say WiMax boosters. For India, which "always used last year's fashion to dress itself up," says Sharma, it is a chance to launch a brand new. fourth-generation technology that the world can follow. "India is becoming the knowledge centre of the world; it should take the lead in this," he adds.

There are some other bits which I got from one of VSNLs (now known as Tata Communications) presentation:

• ISPs using 3.3GHz spectrum for WiMAX roll-out
• At least 3 networks being built in all large towns
• Best spectral efficiencies

Wireless Broadband opportunity in India bigger than:

• Entire LatAm (predominantly on 3.5 GHz)
• Korea (at 2.3 GHz)

Current deployments by Indian operators rival the biggest ofWiMAX deployments around the world. VSNL deploys the largest WiMAX network in a city across the world.

Soft launched on December 31, 2007 in BANGALORE:

• Silicon Valley of India
• 8 million people and over 10000 industries
• 86% literacy ( national avg – at 61%) - second highest literacy rate for an Indian metropolis, after Mumbai.
• More than 1000 software companies - Infosys and Wipro, India's second and third largest software companies are headquartered in Bangalore
• The population of the IT industry folks in Bangalore is 5% i.e 400,000.
• Bangalore's per capita income of Rs. .49,000 (US$ 1,160) is the highest for any Indian city.
• Launched with 132 BTS, will be adding another 28 by March 2008
• 3.3 Ghz, 12 Mhz, 3 Mhz/sector, 4 sectors85% of the city covered
• The response has been far better than what we had anticipated
• In 20 days we have installed an equivalent of 10% of the existing wireline base
• Currently a huge backlog of orders to be installedCustomer experience has been fantastic
• Additional BTS to ensure full coverage planned

Way forward:

• Enterprise roll out into another 300 cities over the next 15 months
• Retail roll out into another 15 – 20 cities over the next 15 months
• Spectrum in 2.5/2.3 Ghz awaited

Those Engineering days

I still remember my university days as an engineering student. Over the weekend i read couple of funny posts on engineers:

First is "Top 5 Reasons It Sucks to Be an Engineering Student". The best reason i like is:

1. Every Assignment Feels the Same: Nearly every homework assignment and test question is a math problem. Only a few courses require creativity or offer hands-on experience.

The other one, " Understanding Engineers" is posted by me after receiving in an email. My favourite in this was:

Understanding Engineers - Take Three
A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

The engineer fumed, "What's with those blokes? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes !"

The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I'venever seen such inept golf!"

The priest said, "Here comes the greens keeper.Let's have a word with him."

He said, "Hello, George! What's wrong with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?"

The greens keeper replied, "Oh, yes. That's agroup of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime."

The group fell silent for a moment.

The priest said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight."

The doctor said, "Good idea. I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there'sanything he can do for them."

The engineer said, "Why can't they play at night?"