The 3G4G Blog

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

3GPP Release 8 Features

Many people are surprised to hear that the Rel-8 of 3GPP is much more than just LTE/SAE. Here is a list of features:

Thursday, 24 April 2008

US MME Industry to cross $6 Billion by 2012

Revenue from mobile media and entertainment (MME) services in the US will more than double during the next five years, according to the latest research from Analysys. US MME services (excluding messaging, and mobile browsing and data charges) generated US$3.1 billion in revenue in 2007, and Analysys Research forecasts that revenue will grow to $6.6 billion in 2012, at a compound annual growth rate of 16.3%. The strongest growth will not occur until after 2010, as the technical and market environment for MME services improves, according to the latest Analysys report, Mobile Media and Entertainment in the US: forecasts 2007-2012.

Key trends that are driving market growth include:

Improvements to service accessibility: mobile Web browsing platforms will improve and facilitate access to off-deck content, and presentation of off-deck content will become more streamlined and user friendly.
Wider availability of content, driven in part by higher-generation network and device penetration: "As 3G, 3.5G and Qualcomm's MediaFLO network coverage increases, a greater range of services will become available to a wider audience, and off-deck content markets (both operator-billed and non-operator-billed) will develop," said Katrina Bond, co-author of the report. "Non-operator-billed revenue from MME content and services will increase significantly during 2007-2012, and will account for $1.3 billion, or nearly 20%, of MME revenue by 2012."
Improvements to service usability: providers have not focused enough on the end-user experience for MME services, and users' frustration when the experience does not meet their expectations has inhibited the growth of some services.
Simplified and more attractive pricing of MME content and applications, as well as mobile data access: complex pricing, high data charges, and unfavorable revenue-sharing arrangements for content providers have inhibited growth in the MME market.

Analysys Research forecasts that MME services will account for 12.3% of non-voice service revenue in the US by 2012. Mobile TV and VoD services will experience the highest growth rate of any MME service during the next five years. When combined, broadcast and unicast TV and video services will account for 36% of MME revenue by 2012. By contrast, revenue from personalization services will decline from 47% of total MME revenue in 2007 to 17% in 2012.

"Operators, content providers and device manufacturers will have to work together to increase subscriber awareness of MME offerings and to ensure straightforward pricing, and simpler purchase and delivery processes,"said Alexandra Rehak, co-author of the report. "It is also critical that the user experience of MME services be compelling and complementary to the subscriber's experience of entertainment across other media."

Via: Fierce Wireless.

Security Upgrade from Release 7

For those familiar with the 3G Security (Ciphering + Integrity) architecture will know this well that there is only one Integrity algorithm (UIA1) defined and it is mandatory. On the other hand there are two ciphering algorithms (UEA0 and UEA1) defined. UEA0 in reality means no Ciphering ;). UIA1 and UEA1 are both based on Kasumi algorithm. UEA1 is f8 and UIA1 is f9 algorithms of Kasumi. (Please feel free to correct my terminology if you think its wrong).

From Release 7 there are some additional provisions made for increasing the security.

First lets talk about GSM. Initially only a5_1 and a5_2 algorithms were defined for GSM. They have not been compromised till date and are still secure. Still some new algorithms have been defined to make sure there is a backup if they are ever compromised. a5_3, a5_5 and a5_8 have been defined for GSM/GPRS and GEA3 defined for EDGE.

For UMTS, UEA2 and UIA2 have been defined. They are based on 'Snow 3G' algorithm. Kasumi is a 'blockcipher' algorithm whereas Snow 3G is 'streamcipher'. The interesting thing as far as I understand is that even though this is defined and mandatory for UEs and N/w from Rel7, it wont be used but will only serve as backup. More on this topic can be learnt here.

More detailed information on UIA2 and UEA2 is available here.

There are some enhancements coming in the SIM as well. At present all the Keys are 128bits but there should be a provision that in future, 256 bits can be used.

There are some extensive overhauling of IMS security as well but I havent managed to get a good understanding of that yet.

All the reports from the 3rd ETSI Security Workshop held on Jan 15-16 2008 are available here.

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

More on LTE-Advanced

LTE-Advanced should be real broadband wireless networks that provide equal or greater peak data rates than those for wired networks, i.e., FTTH (Fiber To The Home), while maintaining equivalent QoS. Smooth introduction of LTE-Advanced should be possible on top of LTE system.

High-level requirements
•Reduced network cost (cost per bit)
•Better service provisioning
•Compatibility with 3GPP systems

Spectrum

WRC 07 identified the following new bands for use by IMT/IMT-Advanced:

450−470 MHz band,
698−862 MHz band,
790−862 MHz band,
2.3−2.4 GHz band, and
3.4−3.6 GHz band.

Not all of these bands are available on a worldwide basis. These bands are in addition to the bands currently specified in 3GPP. Specification for C-band should not be restricted to 3.4 – 3.6 GHz, but cover 3.4 to 3.8 and even 3.4 to 4.2 GHz as these will likely become available in some countries.

Channel Bandwidth

Channel bandwidths up to 100 MHz to be specified
However, for many operators consecutive allocation of 100 MHz unlikely
optimised performance needed for smaller bandwidths of e.g. 50 MHz low cost/complexity (i.e. not fully flexible) resource aggregation to be considered

Interworking with legacy 3GPP RAT

Full low complexity (for NW and terminal) interworking with 3GPP RAT, so operator de facto has flexibility on technology to deploy, when and where. The networks of most operators will be a combination of multiple 3GPP RAT for many years to come.
Network Sharing: Support for at least all currently specified Network Sharing features, also to facilitate cost-efficient roll out of LTE-Advanced, including, but not limited to, rural area coverage.

Working Methods

As LTE-Advanced should be an evolution of LTE, it is essential that it is specified as part of the 36-series of specifications.
It is also essential work is performed to a large degree by the experts that developed LTE, and thus work ideally should be performed in existing Working Groups.
LTE-Advanced will likely constitute the next significant development step for LTE, but (smaller) stand-alone enhancements and additions to LTE should be possible, and progressed in parallel.
Some of these smaller enhancements, as well as the “corrections” to LTE Release 8 could/should be captured in Rel.9, where SAE considerations will lead to relatively short Release completion time-frame.

More details on LTE-Advanced workshop in China here.

The workshop docs are available here.

LTE-Advanced = IMT-Advanced = 4G(or 5G?)

The 3GPP TSG RAN workshop on IMT-Advanced was held (in the week after the RAN WG meetings) on April 7-8, 2008 in Shenzhen, China hosted by ZTE Corporations. The main conclusions from the workshop are:

LTE Advanced shall be an evolution of LTE.
o LTE terminal shall be supported in LTE-advanced networks.
o An LTE-Advanced terminal can work in an LTE part of the network.
o Primary focus of LTE-Advanced is low mobility users.
All requirements/targets in TR25.913 apply to LTE-Advanced.LTE-Advanced requirements shall fulfill IMT-Advanced requirements within the ITU-R time plan
For LTE-Advanced:
o Same inter-RAT interworking capability with at least same performance as in LTE Release 8
o Intra-RAT handover performance shall be same or better than LTE Release 8
As a way forward for LTE-Advanced it was agreed:
o TSG RAN email reflector for LTE-Advanced will be established (the new reflector is called 3GPP_TSG_RAN_LTE_ADVANCED and it is available since 21.04.2008)
§ Email discussions on LTE-Advanced requirements will be started on this reflector (moderator: Takehiro Nakamura, NTT DoCoMo, LTE-Advanced SI rapporteur).
o A new TR will be created (after the workshop it was decided to create TR 36.913 "Requirements for LTE-Advanced") to include LTE-Advanced requirements and updated by RAN WG meetings in May 2008 referring to structure of 25.913 and outcome of the workshop.(note: Allocation of the TR number 36.xyz was done after the workshop.)
o Review of the outcome of this workshop and kick-off of discussions about LTE-Advanced requirements and technical solutions in RAN WG meetings in May 2008 in Kansas City.The goal is to complete LTE-Advanced requirements at RAN #40 in Prague end of May 2008 according to agreed work plan (i.e. TR 36.913 will be provided to RAN #40).

Sunday, 20 April 2008

Forum Oxford Conference 2008

A lot of leading mobile industry visionaries and enthusiasts met under the banner of "Forum Oxford Conference 2008". Lots of ideas were generated and discussed. I was fortunate to attend this event for the second year running. For those who may not know, I started this blog after attending this event last year. I was a bit surprised to see far less attendance then last year even though the fees were peanuts compared to many other conferences. Maybe people dont realise the value of these kinds of events.

Here is summary of some presentations which is in my own words and that of other bloggers and people who have posted on this topic. You may want to read more on these here.

The first topic was - "Pictures are better on Radio" by Mark Selby, Vice President, Industry Collaborations, Nokia

A survey of what people use their mobiles threw some interesting results:

Voice - 12%
Browsing - 8%
Games - 4%
Messaging - 37%

It is interesting to realise that mobile usage for voice is decreasing.

Mobiles can be used for 4 reasons:

Create
Consume
Interact
Connect

The BBC has 200 journalists trained to use high end 3G cameraphones as personal broadcast-trucks-in-the-pocket. Radio is a social media ie where PC users might use the internet as a chat board, radio listeners can send in their comments via SMS and DJ's can comment on them, recognize new listeners who have not commented yet, etc.

How many people control their own wife/partner?
We don’t think of it in that way because it is a relationship. In the same way, we as an industry cannot hope to ever ‘control’ a customer

Back in the 70s, Convergence was a set of three arrows pointing to a yellow cloud (IT, Media and Telecoms) and everyone expected to ‘solve’ the problem in a matter of months

DRM is an odd concept. If you threw a device into a window, can you blame the manufacturer for the damage to the window? If not, how can we hope to legislate against devices?

OVI is an open platform customers can choose which feeds they can display on OVI(for instance CNN etc etc) – not necessarily from Nokia. Abolish the word user generated content!!

By 2012, 25% of stuff will be created, edited, etc by Mobile devices.

You can get an idea of Mark's presentation by checking out this and this.

The next presentation was Jonathan MacDonald on Blyk:

The biggest problem Blyk users complain about, is that they want more of the ads.
They have already 100,000 users.
To learn more about Blyk see this and this.

The next was "Browser extensions (DOM extensions) and accesssing device API's" - David Pollington, Vodafone:

You can download this presentation with comments on Mobile Monday site here.

The next one was "How to Integrate Facebook with IMS" by Niklas Blum, Fraunhofer FOKUS:

This was a very interesting presentation and there were some strong statements made like CS will dissaper and SIP centered platforms will be everywhere. The market will become open services centred and the result will be convergence.

A similar presentation to this one is available here.

The next one was "iPhone Applications" by William Volk, MyNuMo:

Apple created a new ecosystem. That’s the key difference. So should others(hear hear!)

The main thing people like iPhone is because it has browser that works.

The developers like iPhone because it has this discovery mechanism by which new applications and games get detected. Advertised sponsered games generate 11% click thru. Bowling Game (non advertised) generated 2.95% click thru.

Next was "Youth and Mobile and Music and TV" by Luciana Pavan, MTV:

Comments from their youth survey included "mobile is the symbol of coolness" and "mobile is my best friend". They have two camera crews shooting MTV content such as Jackass, one group shooting for the TV screen, the second for mobile. Same content, two approaches to producing, optimized for each screen type. (Clever...).
Flux on MyMTV in Japan - best user-generated videos will end up on broadcast MTV Japan.
MTV MVNO in Belgium has 16% of the subscriber base.
And at MTV Germany the FunkySexyCool mobile dating service had similarities to Flirtomatic.

Next was "Delivering Global Mobile Service" by Cameron Doherthy, Mobile Concierge:
There was some interesting demonstration of how Blackberry can be used for lots of services like booking airline tickets and golf games.

Then Alan Moore on belaf of Xtract spoke on "Social Marketing Intelligence, the Black Gold of the 21st Century":

Lines are made by man! Nature has networksCustomers connect, corporations broadcast!

His main focus was operators who have become more like bitpipes whereas if they are clever they can use this data and exploit it for their own benefit. Their product can help them with a lot of this analysis. You can get a gist of his presentation here.

Then there was this debate between Tomi Ahonen and Dean Bubley about "Will the future of internet be shaped by mobile or is the PC still in control".

Even though the conclusion was that the PC is still in control, personally i feel mobile will be the one that will dominate. See my earlier post here.

Simon Cavill from Mi-Pay spoke on "Mobile Initiated Financial Services in the Developing world":

This was the mind-boggling presentation. Not that they can move money on mobile, and that it can be done cross-borders, but that international transfer of airtime is emerging as a monetary instrument. Not only "printing money" but as Simon said, they are now creating a whole new currency. Simon also pointed out that where mobile phones are aspirational in the West, they are much more so in the developing world. A phone is the most desired item in Africa. Airtime could be the euro of the developing world!

Then we had "Mobile Social Networking" by Antonio Vince Stabyl of itsMY:

Do we ‘Caralize’ airlines? I.e. develop a new format based on an earlier format?Doctors and other demographics who have never heard of online social networks, are directly adopting mobile social networks. 4 seconds after an earthquake – they had the first images. That’s the power of mobile!New mediums have new leaders

Finally Christian Lindholm of Fjord spoke on "Dawn of New Mobility. Thoughts on the future of Mobiles, Services and Their Adoption"

Key design principles ..
How much can you do with one hand?
What’s the largest device that can fit inside a pocket
A ‘PC’ is a swear word in Nokia!

You may also be interested in a related presentation here.

To subscribe to Forum Oxford click here.

Thursday, 17 April 2008

Tridgets and Trivergence

These terms (and ideas) have been pioneered by accenture:

"Trivergence" describes an emerging device architecture where the network is used to separate the physical device from its data and its controls.

But normal people don’t go around discussing architectures. For most people, a device is just a device – even if it depends on a global network, massive datacenters, and tons of software residing outside the device itself for its functionality.

For example, most reviews of Apple’s latest iPod focused on the touch screen, battery life, picture quality, and look and feel. But it is the "outside the box" elements that sync your music library, deliver Podcasts and movies, learn your preferences, and, in general, turn the iPhone into something far beyond an old fashioned "portable music player."

We need some way to communicate that these new devices are more than just devices. According to Webster, a "device" is "a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function." Triverged devices are not a "piece of equipment" – they are one piece of a complex system brought together by a network.

To get this idea across, we need to say it in a word rather than a sentence. And I have a suggestion for that word: "Tridget."

These terms came to my attention from an article in telecoms.com which contains Interview with Andy Zimmerman, head of Accenture Global Communications. Summary of important point from that as follows:

"They're trying to imitate the Apple model, not only with the UI but also the services behind it. Right now, I feel like there is a device renaissance going on, where the device vendors are the ones that are attracting the imagination and attention of the consumers and, frankly, the carriers are not really doing that."

##
Ultimately, Zimmerman believes that no one sector - be it the vendors, the internet players, the carriers - will truly be able to dominate the others. The inter-dependency is too great, he says. That said, he feels the device players have the upper hand because, "so much of the user experience around mobile tends to be hardware related."
If the carrier community has a job ahead of it, he says, it is to learn to be comfortable with its unique attributes and to learn to effectively exploit them. Operators have assets relating to the end user - like presence, identification, authorisation and credit information - that give them a richer customer relationship than other members of the value chain, says Zimmerman. "But they haven't been particularly proactive about bringing those to the table," he says.

"I have a feeling that the carriers don't appreciate what they could provide that could be enabling for a lot of different kinds of service providers. Maybe they should be thinking about getting a dollar from every ten dollar transaction, rather than getting the whole ten dollars..."

##
Zimmerman talks about 'Tridgets', a "combination of content, device and the software that is used to manage the service." A mobile phone is a tridget, as is an iPod. So to is a wifi-enabled pacemaker, implanted next to somebody's heart. "In 20 years there could be a trillion tridgets in the world to be managed, all of which will be network enabled, and almost all of them mobile," he says. "If you can get a dollar a year out of each one, in terms of some information or service around the network to enable it, that's $1tn, which is the size of the current telecommunications industry."

##
Despite this, he argues that there is a rough 50/50 split in the carrier community today, with one half ready to accept a redefined role, and the other convinced that it needs to play end-to-end to avoid being marginalised. "It depends on the individual personalities, and where their company is at the moment," he says. "There are a fair number of executives out there who say that they're never going to be in the [end-to-end] business, and that they should focus on the enabling business."

These are the players that are positioning themselves effectively and pragmatically, he suggests

##
"My sense is there's still some room for consolidation among around software and among second tier vendors. Cisco has done a tremendous job in terms of M&A but they have a particular focus on emerging tech and much smaller companies. It's interesting that they have chosen not to do a big merger, even when there have been assets out there which, when you look at the relative valuation, would have been easy for them to pick up."

##
At the Mobile World Congress, Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin made a plea for consolidation in the handset operating system space, arguing that there are too many options to allow for the creation of an ecosystem in which interoperability and universal application development thrive. Zimmerman is no more optimistic about the chances here:
"With smartphones, there's so much still to be determined in terms of who's going to dominate. So I can't see the leading players gravitating around particular standards to help world hunger, as it were, if they think there is still a chance of picking up market share with their own products. The dynamic right now is not quite right for that sort of thing."

You can also read his article in MWC here. A very interesting point from that:

But the Tridget opportunity is too large to be dominated by any one company. David Clark, one of the architects of the original Internet and now a professor at MIT, has predicted a trillion networked devices in 15 to 20 years. A trillion is a very large number and it implies that Dr. Clark expects almost all electric devices – maybe even down to light bulbs – will evolve into Tridgets.

You may also be interested in reading the following bloga from Accenture:

Monday, 14 April 2008

Qualcomm shows off MediaFLO Mobile TV

Qualcomm Incorporated, a leading developer and innovator of advanced wireless technologies and data solutions, today unveiled the first-ever MediaFLO™ technology demonstration broadcast over the air to an in-vehicle entertainment system. The innovative mobile TV demonstration shows the flexibility of the MediaFLO platform as well as the exciting and unique delivery methods it can enable in a wide variety of scenarios.

The in-vehicle demonstration features a sport-utility vehicle outfitted with two rear headrest television screens with VGA resolution. The MediaFLO receiver, integrated in the rear center console, will receive live streaming television broadcasts on the MediaFLO platform at QVGA resolution. The center console controllerallows users to launch the electronic channel guide, change channels and access optional features of the MediaFLO System.

The MediaFLO in-vehicle demonstration can be seen at the MediaFLO booth (Central Hall, #C2946) at the National Associated of Broadcasters (NAB) show, April 14 - 17 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

MediaFLO enables a rich mobile multimedia experience comprising high-quality video, audio, data and interactiveservices. Since the MediaFLO platform employs a dedicated mobile broadcast network, it does not require direct line-of-sight, unlike satellite-based TV transmissions, and video quality and signal strength won’t be compromised in crowded metropolitan areas. Furthermore, the platform has been designed for superior mobile reception and can operate efficiently under normal driving conditions on roads and freeways.

MediaFLO is a mobile broadcast platform for the delivery of high-quality entertainment and information, including streaming video and audio, Clipcasting™ media, IP datacasting and interactive services. FLO™ is an open, globally recognized air interface technology standardized by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and recommended by ITU-R for the broadcasting of multimedia and data applications. Invented for mobility, MediaFLO is designed to increase capacity and coverage, as well as reduce costs for multimedia content delivery to mobile devices. More information about MediaFLO is available at www.mediaflo.com.

See Also:

Qualcomm files $240 million loss on MediaFLO
Qualcomm announces Taiwan MediaFLO trial

Saturday, 12 April 2008

Quad Play Coming Soon

From the Complete Blog:

It seems like most people these days buy their cable TV, Internet and home phone service from one provider in one nice and neat package. Whether it’s to consolidate billing or to save a few bucks, bundling seems to be catching on.

The real growth opportunity, as most telcos see it, is in bundling cell phone service with existing services. Cell phone service clearly falls under the umbrella of telecommunications, and even though most telcos don’t operate a cellular network themselves, they have been open to creating partnerships with carriers in the past. Including cell phone service in telco bundles would turn the “Triple-Play” into the “Quad-Play” and give telcos a new level of product (and marketing) integration.

But will consumers really go for it?

According to a Compete survey conducted this month, they just might. 35% of survey respondents indicated that they would be either “likely” or “very likely” to purchase cell phone service from their telco provider. It also appears that these consumers can be influenced given the right product and marketing messages. Below is a chart of features that would affect consumers’ decision to purchase cell phone service from their telco provider.

If telcos can articulate the value proposition for bundling cell phone service in with other telco services, it looks like consumers will be accepting. So let’s invite another guest to the party and bring on the Quad-Play!

I would personally definitely not mind Quad Play as I am already having something similar to Triple play at home. The main factor for me would be the ability to forward phone from landline to mobile and free calls from home number to my mobile number and vice versa

You may also want to read an earlier blog of Quintuple Play.

GSM + HSPA = 3 Billion Subscriptions

3G Americas, a wireless industry group advocating for the GSM family of technologies in the Americas, today announces the technology milestone of 3 billion GSM and UMTS/HSPA subscriptions worldwide, based upon research and projections by Informa Telecoms and Media. Today, 88% of the world's 3.5 billion mobile wireless subscriptions are to the GSM family of technologies.

GSM mobile wireless technology continues to outperform most of the communications technologies ever invented. By comparison, there are only 850 million personal computers worldwide, forecast to reach 2 billion in the year 2015 (Forrester, June 2007). Three billion GSM/HSPA subscriptions is nearly triple the number of people accessing the Internet around the world, 1.1 billion. Fixed landline phones number just over this, at 1.3 billion globally. The closest technology in terms of number of electronic devices is the number of television sets. But even that number falls a full billion short of the 3 billion GSM/HSPA milestone, with an estimated 2 billion television sets in use today (Source: Communities Dominate Brands blog, Tomi Ahonen, January 2007).

Read complete press release here.

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Tuesday, 29 April 2008

3GPP Release 8 Features

Thursday, 24 April 2008

US MME Industry to cross $6 Billion by 2012

Security Upgrade from Release 7

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

More on LTE-Advanced

LTE-Advanced = IMT-Advanced = 4G(or 5G?)

Sunday, 20 April 2008

Forum Oxford Conference 2008

Thursday, 17 April 2008

Tridgets and Trivergence

Monday, 14 April 2008

Qualcomm shows off MediaFLO Mobile TV

Saturday, 12 April 2008

Quad Play Coming Soon

GSM + HSPA = 3 Billion Subscriptions

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