SMS costs in Canada are already disproportionately high versus the unrealistically high costs for SMS across the entire wireless industry. This article suggests that SMS costs are, in the aggregate, 4x higher than getting data from the Hubble space telescope. Global SMS revenues are larger than the Hollywood movie, music and video game industries combined.

The quote from the Telus spokesperson is hilarious:

“The growth in text messages has been nothing short of phenomenal,” wrote Telus spokeswoman Anne-Julie Gratton in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail, “This volume places tremendous demands on our network and we can’t afford to provide this service for free any more.”

The same article refers to the latest statistics from the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association that pegs the number of text messages sent in Canada at more than 45.3 million per day. According to recent reports from IEMR the number of wireless subscribers in Canada was 20.4 million in 2007, and wireless subscribers in the UK (which has roughly double the population of Canada) for the same year numbered 71.7 million. Sweden, with a third of the population of Canada’s has better than half as many subscribers. Canada is trending remarkably behind nearly every comparable western nation.

These stats are great, in that they illustrate the problem with subscriber growth that shareholders and analysts are presently appreciating. There’s clearly something wrong with the wireless business in Canada, and it’s not something that the recent spectrum auctions are likely to quickly address.

Allow me to translate Ms. Gratton’s TelecomSpeak in a way that more accurately reflects what went down in the boardroom:

“The growth in text messages has been nothing short of phenomenal,” said Telus’ Business Development Manager, “This is an unprecedented opportunity to exact greater revenue from the customer base without spending a penny on service development!”

The Canadian wireless market has been infantilised by the greed and short-sightedness of our wireless carriers and the mismanagement of our asleep-at-the-wheel regulators. Whereas (according to Wikipedia) the average user in the Philippines sends 10-12 text messages a day, doing some quick math from the stats above reveals that the average Canadian use of text messaging is far lower at 2-3 messages per day.

Still, this 45.3 million SMS messages per month business must be creating a stress on the Telus service network, you’d think. Right?

Well, if you send 45.3 million SMS messages all at the maximum size of 140 characters, you’ll get almost 6 Gigabytes in total storage volume – or, roughly the size of the hard drive I had on my IBM Thinkpad in 1999. That’s a lot of data to store (in 1972, that is). At the end of the day, this means that the entire Canadian SMS relay network has to be able to sustain about 144Kb/s of data transfer (thanks to Gersham for helping me with the math). My Mac Mini has a 1GB/s ethernet interface and is ultimately connected to a (for Canada anyway) smokin’ 30MB/s internet pipe this means that I could personally store-and-forward all of Canada’s SMS traffic myself via my Novus broadband in Yaletown, and it would have limited impact on my BitTorrenting.

SMS uses the signaling overlay path of wireless carrier networks, and from the wireless perspective SMS messages ride in the carrier byte packet. As such it costs the network exactly nothing and uses no bandwidth that isn’t already in use — traffic load is the same on the network even if no SMS messages are being transferred. The networks themselves need to invest in this infrastructure anyway, so there is perhaps an added provisioning and data processing impact created by SMS for wireless carrier network planners, but it is not substantial.

For TELUS to suggest that this traffic is in any way meaningfully impactful to their operating costs suggests that either they’re lying, or perhaps they should go back to operating mechanical switches.

This is a cash grab. Pure and simple. But then, you knew that…

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. Still, many companies attempt to eke out a living by raising capital and earning free cash flow on the basis of moving the needle down a couple of stairs in the telecom industry’s giant race to the bottom. Frankly speaking, as consumers, we need these guys … they create the price pressure that leads to market pressure that forces the cabal to lower their prices. Without them we’d all still be paying $1/minute to call one or two counties over. But rarely (and I suspect Bernie Ebbers would verify this) do they ever make any real money over the long-term.

Because of my history as one of Cisco’s early Packet Telephony product managers, and having architected and helped to launch a few different services including BuzMe and RingCentral, I see a lot of VoIP deals. I’ve taken to referring to many of them as “stupid phone tricks” (in a nod to Letterman) which are clearly designed to take advantage of some gap in arbitrage within the telecom industry.

Unfortunately, this has been the model of telecom “innovation” for many, many years. The first Cowboys in the telecom game were of course the CallBack kids. They allowed you to make calls from Brazil to the USA, for example, paying the long-distance rate for calling from the USA to Brazil instead of the other way around by “ringing both ends” of the call after you first dialed their local or toll-free number to instantiate the call. This significant inconvenience was trumped by the massive savings incurred for folks living in Brazil calling to their USA-resident relatives.

With long-distance deregulation came the rise of prepaid calling card services, which did something similar. Again you traded the convenience of just simply dialing the person you wanted to call for having to call a pilot number, entering a complex string of unmemorable digits, and THEN entering the number you wanted to call in order to save a little dough. The services made money, though, because you and I would usually lose our cards or forget our numbers before we fully expended the value in the cards. This model is called “breakage”. To my utter disappointment this represented the larger part of the market I was dealing with while at Cisco.

More than 8 years ago I recall being asked by my boss, Alistair Woodman, to write an opportunity evaluation of the recently-ratified SIP protocol. My response, over the course of weeks of researching and talking to everyone involved, was a breathless vision espousing nothing short of a complete re-think of the entire Telecom industry. SIP has some epic flaws and paradoxes, like its assumption that we’d all be on IPv6 by 2001, and its paradoxical empowerment of edge devices while making no accommodations for firewall/NAT traversal or P2P.

But it was a pretty good stab at unhanding control of telecom from the cabal and placing it in the hands of scrappy innovators. And as the VON shows once attested, there are some pretty feisty and intelligent people lurking within the telecom business. For a time I hoped to have been one of the more noteworthy ones.

With the benefit of hindsight we now know that SIP just hasn’t panned out (certainly not in the way I had hoped it would). It’s become just another signaling protocol in the transport of fairly uninteresting voice calls within the existing structure of telecom. Let me repeat that in another way: The incumbents took a protocol which was conceived and designed to blow them out of the water, and used it to cost-optimize their networks. As a protocol, SIP is incredibly successful in having propagated in Telecom in the less than 7 years it’s been deployable, but I suspect its effects on the industry would today leave its creators a bit cold.

My breathless assertions that thanks to SIP the web geeks would take over Telecom — first derived in 1997 and held by me until at least 2002 — have never even come close to fruition. SIP, because it unbundles signaling from the calling path and especially because it allows for rich metadata to travel through the network with SIP messages, is rife with potential for adding value — but no one, not even Skype (which uses a protocol clearly inspired by SIP but which fixes a lot of its problems) has deployed it in a way that takes complete advantage of this to stimulate innovation.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Cubic Telecom. There’s a small amount of real innovation there, but it largely falls into my “Stupid Phone Tricks” category. It might or might not save you a lot of money making and receiving long-distance calls while you roam on your mobile phone, but does nothing to abate the greater crime that is mobile roaming charges. After I wrote about Cubic, David Pogue of the NY Times was attracted into their orbit, but got burned when others realized Cubic’s rates weren’t quite so attractive as they’d said they were. Controversy erupted and their launch marketing was irreversibly damaged (see here also) by the Streisand Effect of their attempts to correct and adjust perception.

A Googling of “telecom innovation” yields 10,700+ hits but, sadly, no real innovation. What you will read, instead, are examples of creative cost-optimization (Voice Mail was really a way to eliminate the answering machine at home, and the receptionist at the office). You’ll also see some incredibly creative and extravagant attempts to defeat the inconvenience associated with the CallBack model. Cool, but not fundamentally enabling.

What Cubic is presently caught up in is the fact that their dubious cost savings are hampered by the fact that calling mobile phones, for example, in Europe is always going to be expensive and hugely differentiated in terms of pricing from calling land lines in Europe. The rise of draconian mobile pricing models combined with the steep decline in global long-distance calling rates results in a more and more limited opportunity to cost-optimize and more and more pitfalls for the consumer. Unfortunately, Cubic’s a great example of how this happens and how it can bite one in the ass.

There are a number of artificial bottoms in the telecom industry. Long-Distance was the first and most obvious of these: when there was sufficient market pressure from a few successful VoIP guys (and other telco competitors) to reduce costs, the incumbents simply did so. Why? Their costs to provide long distance were arbitrary. Their only consideration was how much margin they could take without losing customers.

There are a couple of false bottoms in mobile at the moment (who am I kidding, there are half a dozen) including roaming, long-distance, and SMS. SMS is a great modern example of this and here’s why:

The cost for a mobile network to transact an SMS message are incalculably small — on par with your ISP handling an email message. Yet it’s become an enormous cash cow for the mobile phone industry — imagine if your ISP charged you a penny for every email sent or received. A small number of companies such as hotxt (now trutap) rose to try and take a notch out of the carriers on this front, but were ultimately thwarted by the fact that they have to take pot shots at the carriers from within their own ecosystem.

It’s not that easy to attack the SMS business model by requiring users to instead install an app and send and receive messages over wireless data, which is also ridiculously expensive.  It’s kind of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and in any case I’m not sure what it accomplishes for the third-party service.  Not fun. And not particularly innovative.

There is encroachment now, by mobile telecom into terrestrial telecom, and subsequently by platforms like the iPhone and OpenMoko and the rumored GPhone. I guess this means there’s some hope for change. But all of them appear to be embracing the traditional approach to telecom and stepping up to milk the cow in collusion with the big carriers. And this, friends, is a shame. Because innovation will only be barely perceptible if we continue to allow Telecom Monopolists to write the rulebook.

-Ian.

There is some apparent overlap in both offerings, in that they are both essentially smart CallBack services.  But the positioning and nuances of the service offering are in fact quite a bit different.  While on one hand I think MaxRoam represents a more comprehensive solution targeted exclusively at mobile roamers, I think that Lypp is a significantly more frictionless service which you can make use of in myriad ways, not exclusively to avoid long-distance bilking on your mobile phone.

In particular the Lypp API, coupled with the fact that you can easily instantiate calls with multiple parties via SMS and Instant Messaging,  is a game-changer.  The notion of spontaneous conferencing is actually, finally, possible.  And if you coupled Lypp (via its API) with a smart calendar-based scheduling system you’d have yourselves a pretty kick-ass enterprise conferencing solution.

But overall, the Lypp model applies wherever you have a situation where two parties elect to chat via voice while using some other medium.  Viewed from this 30,000 foot precipice, you can see that Lypp has utility in applications as far-flung as online dating, business-to-business calling, and even chat radio shows, call centres, and unified communications.

This means that in some ways Lypp competes with Jangl and Jajah, however it should probably in the end be marketed more as a toolkit like VOXEO.  Come to think of it, all of those companies are run by friends of mine, too.

What I find ironic is that the base concept of CallBack is not new … it’s been around since the early 1980s, when smart telecom entrepreneurs realized it was substantially more expensive to call from, say, Brazil to the USA than it was to call from the USA to Brazil.  These CallBack drones, much like the Prepaid Calling Card industry, were among the first major VoIP platform customers of ours when I was a lowly Product Manager in the Packet Telephony Division at Cisco.

Most of those companies died or were absorbed as their major market differentiator (price) eroded and they were commoditized by Big Telco.

CallBack services are generally easy to replicate on VoIP platforms.  What’s having a disruptive effect now is that with so many open-platform VoIP solutions and generally cheap computational power, it is possible to rapidly develop scalable telecom applications in ways that were formerly only accessible to the likes of Nortel and Cisco.

It’s clear though that among this latest batch of telecom evolutionaries there is some real innovation.  There are, however, lessons to learn:  While the clear temptation of most of these businesses will be to hinge their value
proposition on lower-cost in exchange for slightly lower convenience, this is a losing business.

The challenge is to innovate and let new capabilities and opportunities continue to drive innovation and product design.  This is an area where no Big Telco executive has any real lasting insight.  Elephants are terrible tapdancers.

It’s definitely a secondary phone service, as when you instantiate calls it actually signals their VoIP-based call back service to “ring both ends”. Yes, it’s a CallBack service. The result is a fairly long wait time (20-30 seconds) to connect calls. But the savings when you roam across continents or even in the next country over are profound. The fact that it operates on a pre-paid, non-subscription model helps you cost-justify it as a secondary phone.

I’ll skip the phone, thanks, but I plan to use it, but only for incoming calls, when I travel to the U.S. as an alternative to a prepaid plan with the evil AT&T. It also does SMS at reasonable rates but, as yet, not data. So I’ll still be extorted for using my BlackBerry and iPhone on the road.

Feature request: One major issue with using a secondary phone is that when you make outgoing calls, nobody knows it’s you. My calls are far more likely to be avoided by my board members and business contacts because they don’t know the number. Problematically I don’t want to give them that number and add it to my swelling list of phone numbers because it adds complexity and creates a potential dead-end: my MaxRoam number, unlike my mobile phone number, is not mine… and I can’t take it with me.

To resolve this, and much of this depends on the quality of the termination networks and the strength of their relationships with these termination partners, MaxRoam could ask me which phone number I want to identify myself as when instantiating outbound calls via their web site. They could then rewrite the outbound dialing number on their terminating gateways for the leg of the call destined to whomever I’m calling so that it appears as it should on their phone and my name, etc. pops up.

Of course, there are others among us who might enjoy that anonymity. >:)

A problem for MaxRoam in the short term is that all this fiddling, plus the extra call wait times (75% of calls are incomplete, so 25-30 seconds just to get a busy signal or somebody’s voice mail will get frustrating), is not for the faint-hearted consumer market. I anticipate that they will develop a rabid audience of tens of thousands of global roamers who absolutely love their service, but until big strides are made in the usability model it’ll be difficult to break through to the broader market and really kick the snot out of the mobile carriers.

Their greater effect may be to sensitize the mobile phone consumer market further to the gouging that occurs between carriers for roaming, and the utter fleecing which carriers subject their customers to for Long-Distance. Given the myriad benefits in reducing operating cost for VoIP, and given that VoIP has been widely deployed in mobile phone networks for more than 5 years, it is positively criminal that they want me to pay $2/min. to call Brussels from my mobile phone while I’m at home.

I’m worried that, like Vonage, companies like Cubic will invest significant dollars to champion the charge to fairer pricing in mobile telecom, only to get smote by the carriers as they finally cave under consumer, media, political, and market pressures and adjust their margins accordingly.

It’s scary to think that sophisticated 3G mobile systems may depend for their survival on Hello Kitty, that cutesy Japanese pink cat with whiskers but no mouth. But that’s what it might come down to.

Not long ago, a 3G content developer noted that backgrounds with the Hello Kitty design, which serves the same purpose as the Western world’s yellow smiley face, were one of the most popular downloads over i-mode, the mobile multimedia service offered by Japan’s NTT Docomo.

Such simple things are also trés chic in Taiwan. Sixty percent of the traffic on the proprietary i-mode service is for ring tones, background wallpaper like Hello Kitty and real-time news, according to the top executive at KG Telecom.

KGT, a relatively small operator in Taiwan, decided earlier this year to forgo its bid for a 3G license because it saw too many obstacles, such as a lack of applications, to the generation of cash in the short term. Instead, KGT turned to NTT Docomo because it offered a tip-to-toe solution. So far, Taiwan is one of only two export destinations for i-mode.

For the mobile industry, Taiwan and Japan represent interesting case studies that offer evidence of the services consumers want. Though such evidence is far from conclusive, network operators, equipment operators, equipment vendors, handset providers and content developers that are still uncertain about how to make 3G successful might well take note.

But among industry insiders, it seems, the only certainty is that data services — which require such things as licenses and network upgrades — also entail greater expenses, untested applications and a new round of experimentation with handsets and how they should be used. Of course a few operators are averaging more money per user, but that tends to be on more proprietary systems like those in Japan.

Natural communication?

The slowdown in the general telecom market also brought a sense of urgency, if not quite desperation, to those who gathered in Taipei for IEEE’s recent GlobeCom 2002. Operators, handset makers and content developers want to see data services enjoy the kind of success they are having in Japan and Korea.

Of the world’s 70 million mobile-data users, 80 percent are in Japan, noted Kurt Hellstrom, president of troubled mobile-phone giant Ericsson. “We are just starting to see the growth in mobile data. It starts with camera phones and sending pictures and one day this will be a natural way of communicating with each other,” Hellstrom said. “Nobody on the inside has ever expected that this [data services] technology shift would take place overnight.”

Yet it will happen a bit more quickly if the industry can pull itself together, observers said, and overcome political divisiveness on such issues as interfaces, protocols, formats and content billing.

For instance, 69 operators, mostly of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) networks, have launched multimedia messaging services (MMS) based on 3GPP standards, said J.T. Bergqvist, executive vice president of Nokia Networks. In terms of network interoperability, he said, the technical issues have largely been solved, opening the service to a potential base of 300 million users. Now “it is a question of [business] agreements between the operators” that will slow things down.

And for 3G, Bergqvist said, “We as an industry have not, by and large, been able to create something that is transportable from one operator to another. We have not created something yet where two operator systems would be interoperable. We have not created open interfaces in those data-oriented systems, particularly in Japan and Korea.”

Such bottlenecks are, in some cases, causing frustrated operators to look for a shortcut to data services. That’s what happened with Taiwan’s KGT, which finally opted to purchase i-mode.

In December 1999 KGT was the first to launch the Wireless Application Protocol in Taiwan. Then in September 2000 it introduced GPRS, which was followed in August 2001 by an integrated GPRS over WAP portal called iGoGo. KGT launched i-mode in June 2002.

Executives at KGT believe the WAP protocol failed because it was primarily developed by a voice service community to help fill the gap of mobile data, making it a subset of voice.

WAP started as a value-added service and never took center stage where wireless data should have been, said Leslie Koo, chairman and chief executive officer of KGT. Handset consistency was an issue because each WAP handset had different versions of different browsers from different software vendors, so it was pretty much impossible for a carrier to provide consistent service to multiple handsets with various interfaces, Koo said.

“Sometimes your e-mail would work with Nokia handsets, but not with Ericsson’s. And once you fine-tuned it to Ericsson’s, then Motorola’s had a bug. So you are caught constantly running around and finding answers from no one because your vendor will tell you, ‘No, that’s not my problem, it’s the handsets.’ Then the handset manufacturer will tell you, ‘No, it’s not the handsets, it’s the browser.’ And the browser manufacturer will tell you, ‘Sorry, that’s an outdated version of the browser, which is no longer supported.’ ”

Meanwhile, customer complaints are rolling in, he said. This leaves the carrier wondering whether it should be a wireless-access provider, a portal provider or a service integrator of “all these very complex vendor solutions and software solutions and content platforms. It is almost impossible to manage. No wonder WAP never took off,” Koo said.

For better or worse, with i-mode, at least there are consistent standards for technical applications and business execution.

“These are not the best standards in the world, but they are standards that all i-mode service providers will follow,” he said. “They not only include the content format but also the specs to handset manufacturers. So this is the first time that the carriers can ask the handset manufacturers and also the system integrators to provide an end-to-end solution that will meet the service requirements of delivering a consistent, high-quality service.”

Common business sense suggests that the industry would learn from such a solution. So far, however, that remains questionable. “In the past, the industry, perhaps, has been guilty of just selling hardware. Glorious IDs,” said Brian Holmes, a product-marketing director for Motorola (China) Electronics.

“But in this future world I speak to, design no longer specifically speaks to just hardware. It is about understanding consumer experiences and how they want to use the product, and actually doing application design specifically around the mobile environment and targeted at specific consumers. If we don’t do that, as an industry we will disappoint.”

Nearly commonplace

Asia, in general, has had the best rollout of data services so far. In Japan and Korea, networks and, more importantly, services are nearly commonplace. And mobile-data networks are rolling out in places like Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, where mobile penetration (measured by SIM card subscriptions) is nearly at or above 100 percent, which is far above many Western countries.

Even in Asia, however, some network operators think that trumpeted promises of video-streaming services won’t, in reality, pay the bills — at least not yet. In certain markets based on highly proprietary systems, such as i-mode in Japan, there could be some exceptions, of course.

During a visit to Taiwan, NTT Docomo president and chief executive officer Keiji Tachikawa told IEEE Communication Society members that in Japan even cats and dogs will eventually participate in mobile chic.

Is such a scenario farfetched? Well, in a country that created the robotic dog, Aibo, it doesn’t seem so crazy to imagine that man’s best friend, if lost, would be found with the help of a GPS device that tracks an RF chip implanted in its collar. “The potential demand for mobile services is enormous if services could be applied to objects rather than people,” Tachikawa said.

But given the realities of today’s telecom slowdown, and the sensitive nature of the rollout stage for data services, where end users’ first impressions are long-lasting, many operators will not assume that Japan’s experience transfers easily.

If operators are to learn anything from Japan, it is that, to pay the bills, they should focus on the small stuff, such as Hello Kitty multimedia messages, rather than on the promise of video teleconferencing. “Trying to do full, 30-frame-per-second video, for example, on a GPRS network is probably not in the cards given the current level of compression technology,” said Motorola’s Holmes.

Yet, as the future shapes up video teleconferencing might actually be close to realization. Operators as well as handset providers and network equipment vendors are cozying up to the notion that IEEE 802.11 access should be a part of 3G. Ericsson’s Hellstrom called it a “complementary” technology. Bell Labs fellow Qi Bi said, “Incorporating Wi-Fi into the third-generation system is an important part of the system design. 3G can provide ubiquitous coverage and Wi-Fi can cover the hot spots.”

NTT Docomo’s Tachikawa also factored Wi-Fi into his company’s 4G plans. During his keynote to GlobeCom, Tachikawa revealed a few details of what NTT Docomo thinks 4G networks should do and how they will look. “We are thinking of using a cellular system because we plan to build it by extending the coverage and mobility of the 3G system,” he said. “On the other hand, in low-mobility areas, such as indoors and in hot spots, it may be necessary to introduce a solution that incorporates wireless LAN-type technology for data transmission at even higher speed.”

Fourth-generation systems should offer a peak speed of more than 100 Mbits per second in stationary mode, Tachikawa said, with an average of 20 Mbits/s when traveling. Network capacity should be at least 10 times that of 3G systems. In practical terms, that would quicken the download time of a 10-Mbyte file to one second on 4G, from 200 seconds on 3G, he said, enabling high-definition video to stream to phones and create a virtual-reality experience on high-resolution handset screens.

In the meantime, it’s a good bet that operators will focus on early returns on investment, no matter how unglamorous the application might be. Since operators are used to a more-traditional role as connectivity providers rather than content providers — let alone creators — they will likely look to MMS as a workhorse revenue provider for 2.5G/3G data services, just as SMS is for 2G data services.

Many will be conservative, suggested Herman Rao, vice president of service network and enabling technologies for Taiwan’s FarEastone Telecommunications Co. Ltd. “We know how to make money on connectivity, but we do not yet know how to make money on content. So the challenge for operators is on the content business and services model.”

Rao, too, suspects that such simple applications as location-based maps, entertainment services and news will be the key to early 3G success. “Bandwidth is not as critical as equipment vendors try to make us believe,” he said. “Video streaming won’t be that important.”

So like it or not, Hello Kitty and smiley faces may be the way forward. And that idea might not be such a stretch, since NTT Docomo is already moving on to enabling cats and dogs.

Copyright 2002 © CMP Media, LLC

———–

Mark Milner Monday October 28, 2002 The Guardian

Third-generation mobile phone networks in Europe are likely to prove a better commercial prospect that many of the gloomy projections suggest, according to a London-based consultancy.

Over the next five years 3G penetration will reached 50% in Europe and could be as high as 75% in some countries, the Thinking Box, said in a report out today.

“The image of 3G has had a roller coaster ride, starting as a ‘hip’ technology and ending up as an over-hyped revolution that will never happen. We have observed this ‘killing-off’ of 3G with great interest and surprise.” the consultancy said.

Many of Europe’s telecoms company have built up heavy debt burdens acquiring 3G licences and the costs of rolling out the new networks. Some companies have sought to cut costs by slowing down the network roll-outs. Queries have also been raised about how much extra customers would be prepared to pay for 3G, which can deliver more services more quickly, or whether they would want some of the services at all.

However, the Thinking Box says the expansion of 3G will be driven by operators which do not have existing customer bases and which will be very aggressive, especially on price, in pursuit of market share.

“Like it or not competitors will be obliged to follow.”

The consultancy warns operators against charging high tariffs as a way of getting a quick return on their investments. “SMS and voice tariffs on 3G must remain the same if not be diminished,” it said, though it believes that customers will be prepared to pay up to an extra €15 (£9.40) a month for 3G services.

———–

“This is stupid. Nobody’s going to want to just access their email on mobile devices — people want to surf the web from anywhere!”

Long-time FOIBers know how wrong I think I was.

MOBITEX is the un-sexy, Ericsson-proprietary data network. Rogers operates it in Canada, BellSouth in the US. It’s interesting ’cause it’s a very old network that was built from the ground-up as a data-only system, whereas GPRS, CDPD, and others are simply data abstraction layers overlaid on switched voice networks.

I think it’s probable that MOBITEX could experience a renaissance of sorts in the coming couple of years, now that people other than subscribers to this list are starting to realize that 3G is a faint, whimpering hope. It all depends upon what Ericsson does with it.

This author contends that if Ericsson were smart, they’d Open-Source MOBITEX right away. Allow anybody to build equipment, and leverage the overall market’s growth to become the preeminent supplier of MOBITEX gear.

MOBITEX is now more than 10 years old… could it finally be all growed up?

-Ian.

—— http://www.stmobiledata.com/more_on_mobitex.htm

Mobitex is poised to lead the wireless network revolution. Read on to find out more in Alison Campbell’s “Mobitex versus GPRS – the latest mobile data war?”

By Alison Campbell

It’s been operating in the UK for almost ten years, but not many mobile users may be aware of Mobitex.

A different story can be heard in the USA where the wireless data communications network has a high profile, primarily because of its involvement with the much-acclaimed success of RIM Blackberry.

As the dawning of mass-market mobile data is upon us, Mobitex is poised for market expansion and may even be viewed as a competitor to GPRS. So what does the technology have to offer and how does it compare to the giant of next-generation wireless comms?

The company behind Mobitex in the UK has been RAM Mobile Data, which was acquired at the end of 2000 (along with Tardis Mobile and Playsafe Monitoring) by Transcomm plc. The three companies have been consolidated into Transcomm UK, which is now the UK network operator for Mobitex.

The technology itself was developed by Ericsson back in the mid 1980s to address the need for mobile access to the Internet or enterprise networks. It was initially developed for use by Telia Telecom as a way of controlling mobile communications costs for the company’s fleet of field service engineers. Designed for two-way, packet-switched, data only communication – using devices such as pagers, palm-tops and PDAs – Mobitex has achieved great success in various vertical markets and now has around 30,000 users on its UK network.

In the UK, Mobitex has been targeted at the public sector, transport & distribution and the field service industry, where it competes head-on with Cognito. A recent agreement with Communication Network Interfaces (CNI) of Korea will see a new range of two-way messaging devices being developed specifically for Mobitex users. This opens up the market for Transcomm to target white-collar sectors (such as the City) and other mobile users that need secure and reliable access to mission critical applications.

Like GPRS, Mobitex offers an ‘always on, always connected’ service, but unlike GPRS it has been specifically designed to carry two-way data, quickly and securely, and not voice. The technology is not being marketed as a direct competitor for GPRS, ‘But,’ says Ben Wood, a senior analyst with Gartner Group, ‘GPRS has done Mobitex a big favour by creating awareness of the benefits of mobile data. If Transcomm can ride on the back of that they could do very well.’

Rich Pullin, Managing Director of Transcomm UK, explains his view: ‘we’re offering an alternative to GPRS but it depends on what the user wants. Mobitex has many advantages. Network performance, for example, is not hindered by voice communications but it really depends on what’s important to the user.’

The main advantage Mobitex has over GPRS is that it’s here, deployed successfully, and has been so for ten years. Most experts say that GPRS will not really be fully available until the middle of next year.

As for the technology, Mobitex is data only, which limits it from competing with anything other than the GSM aspects of GPRS. However, there’s something to be said for treating voice and data as separate solutions. Recent research indicates that 83 percent of requirements for mobile data are for short messaging services (SMS).

Mobitex offers a data transfer speed of 8kbps. GPRS, on the other hand (because it operates on fours channels), can offer transfer speeds of up to 38kbps. But voice communication requires significantly more bandwidth. So therefore, performance could be constrained by how many users are on the network at any one time. Realistically achievable data transfer speeds could be much less. The problem GPRS has it that it is being overlaid on top of GSM, which means that in busy cities and urban areas it could be difficult to achieve anything like a decent data speed.

Mobitex is also said to be an extremely secure network, a primary requirement for trading exchanges. It is one of the only networks in the UK utilised by the Police and emergency services without encryption (although encryption can be built in).

Mobitex is designed to facilitate file transfer because it is what’s termed ‘symmetric”, while GPRS is asymmetric. What this means is that Mobitex devices support an even number of time slots in the uplink as they do in the downlink. Put simply, this means it’s easy to transfer files because the available bandwidth is the same all the way along the link.

GPRS on the other hand is ideal for viewing web applications or for gaming because devices support more time slots in the downlink than the uplink.

With GPRS, users get more bandwidth, which is necessary for voice and graphically hungry applications, but this means it is also more expensive. WAP sites are typically 1 gigabyte in size, which could cost as much as £2 per viewing as pricing stand today. So for users that require a fixed cost solution, GPRS may not be ideal. The likelihood is, however, that GPRS operators will offer a choice of packages geared towards different types of user, as will Transcomm with Mobitex. Says Wood: ‘As the market evolves, network operators in both camps will have to become much more competitive by offering a choice of services and tariff options.’

Whereas GPRS is an open technology, Mobitex is a proprietary standard. There will be less service providers and systems integrators designing and building applications to run on the network. For an enterprise-wide solution, Mobitex requires some bespoke programming and bespoke application design. But mobile data comes into best effect when integrated into the business, so for corporates this shouldn’t be a problem. For the single or consumer user it might be more difficult find devices, applications and games. There seems little difference between Mobitex and GPRS on t he pricing side, but Transcomm seems determined to compete starting with a basic service at around £10 per month (same as GPRS). Handsets for both can be purchased at sub £300. But as an established standard without the benefit of pre-Christmas hype, could Mobitex ever be a threat to GPRS?

———–

I have had 3 or 4 different generations of the PALM PDA, starting with the very first one; waaay back I have been the owner of an Apple Newton and a beta tester of the MagicCap from General Magic. I have also owned an SMS-capable phone for the last 3 years (at least) and a WAP phone for 8 months.

Most recently I have destroyed or lost two consecutive RIM Blackberry 950s. To anyone who knows me well, this means that I use those most frequently (you always, after all, hurt the ones you love). So clearly the Killer App for me is wireless email. I’d also love to do instant messaging, just so I can keep up with the Joneses. But the RIM 950 and 957 have, for me, two distinct problems:

– No MacOS connectivity software (I have rejoined the desperate, seething hordes of Macaholics) – A shitty, shitty (did I say shitty?) address book that won’t sync to anything

So, periodically, as I am wont to do, I set out this evening to see if the PDA world had caught up to my needs.

The spec for me is simple:

– Sync to an address book on my Powerbook so that Eudora and my PDA share the same data. – Give me wireless email on the go. – Have a keyboard.

http://www.palm.com My eye was caught by the Palm Vx with a specifically styled and shaped Minstrel modem, albeit briefly. I had thought for a moment that you could actually use AOL Instant Messenger and Buddy List from it, and you can — but only with a landline modem connection. What gives? Also, while the form factor is super-cool (easily the best) the external keyboard you have to get so that you can type is big and ugly. Oh… and the price is a whopping $600. No way San Jose.

http://www.handspring.com Next, I flopped back to the Handspring. They’ve got some great deals ranging from $200-$400 for the Visor, and there’s a $99 deal on the Minstrel right now. Kick-ass! Well, the more I looked into it, the more I realized one key thing that will be the Visor’s undoing: The Visor is a shell — a house for mobile applications. This is great, but what if you want to do more than one at a time? For example, while I’m using my GPS to find a Mercedes Dealership in Beverly Hills, why should I have to remove my wireless email device? What if someone’s trying to reach me? UGH. Sorry, there, Sunnyvale.

http://www.blackberry.com So off we go back to the RIM 957. The new form factor rocks and rolls… this time they’ve got it right (though I wish it ran Palm OS AND had the keyboard), with a bigger screen that does graphics.

They’re all the rage here in Hollywood, by the way, because they’re big and they allow you to be cool in restaurants in a subtle-but-still-obnoxious way. You can pretend you’re a VC and your date is pitching you her latest business plan, and like most VC pitches you both go home, empty-handed and feeling like the other is a dolt because you spent the evening banging out emails to HomeGrocer.com customer service.

http://www.motorola.com/GSS/CSG/direct_pagers/T900/ Next, I dropped in on the Motorola T900 2-Way Email Pager. Everybody I know in the wacky consumer wireless products space is fawning over this thing these days. My friend Mike calls this the “RIM Killer”, but I think he’s wrong. Motorola is clearly thinking with their Paging hats on this device — it’s a stand-alone device, with no PC Sync capabilities and very lightweight address book.

This will be a successful product in migrating the barrios into email-happiness (bloods and cryps will now be able to email each other locations for potential bust-ups) but will not reach a huge market and will definitely NOT solve my particular problem.

http://www5.compaq.com/products/quickspecs/10632_na/10632_na.html Alas, the iPaq. With a derivative name and a similarly derivative Windows OS, need I say more? Definitely high on the cool factor, though, with lots of features, colour.. and the winner of hype-of-the-month club for sure. You can get Omnisky for the iPaq as well as other solutions, however it suffers my scorn for being in the same blast-radius as the Handspring and Palm as far as features. And expensive! Blech.

Conclusions:

What nobody (but me) understands is that this device is supposed to be much more than a personal organizer, or an email client, or a pager, or a mobile applications device. It’s the convergence of all of these things and in many respects of ME: the offloading of menial tasks in communications and organization normally stored in my failing brain, now handled by a convenient, wireless connected device. Web browsing is interesting. Allowing me to do things easily and from anywhere that I hate doing is great.

But who wants to shove cartridges in and out of the rear expansion slot every time they “change” modes? What is this, a frickin’ Game Boy? The wireless email application, and instant messaging for that matter, relies on a persistent data connection to be useful — it doesn’t want to be “turned off”. If you can’t keep it in there 24-7 because you have to remove the expansion card in order to run your PDA-based business accounting software, what’s the point? From a user behaviour perspective, it’s just as unreliable as regular email on a PC.

With all of the work that has gone into PDAs, nobody’s managed to hit it yet. Too much focus on the Personal and the Digital, and not enough on the Assistant.

The verdict? Maybe if I didn’t have a Mac I’d be all over the 957. I might give up on that cause and get one anyway, and pray that someone comes along and solves my sync problem.

-Ian.

GSM is cool because a GSM phone hops all over the spectrum in a pattern. Therefore if a particular frequency is overcrowded, weak, or malfunctioning, the problem is solved on the next frequency hop (usually one second later). This makes GSM highly survivable (wish they used it in the Bay Area) and really, really cheap.

GSM is of course widely deployed in Europe. This large installed base of fairly standardized carriers is why there are several iterations of GSM and why GSM gets so many new cool features sooner (like SMS).

-Ian.

At 11:26 AM 18/05/00 -0700, Darren Gibbons wrote:>In Canada, we have Clearnet and Fido. Clearnet is CDMA, but Fido is GSM,
>which if I understand correctly is based on a varient of TDMA.
>
>Ian, do you know if GSM has the same issues as TDMA when it comes to
>handling data? On an unrelated note, Fido supports SMS (short message
>service) which is very handy — you can send short text messages to and from
>other Fido phones, something that is not possible (to my knowledge) via any
>other service.
>
>Telus just launched their digital data service, including WAP.
>http://www.telusmobility.com/bc/wireless/wireless.htm
>
>
>Darren.
>
>
>
> > —–Original Message—–
> > From: Ian Andrew Bell [mailto:despot [at] ianbell [dot] com]
> > Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2000 11:18 AM
> > To: Mark Schneider
> > Cc: foib [at] ianbell [dot] com
> > Subject: Re: @F: RE: AT&T Slammed on Wireless Data
> >
> >
> > Oops. Let me clarify: CDM = 20x, TDM = 3x.
> >
> > AT&T and Rogers/Cantel use TDMA.
> > Sprint, Telus, and most others use CDMA.
> >
> > -Ian.
> >
> > At 11:04 AM 18/05/00 -0700, Ian Andrew Bell wrote:
> >
> > >Oh. Sorry.
> > >
> > >TDMA: Time Division Multiple Access 3x Frequency Re-use
> > >CDMA: Code Division Multiple Access 20x Frequency Re-use
> > >
> > >Refers, basically, to how cellular carriers squeeze multiple phones onto
> > >one “circuit” (which is actually a frequency/modulation). The difference
> > >is essentially describes how the economics of the business are
> > mitigated by
> > >technology.
> > >
> > >TDM essentially slices up the analog signal using Pulse Code Modulation
> > >from a bunch of phones and interleaves them with one another,
> > and transmits
> > >the signal from each as barely perceptible chopped up bits of sound (as
> > >though you were talking to someone through a desk fan) expressed as Zeros
> > >and Ones.
> > >
> > >CDM very simply encodes and then compresses (this is the key) the voice
> > >using a digital CODEC right on the phone and sends the signal over the
> > >network as Zeros and Ones. This increases the number of phones per
> > >frequency by 3x.
> > >
> > >Thus CDM is more natively “digital” and better-suited to handling bursty
> > >data traffic like internet. And because there’s less bandwidth used on
> > >each frequency by any given handset, you get more bang for the
> > buck. This
> > >increases the number of phones per frequency by 20x.
> > >
> > >It’s basically like the difference between a CD and a DVD. Why
> > can you get
> > >so much more data onto the same physical media with DVD? Compression!
> > >
> > >-Ian.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >At 10:30 AM 18/05/00 -0700, you wrote:
> > > >Ian wrote:
> > > >
> > > >”CDMA carriers will now be able to dance circles around the
> > TDMA guys until
> > > >the
> > > >TDMA guys implement WAP, which is more expensive on TDMA than
> > on CDMA (for
> > > >reasons which should be obvious).”
> > > >
> > > >Why?
> > > >
> > > >—–Original Message—–
> > > >From: Ian Andrew Bell [mailto:ian [at] cafe [dot] net]
> > > >Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 9:34 PM
> > > >To: foib [at] ianbell [dot] com
> > > >Subject: @F: AT&T Slammed on Wireless Data
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >AT&T launched PocketNet a few days ago, which is CDPD-based.
> > Sprint has
> > > >been offering free WAP access for months now (I have a Sprint
> > mobile now in
> > > >the US) for free in some packages, with unrestricted web access.
> > > >
> > > >You can even surf to https://ianbell.com:8888 on your phone and it parses
> > > >quite well into WAP!
> > > >
> > > >This Gartner report slams AT&T, and shows how companies that
> > made the jump
> > > >to digital networks early (and implemented crappy TDMA) are
> > now going to
> > > >pay the price for not really thinking through the notion of
> > > >”Digital”. Because of the greater efficiencies and reduced costs, CDMA
> > > >carriers will now be able to dance circles around the TDMA
> > guys until the
> > > >TDMA guys implement WAP, which is more expensive on TDMA than
> > on CDMA (for
> > > >reasons which should be obvious).
> > > >
> > > >-Ian.
> > > >
> > > >—=—
> > > >Wednesday May 17 06:00 PM EDT
> > > >Commentary: AT&T PocketNet–when “free” is still too expensive
> > > >By Gartner Viewpoint, CNET News.com
> > > >See news story: AT&T Wireless offers free phone-based Net access
> > > >By Robert Egan, Gartner Analyst
> > > >
> > > >As a competitive response to Sprint, AT&T’s effort falls short
> > in several
> > > >ways.
> > > >
> > > >First, PocketNet is a far cry from the Sprint service today,
> > or from other
> > > >competitive wireless Internet services. For one, it limits people to 40
> > > >selected sites (out of more than 100,000 wireless-friendly
> > sites) unless
> > > >they want to pay extra fees. Through an untested business plan, this
> > > >”sticky” strategy may bring advertising and other revenue to
> > AT&T and its
> > > >business partners, but it needlessly restricts customer choice
> > in a service
> > > >that should be highly personalized.
> > > >
> > > >The “free” service includes access only to these selected sites and the
> > > >customer’s “personal Web page.” In addition to wider Web
> > access, email and
> > > >fax service will cost customers from $6.99 to $14.99 over and
> > above their
> > > >regular airtime and other wireless charges. (To be clear about the term
> > > >”free,” AT&T does charge for airtime while Internet services
> > are used, as
> > > >do Sprint and other wireless providers.)
> > > >
> > > >AT&T has been unable to attract equipment suppliers to build
> > phones for its
> > > >offering, so customers have only two models to choose from, whereas
> > > >Sprint’s Internet service is supported on many more phones.
> > This is in part
> > > >a penance AT&T is paying for its decision to use TDMA (time division
> > > >multiple access) technology, which is unsuited to data transmission,
> > > >instead of the more modern, robust technology used by Sprint.
> > > >
> > > >The same constraint limits AT&T to markets that support the
> > CDPD (cellular
> > > >digital packet data) protocol, which covers only about half the United
> > > >States.
> > > >Therefore, the sheer numbers tip the balance toward Sprint:
> > > >
> > > >* Sprint’s more modern data protocols are supported by almost twice
> > > > as many points of presence as AT&T’s.
> > > >* Sprint offers 10 times the number of handset models that support
> > > > its data services.
> > > >* Sprint customers can access 3,000 times as many Web sites for the
> > > > same (“free”) price.
> > > >
> > > >Gartner predicts that AT&T will not be able to fully benefit from the
> > > >ongoing rapid expansion of wireless data services until it
> > begins to more
> > > >accurately meet its customers’ needs and modernizes its underlying
> > > >technology, which will probably take until 2002.
> > > >
> > > >Entire contents, Copyright © 2000 Gartner Group, Inc. All
> > rights reserved.
> > > >The information contained herein represents Gartner’s initial
> > commentary
> > > >and analysis and has been obtained from sources believed to be
> > reliable.
> > > >Positions taken are subject to change as more information
> > becomes available
> > > >and further analysis is undertaken. Gartner disclaims all
> > warranties as to
> > > >the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of the information.
> > Gartner shall
> > > >have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the
> > information
> > > >contained herein or for interpretations thereof.
> > > >

I’m now the:

Director of Advanced Products eVoice, Inc. 1394 Willow Road Menlo Park, CA 94025

Contact info:

650-330-3939 (Desk) 650-838-9945 (home) 650-315-5845 (mobile) 604-306-3615 (mobile – Canadian)

This means I’m back in California, under substantially better conditions than before. I’m living in a small house in Menlo Park that I rent from my friend Trish, and am taking care of her cats (long story…).

Ian Bell Consulting is now also incorporated in New York and I am working for eVoice under a consulting agreement — which is awesome.

I was intending to get back to Vancouver often but that hasn’t been too workable lately. Maybe soon.

eVoice is cool. Best way to describe it is basically the Enhanced Services side of BC TEL with more money, fewer bodies, and more lofty goals. The lead product is free voicemail, which replaces your existing telco voice mail or your answering machine. You can check this voicemail via email or the web, and be notified of incoming messages on your email, SMS phone, or alpha pager. Very convenient.

There are lots of new products upcoming, and that’s what I’m here for.

Incidentally, we do have access trunks in Vancouver but don’t yet offer the full service there. So if you wanna go try it out, sign up for an account with your home number and email me the account info and we’ll provision it by hand. Unlike our US users, you’ll have to pay for Call-Forwarding services and order it yourself with BC TEL/Telus.

-Ian.