Category: Telecom

Writes News.com:

Cell phone heavyweight Qualcomm plans to put Wi-Fi capabilities into tens of millions of phone chips.

The wireless industry considers Wi-Fi a way to augment cell phone networks. Because Wi-Fi networks can also ferry voice calls, these networks could be used in the future to improve cell phone reception in buildings, where cellular coverage is traditionally poor.

Wi-Fi could also be used as a way for carriers, for now, to meet the hype of so-called 3G networks.

Downloading anything of any size to a cell phone or PDA (personal digital assistant) is a real task. That’s where Wi-Fi comes in. It could be used to do the “heavy lifting,” Cahners In-Stat analyst Allen Nogee said. For instance, a cell phone able to access a Wi-Fi network could use Wi-Fi to download a huge document to a personal computer, which has more computing power than a cell phone, for example.

“There is some very real potential to offloading some of the voice calls onto Wi-Fi,” said Keith Waryas, a wireless analyst with IDC.

Using the existing cellphone networks with WiFi for the last hundred metres can help create a truly high-speed and ubiqtuitous network infrastructure.

Writes Business Week:

Seth Heine started a company called CollectiveGood, which gathered used and discarded cell phones, either for sale abroad or for parts. Over the past 18 months, CollectiveGood has sold the majority of the 15,000 phones collected through his program to carriers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The margins on such sales are small. After spending from $1 to $2 on sorting, refurbishing, and shipping, CollectiveGood typically sells to foreign service providers for about $20 per unit, — making a $2-per-unit profit. The carriers then resell the phones to their customers for $25 to $30, Heine explains. That represents a 70% to 90% discount on the typical cost of a new cell phone.

The recycling concept is what I’ve been talking about in the Thin Client-Thick Server idea. Get used PCs from the developed world and resell them in the emerging markets to bring down the cost of the PC to USD 100.

Writes Wired:

The beauty of meshes? They’re bottom-up networks that capitalize on the rise of Wi-Fi and other open wireless technologies. They shimmer into existence on their own, forming ad hoc out of whatever’s in range – phones, PCs, laptops, tablet computers, PDAs. Each device donates a little processing muscle and some memory. Packets jump from one user to the next – finding the best path for the conditions at any given moment – and finally skip to a high-bandwidth base station, which taps into the Internet.

The result: big boosts to the range and speed of wireless signals. With the help of, say, 50 meshed PCs, PDAs, and phones, a typical Wi-Fi network with a 500-foot range can be transformed into one that extends 5 miles.

An interesting point was made in an email to Mohan Narendran sometime ago:

Now that India is loosening up on indoor 802.11b regs, you may want to blog about “used Wi-Fi cards” which I reckon are going to be quite plentiful next year when upgrades happen to 802.11a/g. It could be that your thin-clients are in a Wi-Fi mesh network with the access-point at the thick-server. You had blogged about the Economist article: Mesh Networks is releasing their all-software product MeshLAN on 1st September (I don’t have the pricing), while Jon Anderson at Locust is working out open-source mesh solutions, www.locustworld.com. Used card plus software could add USD30 to your thin-client (I have not seen cabling costs in your SME budgeting …)

We expect this to work well, and we are evaluating the headless Linux-based Toshiba SG20 as the “mobility server” for our internal deployments: The Toshiba SG20 may also work well you – a portable thick server!

Will also be writing about Mesh Networks in tomorrow’s Tech Talk.

David Isenberg is the architect of the Stupid Network theory, writes in his SMART Letter, that the telecom crisis was caused by three factors:
1) Overcapacity
2) Bad debt, directly driven by technological advances
3) A wholesale change of business models more profound than the shift from horse and buggy to the jet age

About the business model change, he says:

The telephone company business model used to be based on vertical integration. The network was a voice network. The wires were voice wires. The switches were voice switches. You can say the same for cable TV. The cable system was specialized for broadcasting video entertainment. These were special-purpose networks.

The Internet, in sharp contrast, is a general-purpose network. It will carry anything. The Internet does not care whether it is carrying voice or video or financial data or email or pictures.

The Internet pushes the decision “What to carry,” to its edges. It pushes the decision “How to use the network,” right into the lap of the end user. This is a direct consequence of the Internet’s architecture.

The Internet’s job is internetworking. That is, the Internet is a network of networks — the Internet Protocol is designed to span the various component networks and to ignore the network specific details. The Internet Protocol ignores even those network-specific details that add value to a given component network.

So if the owner of a component network that forms a piece of the Internet tries to add value to his or her particular network, that value may be useful for a network-specific application — such as telephony or TV — but it is irrelevant for Internet-level connectivity. The only place you can add value in an Internet world is at the edges.

This means that in an Internet world, a network owner has no special advantage in adding value to their network, say, over somebody who owns a few servers at the edge and buys connectivity.

This single fact makes the telephone-company business model obsolete. It also makes the Internet the huge success, the integral part of our lives that it is today.

Think about all the killer applications of the last decade — email, instant messaging, web browsing, streaming audio, ecommerce, Internet telephony — you don’t have to be a network owner to host these apps. Indeed not a single one was brought to market by a telephone company or a cable company.

The Internet became the success it is today — and the threat that it is to existing telcos — because it is a Stupid Network, an end-to-end network.

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A report in the Economist provides a very good post-mortem on what happened over the past few years. The title says it all – “Too many debts; too few calls”.

The last paragraph is interesting:

The lesson of the past few years is that the industry is notoriously bad at gauging demand for its services. The two most successful new telecommunications technologies of the past decade – Internet access on fixed networks, and text messaging on mobile networks – were both unexpected breakthroughs that emerged in spite of, rather than because of, the industry’s best efforts. So, once the smoke has cleared and the dust settled, expect the telecoms revival to come riding on the back of an unexpected technology that nobody in the industry has yet heard of.

My bet on the “unexpected technology” is 802.11 – wireless LANs using unlicenced spectrum. For emerging markets like India, they can help consumers and businesses leapfrog the last-mile connectivity problems cost-effectively.

NYTimes reports on the discussions between many leading US companies to set up a nationwide wireless network:

The Intel Corporation, I.B.M., ATT Wireless and several other wireless and Internet service providers including Verizon Communications and Cingular are exploring the creation of a company to deploy a network based on the increasingly popular 802.11 wireless data standard, known as WiFi, according to several people close to the talks.

The discussions, which are code-named Project Rainbow and have been going on for the last eight months, envision a nationwide service that would provide on-the-go professionals and other Web surfers a unified way to reach the Internet from a wide range of “hot spots” like airports and other public places. It is not intended to supply broadband connections to customers’ homes, an executive involved in the discussions said.

The rapid emergence of the 802.11 standard has been a remarkable phenomenon that has so far been unplanned and moved forward largely without the backing of major corporate service providers. About 7 million wireless cards were sold last year, a number the technology market research firm IDC expects to grow to 25 million by 2005.

802.11 is a disruptive technology, and if this happens, it can be a big blow to the cellular operators. Interestingly, such a move would further drop prices of 802.11 technologies making it cost-effective for leveraging in emerging markets like India as a primary high-speed data network.

Writes Red Herring:

John McKinley, chief technology officer at Merrill Lynch, told a New York audience in May that set-top box manufacturers are planning to build cable boxes that include transceivers based on 802.11, a high-speed wireless technology.

Currently, customers who have both cable TV and broadband cable modem services need a cable box, a cable modem, and multiple cable outlets within the home. Customers with DSL and cable have two distinct setups. But if a cable box included a wireless connection, a single cable line entering the home could deliver cable TV and broadband. The cable box–with its 802.11 connection–could simultaneously transmit video to other TVs and Internet traffic to one or more PCs within the home.

Combining broadband and cable service could enable the redistribution of cable content through PCs, a concept that distresses movie and television studios, which have launched a legal battle against SonicBlue, a manufacturer of digital video recorders whose newest device allows the distribution of recorded television over networks. In addition, with such a combination, a neighborhood with many 802.11-equipped cable boxes could become one large wireless network in which each house serves as a node. Theoretically, then, one could surf the Net and receive cable TV just by being within the confines of the network.

Notes Forbes: The survey of 51,000 respondents in the US found that of the prospective phone upgraders:

– 80 percent of wanted full address book applications in their next phone,
– 74 percent wanted voice recognition features
– 67 percent wanted short text messaging.
– 37 percent wanted personal digital assistant capabilities
– 30 percent wanted photo viewing and multimedia functions
– 29 percent were interested in music listening features
– 26 percent were interested in built-in camera capabilities

About 50% of Americans own cellphones.

WSJ on WiFi and the falling prices which is leading to increasing adoption:

A basic wireless network requires two devices, a base station (stores and retailers call it an “access point”) and a wireless card for a laptop or PC. In both cases, prices have been sliced by a third in the past 18 months. Base stations go for an average of $163, down from $245 in early 2001; wireless cards, which let laptops and desktops communicate with the base stations, have sunk to $74, down from $122, according to In-Stat/MDR, a research group in Scottsdale, Ariz. Consumers can find even better deals on the street. Gemma Paulo, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR, says she recently saw a wireless card on sale for $30 at a local electronics store. Aside from buying a base station and wireless card, the only additional expense is the monthly Internet connection, typically $40 to $50 for broadband access.

Nokia’s Next Act is a story on how the company is responding to the challenges: “The mobile industry is in the midst of an historic transition driven by financial crisis and fast-changing technology. Cell-phone ownership is approaching saturation levels in the developed world. The wireless Web was supposed to spur demand for pricey new computerlike handsets capable of handling everything from real-time stock quotes to videoconferencing. But the introduction of so-called third-generation wireless services is running behind schedule. What’s more, financially strapped carriers are rolling back the generous subsidies that made it possible for new customers to take home $200 phones for $10. No wonder handset manufacturers lost money overall last year and should show only a modest profit in 2002.”