Innovate now or loose market share

Is it wise to invest in this current economic climate was one of the most intriguing question that was flagged up very often in the past one year.

In a recently concluded Cambridge Wireless international event the above topic was discussed at length. Most of the speakers in the event recommended that now is the right time to invest but innovation is the key behind any success rather than investment alone.

There has never been an urgency like today to innovate in order to get out of the current recession and hence build the success for the future. A sensible investment backed with the right focus and indefatigable innovative ideas will no doubt lead us on the road to success and build the next generation wireless world.

Richard Traherne , Director of Cambridge Consultants’ Wireless Division advised delegates at Cambridge Wireless International Conference to innovate now, or lose market share. While speaking to an audience of international business leaders in the wireless communications industry at the Cambridge Wireless International Conference, Richard Traherne said the following:
“To survive in a market like this, it is not enough to stand still. It is critical to have the confidence to be innovative, by which we mean making business out of creativity.”

Key innovation now will certainly help businesses buck the trend in a recession and gain market share. Mr Traherne continued, “Key to this endeavour is to recognise that customers’ needs change in a downturn and so it’s critical to re-calibrate to ensure that they get what they now need, when they need it. There are plenty of examples of companies that grew out of past recessions: Virgin, Apple, Google, to name but three. We are dealing with companies that are being far bolder in the current recession than they would have been in the past, investing hard in technology despite making cuts elsewhere, to ensure that they grow market share and exit the downturn with competitive advantage.”

Most of the business delegates at the event shared the insights into innovative strategies, gained from nearly 50 years in the business of developing breakthrough technology-based products for clients in the medical technology, consumer, transport, cleantech and wireless industries.

To beat the current recession one of the obvious approaches suggested during the event was to reducing product cost but at the same time insisting on other more technologically innovative opportunities. It is very important that the idea regarding the product to enter the market is clear and well defined focus is a must together with the innovation and creativity. The picture below shows one such process as an example:

A company could, for example, seek to achieve premium price positioning by adding new functionality, or it could introduce a novel new service strategy to carve out market share. Another option is to develop an eco-system of partners in different markets to scale business and share risk.

What we are seeing a lot of today, and what is equally recommend even in a growth market, is the selective re-deployment of existing technology in new product applications. The mobile phone manufacturers are a shining example of this, and continue to be so.

The two day conference on 30 April and 1 May 2009, entitled ‘The Future of Wireless’, was conceived to provide a strategic vision of how mobile and wireless markets will develop over the next five years, looking at what technology is likely to deliver, balanced against customer expectations and real-world economic factors.

LTE Rollout Commitments as of May 2009

When we hear about LTE Rollouts, we think of Verizon wireless because it plans to rollout the network end of 2009. According to report by 3G Americas, there are 120 operators who have committed to LTE rollouts. You can check the complete list here.

Service Specific Access Control (SSAC) in 3GPP Release 9

In an emergency situation, like Earthquake or Tsunami, degradation of quality of service may be experienced. Degradation in service availability and performance can be accepted in such situations, but mechanisms are desirable to minimize such degradation and maximize the efficiency of the remaining resources.

When Domain Specific Access Control (DSAC) mechanism was introduced for UMTS, the original motivation was to enable PS service continuation during congestion in CS Nodes in the case of major disaster like an Earthquake or a Tsunami.

In fact, the use case of DSAC in real UMTS deployment situation has been to apply access control separately on different types of services, such as voice and other packet-switched services.

For example, people’s psychological behaviour is to make a voice call in emergency situations and it is not likely to change. Hence, a mechanism will be needed to separately restrict voice calls and other services.

As EPS is a PS-Domain only system, DSAC access control does not apply.

The SSAC Technical Report (see Reference) identifies specific features useful when the network is subjected to decreased capacity and functionality. Considering the characteristics of voice and non-voice calls in EPS, requirements of the SSAC could be to restrict the voice calls and non-voice calls separately.

For a normal paid service there are QoS requirements. The provider can choose to shut down the service if the requirements cannot be met. In an emergency situation the most important thing is to keep communication channels uninterrupted, therefore the provider should preferably allow for a best effort (degradation of) service in preference to shutting the service down. During an emergency situation there should be a possibility for the service provider also to grant services, give extended credit to subscribers with accounts running empty. Under some circumstances (e.g. the terrorist attack in London on the 7 of July in 2005), overload access control may be invoked giving access only to authorities or a predefined set of users. It is up to national authorities to define and implement such schemes.

Reference: 3GPP TR 22.986 - Study on Service Specific Access Control

Public Warning System (PWS) in Release-9

Public Warning System (PWS) is generalization of Earthquake and Tsunami Warning System (ETWS). The requirements for PWS has been defined in 3GPP Release 9 in 3GPP TS 22.268. 3GPP TR 22.968 details the Study for requirements for a Public Warning System (PWS) service.

The following list gives the high level general requirements for Warning Notification delivery:

- PWS shall be able to broadcast Warning Notifications to multiple users simultaneously with no acknowledgement required.
- Warning Notifications shall be broadcast to a Notification Area which is based on the geographical information as specified by the Warning Notification Provider.
- PWS capable UEs (PWS-UE) in idle mode shall be capable of receiving broadcasted Warning Notifications.
- PWS shall only be required to broadcast Warning Notifications in languages as prescribed by regulatory requirements.
- Warning Notifications are processed by PWS on a first in, first out basis, subject to regulatory requirements.
- Reception and presentation of Warning Notifications to the user shall not pre-empt an active voice or data session.
- Warning Notifications shall be limited to those emergencies where life or property is at imminent risk, and some responsive action should be taken.



Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) is Public Warning System (PWS) that delivers Warning Notifications provided by Warning Notification Providers to CMAS capable PWS-UEs. CMAS defines three different classes of Warning Notifications (Presidential, Imminent Threat and Child Abduction Emergency). The CMAS functionality does not require modifications to the 3GPP-defined cell broadcast functionality.

3GPP Release-9 Features updated

From a presentation by Stephen Hayes in LTE World Summit:

•Services Alignment and Migration
•Registration in Densely-populated area (RED)
•End-User Identity
•Customized Ringing Signal
•Public Warning System
•Enhancements to Multimedia Priority Service
•Support of Personal Area Networks and Enhancements to Personal Network Management
•Multi-Media Telephony Service enhancements
•User Data Convergence
•Enhanced Home NodeB/ eNodeB
•Protection against Unsolicited Communication for IMS (PUCI)
•IMS Services Centralization and Continuity
•Enhancements of IMS Customized Alerting Tone (CAT) Service
•Service Specific Access Control in EPS
•Support for IMS Emergency Calls over GPRS and EPS
•LCS for LTE and EPS
•MBMS support in EPS
•Access Network Discovery and Selection Enhancements
•GTP-based S8 chaining
•Multiple PDN to the Same APN for PMIP-based Interfaces (Stage 2)
•Multi Access PDN Connectivity (Stage 2)
•Access Security Enhancements
•GBA Push enhancements
•IMS Media Plane Security (Stage 2)
•Timed Graphics•Managing MTSI Media Adaptation
•PSS and MBMS extensions
•Improved Video Support for PSS and MBMS
•IMS based PSS and MBMS User Service extensions
•Various OAM&P Improvements
•Value-Added Services for Short Message Service
•Definition of 3GPP UICC services over the new high-speed interface
•CS-IBCF and CS-TrGWdefinition in 3GPP specifications
•IMS –Interconnection Border Control Function (IBCF) –Transition Gateway (TrGW); Ix Interface; Stage 3
•IMS Application Level Gateway Control Function (ALGCF) –IMS Access Media Gateway (IMA-MGW); IqInterface; Stage 2 and Stage 3
•Rel-9 Improvements of the Radio Interface
•Rel-9 RAN improvements
•LTE improvements
•Self-Organizing Networks (SON)
•Voice services over Adaptive Multi-user channels on One Slot
•Local Call Local Switch
•Study on enhanced voice service requirements for the EPS
•Study on advanced requirements for IP interconnect
•Study on Service Specific Access Control in EPS
•Study on Unauthenticated PS Emergency Calls
•Study on Personal Broadcast Service
•Study on LCS support in SAE for non-3GPP accesses
•Study on CS Domain Services over EPS access
•Study on Extended Support of IMS Emergency Calls
•Study on System enhancements for the use of IMS services in local breakout and optimal routing of media
•Study on Intra Domain Connection of RAN Nodes to Multiple CN Nodes
•Study on IMS Evolution
•Study on enhancements to IMS border functions for IMS Interconnection of services
•Study on Multi Access PDN connectivity and IP flow Mobility
•Study on Service Continuity for Emergency Voice Calls
•Study on Protection against SMS and MMS spam
•Study on Remote management of USIM application on M2M Equipment
•Study on UTRAN key management enhancements
•Study on Surround Sound codec extension for PSS and MBMS
•Study on System Maintenance over Itf-N
•Study on Self-Organizing Networks (SON) related OAM interfaces for Home NodeB
•Study on Self-healing of Self-Organizing Networks (SON)
•Study on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for IRP
•Study on RcReference Point Functionalities and Message Flows
•Study on Telecommunication Management; Energy Savings Management(ESM)
•Study on Evaluation of the inclusion of Path Loss Based Technology in the UTRAN
•Study on LTE-Advanced
•Study on 1.28 McpsTDD Home NodeB
•Study on E-UTRAN Mobility Evaluation and Enhancement
•Study on Measurement of Radiated Performance for MIMO and multi-antenna reception for HSPA and LTE terminals
•Study on Minimization of drive-tests in Next Generation Networks
•Study on Enhanced Interference Management for HNBs

eCall to save lives

Qualcomm is offering its endorsement for the Third Generation Partnership Project’s (3GPP’s) recent approval of the eCall in-band modem specification, which supports the European Union’s eCall road safety initiative.

The 3GPP standardization group has approved the final specs of the eCall in-band modem standard. The specification work was undertaken by 3GPP at the request of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the European Commission, which sought a standardized technical solution to support the deployment of eCall across Europe. With the completion of this work, ETSI has adopted the 3GPP specifications and will publish them as ETSI standards.

The eCall public road safety initiative is designed to provide rapid assistance to motorists involved in a collision anywhere in the European Union by automatically generating an emergency voice call via the cellular network to local emergency agencies, as well as sending information such as position location. ECall, which is scheduled for introduction and operation across Europe in late 2010, is expected to help save lives by improving notification of road accidents and speeding up emergency service response.

The eCall Memorandum of Understanding (eCall MoU) got the backing of Estonia. The country thereby commits itself to the timely implementation of eCall, the pan-European emergency call system. eCall enables a car involved in a serious crash to automatically dial 112 and call the nearest emergency centre. In the call, it notifies the accident and transmits its exact location. Jüri Pihl, Estonian Minister of the Interior, signed the eCall MoU in the presence of Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for the Information Society and Media. Estonia is the 15th EU Member State to sign the MoU.

The pan-European in-vehicle emergency call system, "eCall", is a device in the car that uses 112, the single European emergency number, to automatically call the nearest emergency centre in the event of a serious traffic accident. In the call the exact location of the accident scene is transmitted to the centre, even is there is no voice connection, because, for example, all passengers have lost consciousness. Knowledge of the exact location of the crash reduces response time of the rescue teams by 40 % in built-up areas and 50 % in rural environments. 2.500 lives could be saved in the European Union annually, and 15 % of serious injuries mitigated, if all European cars were equipped with eCall. Other EU Member States that have signed the MoU so far are: Austria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Spain and The Netherlands. Non-EU States Iceland, Norway and Switzerland belong to the signatories as well.

Watch this Video to understand all about eCall



eCall, Initially designed to fulfil European requirements, the eCall feature will:

• Enable the automated delivery of 140 bytes of information in astandardised format to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP)
• Complete that delivery with 4 seconds
• Provide accurate location information

The introduction of this feature will dramatically reduce the time taken for emergency assistance to arrive at the scene of an accident and hence help to save lives

For more information see:
3GPP TR 22.967
3GPP TS 22.105
3GPP TS 24.008
http://www.ertico.com/
Reference: Adrian Scrase Presentation in LTE World Summit

Amazing iPhone Apps

In the year 2008 the Smartphones took the consumers to different levels and iPhone has been a revelation which was embraced by the masses. What is most striking in the success of the iPhone is the applications which are available on it.

Below are the top 10 iPhone applications.

1 Pandora Internet Radio

This application is available free with the iPhone and is all-time best for music lovers. You pick a song, album or artist and Pandora immediately builds a whole "radio station" around it, endlessly streaming complete tunes from top artists. You can even tweak your station by giving songs a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Music quality is amazingly good for audio and as far as I know the audio streams for free over AT&T's data network. The music library is solid for genres ranging from rock to pop to jazz to classical. It really needs some Indian Bollywood music, though.

2. AroundMe

Simplicity makes this app a must-carry for the road warrior. Like the name applies, it lists all the critical services around you i.e. banks, coffee shops, bars, gas stations, hospitals, movie theatres, restaurants and so on. Using geo-location, the app orders each service by its proximity to you by giving further details like how many yards away the bar is(I would be mostly interested in that). This apps is very much aimed at the traveller and like any other apps it maps out a route from here to there, if requested. It also creates a contact page for every entry, which you can save to your own contacts list.

3. Mobile News Network

The Associated Press's news-on-demand app is the gold standard. It gives you top news stories, as well as business, sports, show biz and other categories, which you can sort by most recent or most read. It even uses the phone's GPS chip to deliver up local news. Stories and photos load fast, look great and can be read offline. You can email or text the story to a contact, or save it in your own news archive.

4. Ocarina

Some genius figured out how to use the microphone on the iPhone as an air-flow sensor, as a result now we've got a virtual ocarina, albeit not potato-shaped. Hold the phone up to your lips and blow; four "holes" appear on your touch screen allowing you to play almost any scale (which you select under Settings). Share your tunes with other Ocarina players around the world, or just set the app to listen to their masterworks. The Ocarina app costs $0.99 in US from the AT&T network.

5. Wikipanion

O.K., so it's not always accurate. But if you need to understand the gist of something, there's no better reference tool at your fingertips than Wikipedia. While there are many Wikipedia apps for the iPhone, this one is the best of the bunch. It automatically searches while you type, which is cool as well as time-saving, and its rendering of the Wikipedia page on the touchscreen is as perfect as you'll find. By upgrading to the pay version, Wikipanion Plus, users can save articles and do offline browsing.

6. Adrenaline Pool Lite

Virtual pool has been around since the advent of computers. It wouldn't be surprising to hear that it was first played on the UNIVAC 1. And like everything else with a chip for a brain, e-billiards continues relentlessly to improve — this app being a case in point. Fire up Adrenaline Pool, log into a server, and you can play anything from eight-ball to snooker, against other anonymous iPhone pool sharks. The physics are so good; you'll want to take up smoking again.

7. Instapaper

Sign up at Instapaper.com for a free account then drag the "Read Later" tag to your browser's toolbar. Now, whenever you're sitting at your computer and stumble upon an article or blog post on the Web that you'd like read later, hit that button. Instapaper's app instantly stores it on your iPhone in a format that's especially readable.

8. NetNewsWire

There's no better way to keep up with your daily perambulations on the Net than via an RSS reader, which basically pushes content from any website or blog to your computer in a format that resembles email. NetNewsWire is one of the best free programs for computers, allowing you to easily subscribe to any feed and synchronizing what you've read across any computers you use. This app adds your iPhone to the party, allowing you to read perfectly formatted text on demand, as well as offline.

9. iTalk

A reporter's best friend, but also indispensable for anyone who wants to dictate memos or record other audible stuff on their phone. The app is little more than a big, red RECORD button on your iPhone screen; push it to capture audio in the high-quality AIFF format. What makes iTalk especially cool is the free, companion iTalkSynch app, which you download to your computer. That program can "sniff" the audio files on your iPhone and download them to your Mac or PC, via Wi-Fi. Now all we need is an app to do perfect voice-to-text translations

10. FakeCall

Because everyone needs a decent, iPhone party trick. Set up a fake contact and that person calls you, on demand. Great for getting out of dull business meetings, or impressing friends when Steve Jobs calls to ask if you really, truly think cut-and-paste would be a good thing to have on the iPhone.

Together with the above Apps there are so many programmers around the world who are busy in writing or developing some more interesting Apps on the apple i-phone Apps store. One of the most interesting I came across recently was a British-made iPhone program that allows the user to read the Kama Sutra.

Eucalyptus, a book reading application developed by Edinburgh programmer James Montgomerie, allows users to download and read thousands of classic titles from the library of Project Gutenberg, the respected website that hosts out of copyright books.But after repeated attempts to get Eucalyptus onto the iPhone's popular App Store, Montgomerie was told that his application was being rejected because one of Gutenberg's books happens to be Sir Richard Burton's 1883 translation of the famous guide to sex.

The link below from Guardian UK tells you more about the above story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/21/apple-iphone

LTE World Summit: Day 3 roundup

I started the third day with my Breakfast briefing. You can see the details here. The third and final day was the deployment day so there were lots of operators speaking.

Pierrre Lescuyer from SFR, France talked about the Spectrum challenges for LTE. SFR is by the way, second largest operator in France with nearly 20 million customers. The key factors for success of LTE would be to have 2.6GHz and UHF band to be bundled together. Also the backhaul has to be improved. The Digital Dividend band in France will be available end 2011 and there is going to be protection of broadcasting below 790MHz. The French goverment has announced the auction of remaining 2.1GHz band and started consultation in 2.6GHz band. In the 900MHz band, there is not enough spectrum for everyone to co-exist. The 2.6GHz band is good for hotspots giving 2x20MHz bands and LTE could also be deployed in the 1800 band with 2x10MHz bands. LTE 800 is another alternative but the existing antennas will have to be replaced.

Franz Seiser from T-Mobile Germany, VoLGA (Voice over LTE Generic Access). The main reason for VoLGA is because the current solutions for voice do not meet all LTE requirements. CS fallback is not good enough because of the time it takes for establishing the call and has lots more impact then originally envisaged. Also the MSC would have to be upgraded to Rel-4 for this feature to work. IMS solution is again not good enough because of high complexity; availibility and stability not feasible in time for rollout. Also what happens in case like Femtocell where CS fallback is required and no 2G/3G network is available? To overcome this VoLGA was proposed. Its the best compromise and elegant approach to solve Voice and SMS problems in LTE early.

Prof. Patrick Marsch, Technical Project Leader EASY-C, Vodafone Chair Mobile Communications, Germany spoke about the Easy-C project. Apparently, Easy-C has already been doing the things identified by the LTE-Advanced comittee. Their requirements were mentioned in slightly different terms then the standards one. For example, "Click and Bang", "Click and Wow", etc. The main aim being Inexpensive throughput, anytime, anywhere. I will look into the details later.

Thierry Maupile, VP, Starent Networks spoke about the readiness of the Core for high amounts of data traffic predicted. The main growth for mobile broadband will come by having higher bandwidth true multimedia devices, friendly devices and easy access to applications, payments, etc. By 2014, more than 4 petabyte data will be flowing through some operators. This can cause major challenges in the multimedia core as there will be a massive increase in the signalling. To overcome these challenges, simplified All-IP architecture will be required. Voice grade reliability is another important factor and so is security. Starent claims to be a leader with support for multiple technologies in the same platform. It concentrates only on the PS core and has 95+ operator deployments in 40+ countries. Its core is used by 8 of top 10 3G operators and its #1 in UMTS PS cores.

Rodrigo Cárdenas, Deputy Director of Technological Evolution, Entel PCS, Chile spoke about Deploying Next Generation Technologies such as LTE in Latin America. Chile, surprisingly ranks #9 in the number of facebook users. Since the landlines connectivity is quite limited in Latin America, mobile has good chances of growth if the pricing is correct. With some clever pricing, the mobile broadbank uptake has grown 249% recently. Even high quality mobile TV encoded at 240kbps is being delivered. In Chile, HSPA is good enough for the time being with migration to HSPA+ in near future. LTE will be useful for Corporate broadband or for HDTV on mobile. It can also be used as main broadband connection at home and can complement satellite. 2.6GHz is the main band for South America with other possibilities being 1700/2100MHz or even 700MHz.

Rick Keith, Director of Global Strategy, Motorola spoke about LTE for the Operator in an Emerging Market. There were lots of facts and stats to mention right now but the main point being that LTE can address digital divide in rural areas (developed as well as developing countries) and an early launch of LTE will open possibilities for new revenue.

Javier Sanchez, from Zain, Kuwait soke on similar topic of LTE for the Operator in an Emerging Market. Zain is present in 24 markets. It has got 62 million customers. Recently they have started the "One Network" which allows users from any of their countries to roam to other country and use the phone as local. That means the price of international calls is still local and they can even top-up using vouchers locally. '3' in UK have done something similar even though its not exactly the same. One of the thing Zain has done is that rather than subsidising devices, they have subsidised bundles. The main criteria for success according to them is to make mobile broadband more affordable for everyone. This means to create possibility of low entry price

Please note that all the details I mentioned are from my notes or memory. I havent dived into the presentations yet. When I do, I will mention things in more detail and may correct myself. In the meantime if you spot something wrong please feel free to comment.

Killer Applications or Devices

Here is my breakfast briefing presentation.

Killer Applications Or Devices

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As expected, we had a very lively and interesting discussion. It is not easy for me to remember and detail the discussions but the presentation will give some idea regarding the things we discussed. I also referred to a presentation about Japanese market which is embedded below.

Mobile Services in Japan

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Please feel free to comment, criticise, suggest, etc.

LTE Femtocells: Stepping stone for 'killer apps' presentation

This is my presentation from last year. I added this because some people asked me for this. Please feel free to comment.

Lte Femtocells: Stepping stone for killer applications

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