Is GPS really going to fall over?

The satellite navigation has become one of the staples of modern, hi-tech life. Using satellite navigation tools built into your car or mobile phone to find your way from A to B is one of the most basic things we are used to in our day to day activities.

But experts have warned that the system may be close to breakdown. A recent US congressional report says that the GPS system that could be on the verge of breakdown, thanks to a lack of proper investment.

The thought of the GPS not working itself is scary let alone it's a worrying possibility, not just for the Pentagon, which is having its ability to manage a complex service like GPS called into question, but for the companies that have built businesses on the solidity of the global positioning system.

As you might be aware that GPS data is made free to use by the US government, primarily with the concept of fostering the growth of the system and adoption by a wide range of companies - from the makers of in-car satellite navigation systems to high-end mobile phones, tagging the criminals and even child-locating wristwatches.

But what do they think about the possibility that GPS could fail?

The satellites are overseen by the US Air Force, which has maintained the GPS network since the early 1990s. The study by the US government accountability office (GAO) continbues to argue that mismanagement and a lack of investment in GPS technology means that some of the crucial GPS satellites could begin to fail as early as next year.

The impact on ordinary users could be significant, with millions of satnav users potential victims of bad directions or failed services. There would also be similar side effects on the military, which uses GPS for mapping, reconnaissance and for tracking hostile targets.

Among the companies that could be seriously affected is TomTom, the Dutch satnav maker that was founded in the early 1990s - around the same time as GPS went live.

The contents of the report from the government accountability office suggest that the reliability of GPS will begin to drop drastically, with at least five years of deterioration before things might get better.
However I still believe that GPS is, and remains, an excellent technology for all who use it. Although these report appears to be serious but I’m not overly concerned about this, and there is no reason to believe it will. I’m pity sure that the US government will pledge full support for GPS and will not allow it to falter.

I would be very much surprised if anyone in the US government was actually OK with letting it fail – it's too useful. Instead, the theory which is emerging now is that the worries generated over GPS are merely the push and pull of Washington politics and that the problem isn't really a serious one.The failings of GPS could also play into the hands of other countries – including opening the door to Galileo, the European-funded attempt to rival America's satellite navigation system, which is scheduled to start rolling out later next year.

Russia, India and China have developed their own satellite navigation technologies that are currently being expanded.

For the above reasons US government is taking it very seriously and it appears though are now considering to appoint organizations to monitor the development of GPS, which are good signs in terms of looking ahead to ensure GPS continues to deliver the great quality it has to so many people.

CS Services over EPS study in Release 9

One of the Release-9 items is "Study on Circuit Switched (CS) domain services over evolved Packet Switched (EPS) access" which is described in 3GPP TR 23.879.

Martin Sauter has already done some analysis on this topic so I would advice anyone interested to read it on his blog here.

Telenor Sweden's LTE Misinformation

It took a long time for the Network operators to educate people about what 3G (and HSDPA to some extent) is. As a result Telenor has taken the bold step in educating the users in advance about how LTE (or 4G?) will be beneficial to everyone. Look at their website photos below.

What they are showing is that with 3G (HSPA) the maximum download speed is 7.2Mbps but with LTE one can get 150Mbps, hurray! A CD that takes 3 mins on DSL will now be downloaded in just 1 min!

As most engineers would know very well that Peak rates quoted for a technology is far from the real speeds. For HSDPA, with the network supporting 3.6Mbps DL, I generally get between 300Kbps to 1Mbps (early morning). With LTE, maybe this will increase but I am not expecting to see more than 10Mbps. The average rates might be still lower.

Setting wrong expectations can lead to increase in sales in short term but will definitely be harmful in the long run. I wont be surprised if they get sued in future for mis-advertisement :)

Check the Telenor's website out here.

Thanks to Agilent guys who pointed this out at the LTE World Summit.

New York Art using iPhone App

Check the Video of how this was drawn:



Portuguese illustrator Jorge Colombo, has graced the June 1st cover of The New Yorker Magazine with art he produced entirely on his iPhone. The original finger painting Colombo created in about an hour standing outside Madame Tussuad's’s Wax Museum in Times Square, has helped the magazine make a quantum leap forward from it's first issue released on February 17, 1925. Colombo's work brings fresh cultural relevance to a tired relic desperately in need of reinventing itself.

Jorge uses the iPhone app Brushes to create works of art he calls iSketches, focused on the city of New York which he now sells online as limited edition prints. Though Colombo has worked for many years as a professional Illustrator, graphic designer and photographer, it's his ultra-modern iPhone paintings that have delivered him into a period of personal renaissance. Colombo's iPhone paintings carry a distinct impressionist style, passionately romanticizing New York City landscapes and architecture like a possessed lover.

Jorge uses the iPhone app Brushes to create works of art he calls iSketches, focused on the city of New York which he now sells online as limited edition prints. Though Colombo has worked for many years as a professional Illustrator, graphic designer and photographer, it's his ultra-modern iPhone paintings that have delivered him into a period of personal renaissance. Colombo's iPhone paintings carry a distinct impressionist style, passionately romanticizing New York City landscapes and architecture like a possessed lover.

"It was a natural thing to try a new tool, it's a continuation of what I've been doing for years," Colombo told the iPhone Savior in brief phone interview. "The first sketches I did on iPhone were done on the subway but they were not very good, because I had not mastered the technique. iPhone art works better with wider brush strokes. You shouldn't try to do detailed drawings."

I immediately realized that Jorge Colombo is an artist that distills great insight and passion for art though he takes a casual approach to the work he produces on iPhone. The powerful Brushes ($4.99) application he uses as his digital tool of choice allows for his finished iSketches to be exported as QuickTime movies, retracing every finger swipe stroke by detailed stroke. (watch above)

"When I'm doing those drawings I sometimes erase it and do it again until I get it right. The app makes it look like every single brushstroke hits the mark and that's not true." Colombo quickly admitted, as he detailed how the Brushes output only records the finished strokes that the artist chooses.

"It makes me really happy when somebody gets the app on their iPhone, especially when they're not artists. I like that people do art as a hobby," Colombo said, "I hope that this will influence more people to do art with their iPhone."

Once millions of people discover Jorges' iSketches from the cover of New Yorker Magazine, I would expect a flood of artists will find fresh expression through a new medium known as iPhone painting. Unleashing the start of the iPhonian era of modern art. So if you happen to see Jorge Colombo, planted on the corner of some New York City street, remember that he's not just texting friends at a frenzied pace, he's busy fingering another masterpiece.

There’s a companion application, Brushes Viewer, that makes a video recapitulating each step of how Colombo composed the picture. Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast—it gets rid of all the hesitations.”

You can see more iPhone Artists here. You can see some more of Jeorge's New York Photos here.

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