TD-SCDMA: Where are we

Interesting things are going on in the Chinese market.

A new mobile phone platform has been launched by China Mobile for it's TD-SCDMA 3G mobile phone network. In fact, it’s the first ever mobile phone operating system designed by a 3G mobile phone operator and is called Ophone. The OPhone is a linux-based terminal software platform for mobile internet.

In conjunction with the announcement for the Ophone, China Mobile announced a number of Ophone compatible handsets from Samsung, Lenovo, Phillips and Dell.

China Mobile stated that by introducing the Ophone operating system, significant savings will be made on TD-SCDMA handset design and development.

"Dopod CEO Dennis Chen said the Qilin handset is the first result of China Mobile's $7 million in subsidies to encourage TD-SCDMA handset development. Dopod has expanded investment in manpower and funding towards TD-SCDMA R&D and will release numerous high-end TD-SDCMA (sic) handsets next year."

The HTC Qilin has some pretty good genes: WM 6.5, 600MHz TI OMAP processor, 3.6" WVGA screen, GPS, 5MP camera, and CMMB Mobile TV and is apparently based on HTC's Whitestone design. The TD-SCDMA standard is China's home-grown 3G standard, which means that the Qilin won't have access to 3G networks outside of China. Having said that, HTC and China Mobile have just signed an MOU to partner up in R&D, market research, and product development, so the Qilin will be just the first in a series of handsets HTC will develop for China Mobile.

The Qilin is slated for release in December, which puts it just in time for runup to the Chinese New Year holidays.



China Mobile and LG have recently showcased the GW880, LG’s first smartphone to use the Android-based OMS (Open Mobile System) platform.

Featuring GSM and TD-SCDMA connectivity, the LG GW880 will be available via the largest Chinese mobile carrier later this year, for a price that was not announced.

The smartphone is a high-end one, as it comes with a 3.5 inch WVGA touchscreen display, 5MP camera with flash, Mobile TV, 512MB ROM and 256MB RAM.

We’re probably not going to see the LG GW880 outside China, but that’s OK, since LG is surely preparing some Android phones for other markets.

China Mobile saw its number of TD-SCDMA subscribers increase by 129,000 to 1.088 million in July. The first batch of handsets were released in May.

Nearly one half billion people subscribed to China Mobile cellular services last month, but the giant's efforts to promote a Chinese 3G standard have made little headway. The world's largest carrier grew to 498 million mobile subscribers last month, a number larger than the populations of the U.S. or the European Union. The number of subscribers using their mobile phones to play games, download music and surf the Internet also rose during the first half of the year, China Mobile said Thursday. But growth was slow for TD-SCDMA, a domestic 3G mobile standard that the government tapped China Mobile to market. Subscribers surpassed 1 million in July, continuing a slow climb upward from the launch of TD-SCDMA services in January.

China Mobile Communications Corp. aims to have as many as 80 million users of its homegrown third-generation mobile technology within two years of its initial rollout, Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong said. Speaking at a news briefing, Li acknowledged the domestic standard isn't as developed as its more mature international rivals, but said he is confident in its commercial development.

Youtube Clip on Dangers of driving while texting

The film tells the story of a fictional 17-year-old girl, Cassie Cowan (nickname COW), who is distracted by her mobile for a few seconds while driving with two friends.

COW – a "nice girl from a nice valleys family" – causes a devastating crash which kills her friends and another couple. The impact and its aftermath is portrayed in vivid, harrowing and bloody detail.

One girl's face hits the windscreen with sickening force. A child in the car COW crashes into asks: "When will mummy and daddy wake up?" while a baby strapped into a child seat stares unblinking and may be dead.

Actually, police had intended to commission a different film – on joyriding. But when they spoke to pupils at Tredegar comprehensive, the youngsters told them that texting while driving was a much more important issue for them.

With a budget of £10,000, film-maker Peter Watkins-Hughes was asked to write and direct the film. Local people donated props including the cars that are smashed up and the locations while Watkins-Hughes and his cast gave their time.

A 30-minute version of the film is due to be shown for the first time this autumn but Watkins-Hughes put a four-minute clip of it on YouTube (entitled COW test 001) to show it to a friend. For weeks the clip remained unnoticed by anyone but the friend and a few crew members.

Then suddenly it began to attract hits. It was copied on to other sites, attracted attention around the world and within a couple of weeks became one of the most popular viral videos. Today it was still ninth on one global viral video chart. Clips about Oasis and Jay-Z were at first and second place.

Watkins-Hughes said it felt like being in an Ealing comedy when a small Welsh community had suddenly attracted worldwide attention.

The "weirdest" moment for him was when his explanation, "We've gone for grim reality", was a quote of the day on the Time website.

Watkins-Hughes said he thought it was so powerful because the violence of the crash was shown but the film then "lingered" on the human price – the baby, the child asking about his mother and father. And the screams of COW, who survives the crash.

The film has struck such a chord in the US where the danger of texting while driving is a big issue because it is not illegal in all states. The trend in America has been to try to get the anti-texting message across more gently through humour or playing on the emotions but not showing violence.

However, one survey in the US found that 80% of people who had seen the Gwent film were less likely to text while driving than before.

In the UK, the road safety charity Brake, having been asked to watch the clip by the Guardian, praised the film-makers and said it was important to show the reality of road crashes.

Farmers worldwide being helped by Mobile Phones Technology

Airtel has entered into a strategic tie-up with IFFCO (Indian Farmers Fertilisers Cooperative) for providing agriculture and allied information to farmers through mobile phones. The facility was formally launched by the Chief Operating Officer (Andhra Pradesh) of Bharti Airtel Limited, Rajnish Kaul, at a function at Anakapalle town, about 40 km from here on Tuesday.

Addressing a media conference on the occasion, he said that the unique facility would benefit over 10 lakh IFFCO society members of rural Andhra Pradesh by giving them access to vital information. The farmer members would be given five free voice messages on farming techniques, weather forecasts, dairy farming, animal husbandry, fertilizer availability and rural health initiatives.

Mr. Kaul said the farmers could also call a dedicated free helpline to get answers from a qualified veterinarian to their specific queries regarding the health of their animals. He said that SIM cards would be provided at subsidised rates and lifetime activation would be done for a mere Rs.47. Calls between the members would be charged at 50 paise a minute. The SIMs would be compatible with any mobile handsets and farmers could buy the handsets of their choice depending on their purchasing power. He said the facility was launched about six months ago in various districts of the State and there were already 65,000 connections.

Question Box provides a service in India and Uganda. In India, phone boxes are installed in slums and villages that connect users to operators that will answer questions. In Uganda, users can call in from any mobile phone and ask their questions. The operators have access to a repository of previously asked questions (and their answers), and they can also occasionally consult the Internet. A special search engine and database were also built specifically for the project.

Another initiative, Avaaj Otalo, provides an audio community forum for farmers in rural Gujarat, India. Working with an organization that produced a popular radio program, Otalo provides a call-in number where farmers can exchange questions and answers. Users are also able to listen to archives of the radio program.

These projects differ in that Question Box avoids having to process users' questions by adding a human listener in the loop; Avaaj Otalo avoids processing by organizing their collection of audio prompts with into a menu. Both programs, however, have yet to deal with the problem of cost because they subsidize the service for users. Otalo operates with a toll-free number and Question Box provides the phones to call from in India. In Uganda, Grameen Community Knowledge Workers provides the mobile phones.

It's easy to see why the fishermen of the southern Indian state of Kerala captured the attention of a Harvard economist when they began using mobile phones a few years ago to track prices in the markets where they sold their catch of the day. Observing how these devices can be used to promote economic growth, Robert Jensen wrote in a 2007 paper titled, "The Visible Hand(set): Mobile Phones and Market Performance in South Indian Fisheries -- The Micro and Mackerel Economics of Information," that "before mobile phones, deciding which [market] would offer the best price was sheer guesswork." With mobile phones, however, suddenly it became an information-based decision. What's more, noted Jensen (who is currently at Brown University in Rhode Island), "it's not a zero-sum trade-off." The fishermen's customers benefitted from lower prices and greater choice, and there was less waste since the fishermen could easily identify the villages that would have the greatest demand for their fish each day.

Now Jensen's "visible handset" is reaching further into rural India. Following a nationwide launch this summer of Nokia Life Tools (NLT), India's farmers can use their mobile phones to access tailored information to help them grow, harvest and sell their crops and manage their livestock. "There is no reason why farmers should not be as successful as fishermen," says Ravi Bapna, associate professor of information systems at the Carlson School of Management in Minnesota and executive director of the Centre for Information Technology and the Networked Economy at Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB).

Consider Ravindra Shinde, a farmer in Magardhokada, a village in the Nagpur district of Maharashtra. When he recently harvested 125 quintal (a quintal is 100 kilograms) of soybeans and was about to take the crop to market, the price was $32 a quintal. But then he received a message on his handset that soybean production in the U.S. and Argentina had fallen, so he held back and later sold his crop for $48 a quintal.

IN the early 1990s, I was engaged in an empirical research work relating to the nexus between mobile phone and poverty in rural Bangladesh. However, friends used to tease me and raise their eyebrows on hearing about the project and my interest at that time. This was to be expected in the early 1990s when, not to speak of the poor, even the "solvent" could not afford to have a mobile set. It was treated as a "luxury" item, only to be monopolised by the moneyed people.

My research findings on village pay phones of the Grameen Bank at that time -- and as published in international journals in subsequent years -- clearly showed that mobile phones could help the poor escape "rural penalty" (a la H. Hudson), defined as poverty mainly due to distance, poor connectivity and asymmetric information. However, as of today, about 40 percent of the rural households in Bangladesh are reported to have access to mobile phones and roughly one-fourth of the users are poor. Rickshaw pullers, fishermen, traders all use it to minimise information asymmetry and quicken communication between two points.

About a decade later, I was invited to comment on two research papers showing the impacts of mobile phones on farmers and traders in Africa.

The first paper was by Megumi Muto and Takashi Yamano, both representing JICA and Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development (FASID). They drew upon panel data of rural Uganda where banana producers could reduce marketing costs and raise income with expansion of mobile phone coverage. The message is that the expansion of mobile networks increased market participation and sales of the perishable product, banana. More importantly, small producers and farmers in remote areas gained the most.

As information flow increases due to the expanded mobile phone coverage, the cost of crop marketing is expected to decrease, particularly in remote areas where potential marketing gains from the increased information flow is large. We indeed find that the network expansion has a larger impact in market participation in areas farther away from the district centers than in closer areas.

The second paper was presented by Jenny C. Aker of the University of California, Berkeley, on the impact of mobile phones on price dispersion of grains in Niger. Using a sequential searching model, the researcher observed that cell phones increased traders' reservation sales price and the number of markets over which they searched. This reduces price dispersion across markets. To be specific, grain price dispersion reduced by 6-7 percent and reduced intra-annual price variation by 10 percent.

What is important, and as revealed in both papers, is that every farmer need not possess a set. It could be the community, producers' organisations and others from where the price information could spread, either as a "public good" or as a "private good." A participant from the audience in that seminar informed us that in his village in Africa, a mobile phone is hung from the branch of a tree and interested persons could use it on payment of a fee. Second, even with access to mobile phones, full gains might not be reaped as farmers might need more information. The role of public authority and media in this respect is very important. Again, producers' organisations could form an information forum of their own to be more effective at bargaining than individual initiatives.

LTE Buzz from Alcatel Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent has produced a LTE Widget that provides real-time LTE news and information direct on your PC. Very useful if you want to keep a watch on breaking news and information. The widget can be downloaded from their website here.

Samsung claims First commercial LTE Modem development

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., announced that it has developed the first Long Term Evolution (LTE) modem that complies with the latest standards of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), which were released in March 2009. Utilizing Release 8 of the 3GPP, this LTE modem is a significant upgrade from the previous standard that was released in December 2008.

The modem, branded the Kalmia, supports download speed up to 100Mbps and upload speed of 50Mbps within the 20MHz frequency bandwidth. Users of a mobile device equipped with the LTE chipset can download a high-definition movie file (800MB) in one minute at speeds of 100Mbps, while simultaneously streaming four high-definition movies with no buffering.

Samsung also announced it has successfully developed a 3G baseband modem based on the Release 7 standard with an HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) Evolution platform.

This modem, branded the Broom, allows download speeds of up to 28Mbps and upload speeds of 11.5 Mbps. This makes the Release 7 more than twice as fast as the Release 6 HSPA Service, which had a maximum download speed of 14.4Mbps.

Separately, Samsung Electronics has also developed the mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) modem chip, a product that is already resonating in the mobile market. The company has already adopted the modem into commercial WiBro handsets in Korea. With this new modem, Samsung has delivered WiMAX and LTE model solutions, which are the two major wireless mobile communications systems for the next generation. The company has also demonstrated a full lineup of modems from 2G/3G to modems for the next generation of mobile telecommunication systems with its HSDPA Evolution modems.

Samsung is also strengthening its position as a leader in mobile telecommunication system standards. Samsung currently holds the most chairman seats within the IEEE 802.16 Working Group, a WiMAX standardization association, and also chairs the WiMAX Forum, an affiliate organization. Additionally, Samsung is highly influential in securing many leading positions in other organizations such as the Technology Working Group.

At 3GPP, an association that specifies standards for LTE, Samsung ranks in the top group according to its number of contributions and has four seats in the wireless networking standardization working group executive board. Samsung has also served as the chair for two years in the steering committee of LSTI (LTE/SAE Trial Initiative), an organization that works closely with LTE. The company is also actively participating in various programs for NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks), a business association of global and leading mobile operators.

LTE NAS and AS states and their relation

Continuing from where we left yesterday.


As you can see that there are three different states in an LTE system we are talking about.

The first is the RRC state that goes from RRC_IDLE to RRC_CONNECTED everytime the UE needs to be connected to the eNodeB.

Once the UE is RRC_CONNECTED, it can register with the Mobility Management Entity (MME), and the EPS Mobility Management (EMM) state moves from EMM-DEREGISTERED to EMM-REGISTERED

The EPS Connection Management (ECM) state (ECM-IDLE or ECM-CONNECTED) reflects the connectivity of the UE with the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). See the Interface diagram for details.

The NAS states, and their relationship to the AS RRC states can be seen in the diagram above

I have picked up some information from: LTE: The UMTS Long Term Evolution: From Theory to Practice

LTE Protocol Stack

Over the weekend, I was looking in the standards for an LTE Protocol stack and none of the diagrams seemed simple enough so I made one myself.
I also found a very detailed one on Nomor Research site.

I was also looking for some details on EMM (EPS Mobility Management) and ECM (EPS Connection Management) and found couple of (expected ;) blogs that had the required information. If interested have a look here and here.

Mobile Phone purchase, decision process...

Ajit has brought up an interesting topic in his blog and has cross referenced my presentation on "Killer Applications or Devices".

The post titled "Do single factors drives purchase of mobile devices? If so which ones?" is I would say quite important as sometimes it drives the decision process when someone is looking for a phone.

For the first time in my life I got myself a non-Nokia phone which is a Blackberry bold. My main motivation was, I can get my work emails in better format than on other phones. I am sure some of you can argue against this but when I was getting a new phone I had half an hour to make my decision and thats what I decided :)

Anyway, have a look at Ajit's post here.

Whitepaper: Voice over LTE via Generic Access (VoLGA)

Martin Sauter has published a whitepaper on VoLGA. I havent read it as of yet but I am sure it will be an interesting read for people who are interested in learning more about Voice options in LTE.

The whitepaper can be found here.

Feel free to post comments regarding the whitepaper on Martin's blog here.

Mobile Phones to replace Alarm Clocks

More than half of Brits are now using their mobile phones as alarm clocks, an alarming development for clock traditionalists.

They fear it could mean the end for dedicated alarm clocks, which have sat dutifully on our bedside tables for 150 years.

A survey of 1,500 people found that 52% had used their mobile as an alarm clock with 21% using it to get them up in the morning each day. Of course it also means you are likely to be woken up in the early hours when your do-it-all phone starts beeping because you've received an email about viagra.

A spokesperson for Rightmobilephone.co.uk - who commissioned the study - said: "The mobile phone now plays a larger more important role in our lives. "Handsets now provide us a wealth of information on the go, schedule our social occasions and as we found for many simply ensure we get out of bed each morning.



"The mobile phone is no longer for communication only, our independent handset reviews show signs of this with consumers often praising or berating the handsets camera or music quality, discounting its ability to make calls or text."