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Wi-Fi and the Mobile Internet

Admob periodically publishes numbers on the mobile Internet and its usage. The numbers are badly skewed because of Admob’s customer mix. For example Indonesia lists as the second largest mobile Internet market in the world. But if you make your own mental adjustments for this, the numbers are informative.

Admob’s latest report highlights Wi-Fi use in the USA.

Of the ad requests fielded by Admob, in August 2008 9% came from Wi-Fi capable devices: dual-mode phones, iPod Touches and Sony PSPs. In November this number doubled to 19%. Since the numbers for August aren’t broken down, it is uncertain which devices drove this growth, but my guess is that it is due to the booming sales of the iPhone.

Of the requests from Wi-Fi capable devices, the proportion that came over Wi-Fi varied radically. For the iPod Touch and the Sony PSP, 100% of the requests were over Wi-Fi. No surprise there. But on the phone side, a very interesting discrepancy between the iPhone (42% of requests by Wi-Fi) and the HTC phones (16% of requests by Wi-Fi). Since each of the phones uses the same browser for cellular data and Wi-Fi connections, it can’t be an ease of use of the Internet issue. Two other possibilities come to mind: the Wi-Fi may be easier to set up on the iPhone than it is on the HTC phones, or the cellular data speed may be worse on the AT&T network, driving the users to Wi-Fi, while users on T-Mobile (where all the HTC phones listed in the report are) get acceptable performance from their cellular data connection.

The Blackberry data casts a similar light on the question. The two Blackberries in the report were the 8820 and the 8320. The 8820 had the same profile as the iPhone – 40% of the requests came by Wi-Fi. The 8320 had even less Wi-Fi use than the HTC phones – only 8% of the requests came by Wi-Fi. These two phones are both on the same carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile), they have the same Wi-Fi chip (from TI), and their specs are similar.

The clue is in their release dates. The 8320 has been out on T-Mobile for a year, but was not yet released on AT&T in November when AdMob collected their numbers. The 8820 was released by AT&T a year ago, but by T-Mobile only 6 months ago. There are obviously a lot of other variables at work – like 3G versus 2G, for example, and pricing structure, but this looks like evidence that the T-Mobile data network has a more acceptable performance than AT&T’s.

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A not so perfect Storm

The Verizon Storm may be heading for failure in more than one way. A raft of reviewers, led by David Pogue of the New York Times are trashing its usability. This means that even with the marketing might of Verizon behind it it may not fulfill its goal of being a bulwark against the iPhone in the enterprise.

But the Storm was an experiment in another way by Verizon. The other three major American mobile network operators have capitulated to Wi-Fi in smartphones. Against the new conventional wisdom, Verizon decided to launch a new flagship smartphone without Wi-Fi. The Storm looks like a trial balloon to see whether Wi-Fi is optional in modern smartphones. If the Storm is a success, it will demonstrate that it is possible to have credible business smartphones without Wi-Fi. But if it turns out to be a flop because of other factors, it will not be a proof point for Wi-Fi either way.

But Wi-Fi is a closed issue by now for all the network operators, perhaps even including Verizon. Phones have lead times of the order of a year or so, and controversies active back then may now be resolved. Verizon covered its bets by launching three other smartphones around the same time as the Storm, all with Wi-Fi (HTC Touch Pro, Samsung Omnia, Samsung Saga).

Before its launch, AT&T hoped that the iPhone would stimulate use of the cellular data network. It succeeded in this, so far beyond AT&T’s hopes that it revealed a potential problem with the concept of 3G (and 4G) data. The network slows to a crawl if enough subscribers use data intensively in small areas like airports and conferences. Mobile network operators used to fear that if phones had Wi-Fi subscribers would use it instead of the cellular data network, causing a revenue leak. AT&T solved that problem with the iPhone by making a subscription to the data service obligatory. T-Mobile followed suit with the Google phone. So no revenue leak. With the data subscription in hand, Wi-Fi is a good thing for the network operators because it offloads the 3G network. In residences and businesses all the data that goes through Wi-Fi is a reduction in the potential load on the network. In other words, a savings in infrastructure investment, which translates to profit. This may be some of the thinking behind AT&T’s recent acquisition of Wayport. The bandwidth acquired with Wayport offloads the AT&T network relatively cheaply. AT&T’s enthusiasm for Wi-Fi is such that it is selling some new Wi-Fi phones without requiring a data subscription.

The enterprise market is one that mobile network operators have long neglected. It is small relative to the consumer market, and harder to fit into a one-size-fits-all model. Even so, in these times of scraping for revenue in every corner, and with the steady rise of the Blackberry, the network operators are taking a serious look at the enterprise market.

The device manufacturers are way ahead of the network operators on this issue: the iPhone now comes with a lot of enterprise readiness Kool-Aid; Windows Mobile makes manageability representations, as does Nokia with its Eseries handsets. RIM, the current king of the enterprise smartphone vendors also pitches its IT-friendliness.

Wi-Fi in smartphones has benefits and drawbacks for enterprises. One benefit is that you have another smart device on the corporate LAN to enhance productivity. A drawback is that you have another smart device on the corporate LAN ripe for viruses and other security breaches. But that issue is mitigated to some extent if smartphones don’t have Wi-Fi. So it’s arguable that the Storm may be more enterprise-friendly as a result of its lack of Wi-Fi. Again, if the Storm becomes a hit in enterprises that argument will turn out to hold water. If the Storm is a flop for other reasons, we still won’t know, and it will have failed as a trial balloon for Wi-Fi-less enterprise smartphones.

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Wideband codecs and IPR

Wideband codecs are a good thing. They have been slow to enter the mainstream, but there are several reasons why this is about to change.

Voice codecs are benefiting from the usual good effects of Moore’s law. Each year higher-complexity (higher computation load) codecs become feasible on low-cost hardware, and each year it is cheaper to fit multiple codecs into a ROM (adding multiple codecs increases the chance that two endpoints will have one in common).

Voice codecs are often burdened by claims of intellectual property rights (IPR) by multiple players. This can make it difficult for software and equipment vendors to use codecs in their products without fear of litigation. The industry response has been to create “patent pools” where the patent owners agree to let a single party negotiate a blanket license on their behalf:

Prior to establishment of the Pool, the complexity of negotiating IPRs with each intellectual property owner discouraged potential integrators.

Unfortunately there is still no pool for the standard wideband codec ratified by the 3GPP for use in cell phones, AMR-WB (G.722.2). Even where there is a pool, getting a license from it doesn’t mean that a use of the codec doesn’t infringe some yet-to-be-revealed patent not in the pool, and it doesn’t indemnify the licensee from such a claim.

There are several royalty-free wideband codecs available. I mentioned a couple of them (from Microsoft and from Skype) in an Internet Telephony Column.

Microsoft and Skype have got around the royalty issue to some extent by creating proprietary codecs. They have researched their algorithms and have either concluded that they don’t infringe or have bought licenses for the patents they use.

G.722 (note that G.722, G.722.1 and G.722.2 are independent of each other, both technically and from the point of view of IPR) is so old that its patent restrictions have expired, making it an attractive choice of common baseline wideband codec for all devices. Unfortunately its antiquity also means that it is relatively inefficient in its use of bandwidth.

Polycom did a major good thing for the industry when it made G.722.1 (Siren7) available on a royalty-free basis. G.721.1 is considerably better than G.722, though it is not as efficient as G.722.2.

The open-source Speex codec is efficient and royalty free, but being open source it bears a little more fear of infringement than the other codecs mentioned here. There are three reasons why this fear may be misplaced. First, the coders claim to have based it on old (1980’s) technology. Second, it has now been available for some years, and has been shipped by large companies and no claims of infringement have surfaced. Third, while it is possible in these times of outrageous patent trolling that somebody will pop up with some claim against Speex, a similar risk exists for all the other codecs, including the ones with patent pools.

So we now have three royalty-free wideband codecs (G.722, G.722.1 and Speex); we have hardware capable of running them cheaply; we have broad deployment of VoIP and growing implementation of VoIP trunking. We have increasing data bandwidth to homes and businesses, to the point where the bandwidth demands of voice are trivial compared to other uses like streaming video and music downloads. Plus there’s a wild card. By 2010 over 300 million people will have mobile smartphones capable of running software that will give them wideband phone conversations over a Wi-Fi connection.

Perhaps the time for wideband telephony is at hand.

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Counterpath’s new strategy

Counterpath has an enviable incumbency in the PC soft-phone market. Their eyeBeam soft phone is licensed by numerous service providers and PBX manufacturers. But the soft phone business is not enormous, so Counterpath is looking to use its leadership in the soft phone business as a beachhead into the fixed-mobile convergence space. Fixed-mobile convergence comes in two flavors: service provider and enterprise. So last year Counterpath made three acquisitions to fill in the spaces of a two by two matrix, with enterprise and service provider on one axis, and client software and mobility controller server software on the other.

Counterpath bought FirstHand for its Enterprise Mobility Gateway (EMG) and Bridgeport Networks for its service provider Network Convergence Gateway (NCG). It already had client software for service providers covered with its eyeBeam software. It bought NewHeights for its enterprise client software, a softphone with PBX features to complement the more consumer-oriented eyeBeam phone. These two soft phones have already been integrated by Counterpath into their new Bria softphone. It remains a challenge to get the soft phones and the two gateways working together seamlessly. It will also be a challenge to gain market share in the mobility gateway market.

Most mobility gateway vendors tend to focus on either service provider or enterprise customers, but Counterpath is not unique in having gateway devices for both. Tango Networks claims this as the differentiating feature of their solution; Tango’s two devices were designed from the outset to work together and complement each other. Counterpath must integrate two products with independent pedigrees. The NCG that came from Bridgeport is a pre-IMS solution. When a call comes in for a cell phone, the NCG can decide whether to ring the cell phone, a soft phone on a PC or both. The EMG that came from FirstHand is an enterprise mobility controller similar to RIM’s Ascendent product.

Neither of the two Gateways provides “true” FMC, namely the ability to run a call over Wi-Fi to a dual mode cell phone; this is presumably in the near future. The NCG fields calls to a cell phone number and directs them to a PC in the enterprise, while the EMG fields calls to the PBX and can route them to a 3G cellphone via a VoIP connection. What’s interesting about this particular solution is that it uses the 3G data connection for the VoIP call, rather than using the regular cellular voice connection. According to Counterpath the QoS (latency, jitter, packet loss) on the 3G data connection provides equivalent call quality to a cellular voice connection.

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Self-configuring Femtocells

Rethink Wireless reports that picoChip has added cognitive capabilities to their femtocells. Related “sniffing” technology is used in White Spaces radios and in the UNII-2 band by Wi-Fi. The idea is to check to see how the spectrum is currently being used, and to arrange matters to interfere as little as possible. With White Spaces and Wi-Fi the sniffing is used to avoid spectrum occupied by a primary user. PicoChip uses it to create self configuring networks:

As well has handling configuration, synchronization and hand-off – and reporting metrics on the cell to help network planning – the sniff function will support entirely self-organizing networks of the type Vodafone has outlined in recent presentations. Currently, most of the interference management these require are handled in different ways by the femtocell OEMs, but each has its own proprietary algorithms, making mixed-vendor networks difficult. The picoChip designs also allow the femto silicon to run the manufacturer specific code.

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Low cost international calls from your mobile phone

I wrote about the vast array of ways to bypass international tolls in my Internet Telephony column a while back. Now there is an interesting web site, LowCostMob.com, that gives a listing of the services available and technical explanations of how they work.

If you go to the “contact us” link on the website you can type in “user feedback” with mini-reviews of the services. I presume that over time the database of user comments will become an additional helpful resource on the site.

All these services work to make calls to international destinations cheaper, but if you actually travel abroad you still have to pay exorbitant roaming charges for using the cellular network. The benefit of dual-mode (Wi-Fi plus cellular) phones is that with some of them you can use the Wi-Fi connection to make VoIP calls and completely bypass the cellular network, avoiding international roaming charges. Not all the listed services support this feature, and not all dual mode phones do either.

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FCC Approves White Spaces!

This is incredible news. The FCC has done a wonderful thing, standing up to the broadcast TV lobby to benefit the people of America. What’s even better, four of the five commissioners are enthusiastically behind the decision:

It has the potential to improve wireless broadband connectivity and inspire an ever-widening array of new Internet based products and services for consumers. Consumers across the country will have access to devices and services that they may have only dreamed about before.

Some have called this new technology “Wi-Fi on steroids” and I hope they are right. Certainly, this new technology, taking advantage of the enhanced propagation characteristics of TV spectrum, should be of enormous benefit in solving the broadband deficit in many rural areas.

Today the Commission takes a critically important step towards managing the public’s spectrum to promote efficiency, and to encourage the development and availability of innovative devices and services.

While new broadband technologies are the most likely uses of these channels, the most exciting part about our action today is that we are creating the opportunity for an explosion of entrepreneurial brilliance. Our de-regulatory order will allow the market place to produce new devices and new applications that we can’t even imagine today.

The fifth commissioner, Deborah Taylor Tate, is only partly on board – she thinks some of this spectrum should be licensed, and she is concerned that not enough provision has been made for remediation in the event that interfering radios are deployed.

The FCC decision is a bold one – a more conservative positive decision would have been to approve a rural broadband access-only (802.22-style) use for now, but the commissioners went ahead and approved personal/portable use as well, which is what Google, Microsoft and numerous other computer and Internet industry companies have advocated.

The ruling imposed a geolocation requirement which will vastly increase the market for GPS silicon, though the trend in embedded GPS is to include GPS on the same die as other radios (like Bluetooth or cellular baseband) so whoever makes the White Spaces radio chips will probably be putting GPS on the same die by the second product generation.

The digital TV transition will open up the White Spaces spectrum in February 2009, but I will be very surprised if any white spaces consumer products appear in the market before 2010.

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DiVitas Test Drive

Divitas loaned me a Nokia E71 to try out with their mobile unified communications solution hosted by Sawtel. It’s a very nice phone – looks good, feels good in the hand. It’s also the best-sounding cell phone experience I have ever had, and that’s thanks to DiVitas. All cellular service providers use technology that sacrifices sound quality for increased carrying capacity. By squeezing down the bandwidth used by a call they can fit more calls into each cell, and get by with fewer cell towers, saving money. The standard codec around most of the world is GSM, and it’s the reason that cell calls can never sound as good as landline calls.

But DiVitas uses a Wi-Fi connection for your calls, and they have chosen to use the standard land-line codec, G.711. The effect is startling – a little disorienting even; we are so used to the horrible GSM codec that when a cell phone sounds as good as a land-line the subjective illusion is that it sounds much better.

This is one of the reasons that the type of voice over Wi-Fi solution offered by DiVitas is way better than the one offered by the telco industry, called UMA. UMA uses the GSM codec even over Wi-Fi connections.

But DiVitas didn’t stop with the sound quality. DiVitas has done an excellent job in several other technical areas. The fundamental technology of fixed mobile convergence is the ability to hand off a call in progress from the cellular network to the Wi-Fi network and vice versa.

This is very challenging, and it is an area where DiVitas claims to lead. So the first thing I did after turning on the phone was to make a call to check it out. I didn’t need to look at the on-screen indicator to know that the call was running over my office Wi-Fi network. The sound quality (did I mention this before?) was superb. So I walked out of range of the WLAN and sure enough the call handed over to the cellular network without dropping. There was a brief interlude of music and the call continued. Going back into the WLAN coverage area the handoff was completely seamless, perceptible only by the improvement in call quality as it moved from the cellular to the WLAN network.

Superior sound quality and seamless handover, while impressive to an engineer who knows what’s entailed, are not really sexy to regular users – it’s just a phone behaving like you would expect. DiVitas takes it to the next level by overcoming another technical challenge, delivering a polished, well thought-through, feature rich and well integrated user interface on the phone.

Actually, the DiVitas software client for the handset overcomes two challenges. The technical challenge of integration with the phone’s native software environment, and the design challenges of usability and usefulness. User interfaces are a matter of personal taste; the best are those that don’t get in the way of doing what you want. I disappointed the people at DiVitas by discarding their carefully written instructions and forging ahead by trial and error. Considering the potential consequences of this behavior I got away lightly. Everything worked the way I expected it to, and there were some nice touches, including Skype-like presence icons by the names in the directory.
While we’re on the topic of the directory, one thing that jumps out is the four digit phone numbers.

This is an indicator of yet another set of technical challenges that DiVitas has overcome to deliver their solution, namely integration with the corporate PBX, and presentation of the PBX features through the cell-phone user interface. DiVitas users will actually get a superior experience of the PBX through their cell phone compared to their desk phone. This is because the DiVitas software has a computer industry heritage rather than a telco heritage; it takes advantage of the nice big color screen with features like the presence icons and voice mail presented in an on-screen list like on the iPhone.

So the big news here is that a product has finally caught up with the hype around enterprise Mobile Unified Communications. All my criticisms (DiVitas got an earful) are nitpicking. For me the system worked as advertised, and that’s saying a lot.

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White Spaces Heat Up

In my last post I alluded to the techniques by which the TV broadcast industry was resisting the FCC’s exploration of unlicensed use of unused spectrum in the TV bands. These techniques appear to have borne fruit. Representative John Dingell has written to the FCC with some questions that they need to answer before their November 4th meeting that has White Spaces on the agenda.

I hope that Rep. Dingell keeps an open mind on this issue, and studies it sufficiently deeply to form a balanced opinion. I hope the FCC commissioners stick to their guns and argue persuasively for their plans.

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White Spaces Videos

I found this “grass roots” video on Google’s Public Policy Blog. That blog also has some interesting posts on related issues by Richard Whitt and Vint Cerf.

Looking at this provoked me to go to YouTube and search for other White Spaces related videos. I was interested to find a coordinated (by Google) effort by the proponents of White Spaces, and on the other side basically nothing – just this incredibly lame video that takes 7 minutes to tell us that microphones are used in sports broadcasting (don’t waste your time watching more than a few seconds – it’s the same all the way through).

It’s odd that the main opponents of Whitespaces (NAB and MSTV) haven’t put rebuttal videos on YouTube yet, and even odder that they haven’t found a need to present any more thoughtful analyses of the issue, equivalent (but presumably opposite) to those of Chris Sacca or Tim Wu. Instead, I have the impression that their strategy rests on the two prongs of public fear-mongering and bare-knuckled political lobbying.