With summer holidays now upon us (well, if you're 14 maybe but not if you have to work for your living), OFCOM has launched an online safety campaign.
According to OFCOM:
Two-thirds of 5-7 year olds now use the internet at home, rising to over three-quarters of 8-11 year olds and over four-fifths of 12-15s.
Of these, one fifth of 5-7 year olds use the internet without an adult present, as do almost half of 8-11 year olds and two-thirds of 12-15s.
12-15 year olds say they spend an average of nearly 14 hours a week online.
Over a third of 12-15 year olds say they mostly access the internet in their bedroom. During this time they could encounter inappropriate or even potentially harmful content.
Though surely the better advice is that handed out by that classic children's television, "Why Don't You ... just switch off the television [or computer], go outside and do something less boring instead."
Following on from Viviane Reding's comments last week, the European Commission has formally opened a consultation period on how the digital switchover spectrum should be managed on a pan-EU level. Predictably, given the success of GSM, they are trying a repeat performance with mobile broadband.
Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and, of course, Finland have already committed to releasing some of the digital dividend spectrum for mobile broadband... and as we've seen from the Digital Britain report, the UK is heading in a similar direction too.
However, the point isn't that regulators are making spectrum available for mobile broadband, the point is what spectrum is available. We're seeing auctions at 2.6Ghz, refarming of 900mhz and now 790-862mhz (the so-called 'digital dividend' band).
You can see why the Commission is claiming that at extra €30 billion in economic benefits could be realised through continued EU co-ordination.
However, this all brings me back to a point I raised last month - who manages the spectrum? Is it the national regulator (you only need to look at Finland to see a regulator happy to plough their own furrow)? Is it the ITU? Well, it should be the ITU. Afterall, its of limited use having an LTE dongle that only works in the. We may as well go back to CDMA v. GSM battle of yesteryear.
So you can see why the European Commission is getting involved. But there are much bigger stakes to play for than just what happens to the old analogue TV spectrum. If mobile broadband is going to deliver real economic benefits, we need to think much bigger. And the ITU needs to step up to the mark.
It looks like Viviane Reding is alive and kicking at the European Commission after being nominated for another five year term and issuing her customary rallying call to governments and the telecom industry to move faster down the path of liberalisation.
Less than a month after the UK government released it's Digital Britain report restating it's ambition to complete the digital switchover from analogue TV by 2012, Reding has urged European government's to bring forward plans and not wait until 2012. What's more, Reding reckons the EU-wide switchover would increase the value of spectrum by between €150 billion and €200 billion.
That's a hefty sum, although just how much operators are able and/or willing to pay for spectrum right now is a different matter. Indeed, the tone coming out of the Digital Britain report was far more about maximising coverage rather than maximising the monies generated by any spectrum auctions... which when you consider the still poor 3G coverage in the UK, is probably a sensible move.
The maps come with some caveats. The benchmark they've used is already pretty low, that is to say the signal strength needed to count as 'coverage' was just 10% of maximum transmit power and this had to be exceeded for 50% of the locations for 50% of the time. Oh, and it only measures outdoor coverage, not indoor where signal strength degrades even further. So it's a very conservative map, designed to give the operators the best chance of succeeding you might say.
And who comes out looking best? Well, H3G is the clear winner when it comes to nationwide coverage (although if you're Welsh, Scottish or from Norfolk you can still forget it). Orange comes a credible second. Quite frankly though, for all the naming and shaming, O2 is still pathetic. You can maybe drive from London to Liverpool and have 3G the whole way, but you'd have to pick your route damn carefully. The one that surprised me though was Vodafone. I expected better (and to use the same 'test' as for O2 as above, you can't even do London-Liverpool and stay within Voda 3G coverage because of a 'Not-Spot' that looks to be around the Northampton area!).
But all is not lost, because while the nationwide 3G coverage is still poor for many operators, the coastal coverage is excellent! That's right, if you want to sail from Margate to Falmouth, 8 out of 10 sailors say their yachts prefer Vodafone!
The news that Nokia and Intel have teamed up to “define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks” raises interesting questions about who the winners will be in the brave new all-IP world that is LTE. Or, more pertinently, what will this mean for the previous goliath of mobile chipsets and licencing - Qualcomm?
The Intel/Nokia tie up in many ways looks to the same inspiration, but with a difference. Intel knows how to make computing devices; Nokia knows how to make mobile phones. Crucially, they are talking about the devices being "pocketable" (and hopefully they're not working on the assumption that everyone in 2010 is going to be wearing baggy cargo pants!). The details are still vague but there are a few things that the tie-up suggests:
First, it's a real shot in the arm for mobile Linux and other open source projects. Potentially, it's not good news for Symbian, although you could argue that it's already given up the fight now that it has also gone the route of reinventing itself as the Symbian Foundation.
Furthermore, the implications go further than this deal because of Intel's acquisition of Wind River earlier this month. This really could be the beginning of something big in the broader connected devices market. As we're already seeing with devices such as TomTom embedding connectivity into them, more and more consumer electronics devices are being connected. This isn't about Smartphone functionality in a device as big as book, it's about taking devices we already use and connecting them to new services and creating new revenue streams for operators. The combination of Intel, Wind River and Nokia is potentially a powerful one here especially.
At the moment, the deal gives Intel an HSPA 3G licence but continue the line of thought and the Intel/Nokia tie-up is bad news for Qualcomm. The new mobile platform that it creates goes far beyond netbook and smartbooks. It potentially sets the scene for a much bigger play in the wider consumer electronics market, leaving Snapdragon on the sidelines.
So it's just struck me, substitute Snapdragon for Puff the magic dragon in the well known ditty, and you get a sense of what the future may hold:
Qualcomm, the snapdragon lived by the sea* And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee, Qualcomm, the snapdragon lived by the sea And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.
A dragon lives forever but not so little boys Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys. One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more And snap that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.
And all together now ...
* [Ed note: San Diego is by the sea, so it works!]
All of a sudden, the world seems to have gone femto-crazy ... or more accurately, operators have finally decided to bite the bullet and deploy services. Disapppointingly, this seems to mean that my big brave prediction for 2009 has been shot down only six months into the year. I still maintain that LTE will be the bigger opportunity for femtocells, but nevertheless the news that Vodafone and AT&T are launching commercial services this year goes to show that there is some immediate and real opportunity as well.
However, looking deeper into the news and you get a sense of some of the underlying themes which will now start to come to the fore.
Quality of Service: Suffice it to say, if I used a Voda femto in my flat in London, I would struggle to get more than three words out so bad is my Tiscali broadband. The simple fact is an operator can never guarantee QoS. In a conventional network, they can guarantee it throughout the core as far as the cell site, but as soon as it hits the RAN, there are so many environmental variables (pesky things like buildings that get in the way) that the operator can only then do a best effort. Now, in theory, femtocells solve this problem - it fixes the in-building RF problem. But, if operators such as Vodafone then use the subscribers' own DSL connection to backhaul the call, they have again surrendered control over QoS. In fact, they've taken a step back. While they can optimise the RAN, they have no control over the ISP.
The Form Factor: At the moment, AT&T and Vodafone are planning to go to market with standalone femtocells. The marketing wizards at AT&T have branded theirs a '3G microcell, clearly expecting the US consumer to be tech-savvy, while Vodafone have gone the route of calling it an 'Access Gateway' (access to what, you can already hear consumers asking). However, AT&T has also alluded to 'integrated femtocells' coming later, and this is perhaps where it becomes a real consumer market. I sat in a briefing by Continuous Computing* with Ovum this week and this point came up. Although a lot of the details are still under wraps, Continuous Computing said that not only are about half of their femtocell design wins are with set-top box manufacturers and the like, but that we should be seeing the first integrated femtocell products shipping around late 2009 / early 2010.
The Pricing: Well, this really is the big one, isn't it. The pricing from Voda has that the femtocell with be free on selected tariffs (so operator subsidised like handsets) and also bundled in some phone packages. If you buy the femtocell as a standalone, you're looking at £160 or £5 per month. I won't even try and digest the different phone packages since I've always maintained their are designed solely to confuse but it's clear that the subscriber is going to have to pay extra to solve a coverage problem which you can be pretty sure they weren't warned about when they first bought their shinny 3G handset.
But let's not be churlish. Femtocells are going commercial with two tier 1 operators and for an industry that has invested time, money and effort in creating the market, that can only be a good thing. Well, provided they work and deliver on the subscribers' expectations that is ...
London 2012 is already starting to have an impact on the infrastructure of London, and that includes communications.
OFCOM today "published proposals under section 107(6) of the Communications Act 2003 to extend Airwave Solutions Limited's powers under the electronic communications code to enable it to rollout a private mobile radio network for The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralmypic Games."
It seems like every company in the land is fighting for its share of public money sloshing around in East London right now, so who might be some of the winners?
TETRA ... despite having over 150 organisations from 35 countries (according to the TETRA Association) backing the standard, it never has exactly hit the big time. But as the OFCOM news suggests, there's still life in the old dog yet.
Mobile TV ... every major global sporting event seems to spur an innovation in broadcasting. If the Beijing Olympics saw HD going mainstream (the 2006 FIFA World Cup was the first to be broadcast in HD), then what price London 2012 being the one to reignite mobile TV? The BBC is one of the few broadcasters with the resources to innovate and deliver it, and then there's that L-band spectrum that Qualcomm bought that's lying dormant ...
NFC ... the BT team responsible for the communications at London 2012 are apparently looking at NFC for micro-payments of under £10 within the Olympic Park. While the Oyster card is a success for Londoners already, this could be the spur to start seeing NFC embedded into more handsets and to see retailers equiped with NFC-enabled mobile terminals
.. and then of course there's everything else that comes with it ... the network planning, the extra base stations, the mobile apps (both officially sanctioned and those trying to pull a fast one), the list goes on. Hell, we may even have LTE and universal broadband by then ;-)
Yesterday's publication of the Digital Britain report has predictably been met with headlines about the imposition of a broadband ‘levy’ (or ‘tax’ to you and me) to help fund the future investment in a national high speed internet infrastructure.But, as the appointment of Martha Lane Fox as ‘Digital Inclusion Champion’ perhaps mischievously suggests, is this all a little bit of a lastminute strategy?
There are some interesting points contained within the report (Martha's appointment not being one of them!), not least the news that ISPs are going to be made responsible for policing their own subscribers. This is maybe not such good news for the ISPs, but for anyone selling DPI-related products, it can only be a good thing ... but more on this in a later post.
One area that hasn't received much attention thus far has been what it had to say about mobile networks. There has been some moaning that mobile is just being seen as a stop-gap solution until fixed networks can sort themselves out and deliver the requisite speeds (a heady 2Mbps) to the more remote, broadband-deprived parts of the country. However, I think that's a bit harsh, to be honest.
The report not only acknowledges that next generation mobile networks will be able to deliver data rates of up to 100Mbps, but clearly says that both 3G and LTE have a key role to play in delivering the goal of universal broadband coverage.
What is of perhaps more significance though is:
WiMAX is essentially dead in the UK. While it advocates "the immediate release of WiMAX-suitable 2.6Ghz unpaired TDD spectrum for auction", the reports lays its cards on the table and states that there is "an encouraging consensus amongst incumbent mobile operators for the mobile broadband networks to be based on either 3G or LTE. This does not preclude a new entrant using other technologies, such as WiMAX, but in the highly competitive UK mobile radio market it is highly unlikely that such a new entrant would have the market power to de-stabilise the vital standardisation that underpins national and international mobile roaming for UK users."
The 'Big Auction' for 2.6Ghz paired FDD spectrum (i.e. the spectrum for LTE) is set for mid-2010. But, there is still a big debate to be had over spectrum refarming before this can happen. Essentially, if Vodafone or O2 (who occcupy 900Mhz spectrum for their GSM services) want any 800Mhz spectrum for future mobile broadband services they will have to trade in their 2G spectrum. The reason, simply, is that the economic advantages of 900Mhz over 1800Mhz (greater cell coverage etc.) are such that the regulator has to balance it out so T-Mo and Orange aren't penalised. So the auction of 800Mhz and deployment of LTE rests on how easily 900Mhz can be refarmed.
In a bid to drive universal mobile broadband coverage and so get 3G services as nationwide as 2G, the terms of the 3G licences are going to change from time limited to indefinite in order to give operators a chance to see an ROI from extending their 3G coverage. What's more, the Digital Britain report seems to favour network sharing in the sub-1Ghz spectrum as a way of expediting this network expansion, not least because lowering the cost of delivering broadband coverage to the last 10% of the UK is critical given that they are so well dispersed and "not a viable market" on their own.
Overall, the Digital Britain report seems positive for mobile operators. I've heard murmurings of people saying LTE could solve all the problems and so we wouldn't need to pay the 'broadband tax' to bankroll building a nationwide high speed fixed network, but realistically this was never going to be the case. Any anyway, the economics of delivering mobile broadband in remote areas is still something that needs help from the regulator to balance.
Either way, with several important spectrum issues to be resolved over the next 12 months, it's clear that there is still much to play for in the role mobile networks will have in policies to finally deliver a universal high speed internet in the UK.
The Digital Britain White Paper has just been published... Analysis to follow once I've read all 245 pages, but according to the Dept of Media and Culture's press release, Digital Britain measures include:
Communications Infrastructure Steps to strengthen and modernise the UK’s Digital Infrastructure so the UK can compete and lead globally
* Universal access to today’s broadband by 2012, creating equal access for all and a fairer digital future * A fund for investment in the next generation of superfast broadband to ensure it is available to the whole country, not just some of it * Digital Radio Upgrade by 2015 * Accelerating current and next generation mobile coverage and services * Proposed new role for sectoral regulator Ofcom to carry out a full assessment of the UK’s communications infrastructure every two years
Digital Participation Steps to ensure that everyone can share in the benefits of Digital Britain
* Three year National Plan to improve Digital Participation * Programme of Digital Switchover in public services * A new Digital Inclusion Champion: Martha Lane Fox * Revised Digital remit for Channel 4 and key role for BBC * Guaranteed funding for three years for targeted marketing and outreach
Digital content Steps to make the UK one of the world’s main creative capitals
* Robust legal and regulatory framework to combat Digital Piracy * Digital Test Beds to promote innovation, experimentation and learning around creation and monetization of digital content * TV Licence Fee: consultation on contained contestability, primarily to secure news in the nations, regions and locally * A new direction for Channel 4, championing new talent across all digital media * Guidance note and clarification on the media merger regime and an enhanced evidence role for the regulator in local mergers * Support for Independently Funded News Consortia
The contention that Chinese infrastructure vendors (namely ZTE* and Huawei) are going to dominate the market has gathered more momentum. Tarek A. Robbiati, CEO of Hong Kong's number one mobile operator CSL said in London today that “Further consolidation will come in the next three to five years. In the end there will be only three [infrastructure vendors] left, and two of them will be Chinese. The European vendors are just too slow.”
Perhaps even more significantly, according to Telecoms.comwho met with Robbiati today (Robbiati is in London with ZTE to discuss their work together in deploying an HSPA+ all-IP SDR network) he also argued that ZTE and Huawei can no longer be viewed as competing only on price - an accusation that has been levelled at the two vendors in the past. Price remained important, he said, but technical performance was the deal maker.
The combination of financial muscle, a production capability that can continue to thrive in an increasingly commoditised market, and a growing track record for innovation and R&D is a powerful one. Not least because there are some competitors who are reporting poor financials, are struggling to keep costs under control and are being driven to outsource more and more of their R&D and software development.
Well, they say the customer is always right ... and ZTE will be hoping that this one most certainly is.
Watch this space for an analysis on the Digital Britain report once it's published, but in the interim, check out the story so far on whether broadband should be considered a utility:
For a while now I've been banging on about whether Broadband should be considered a 'utility', particularly in light of the decision by the Australian Government to invest in building a 'National Broadband Network'. Well, it seems as if we finally have an answer ... Yes, it should be.
According to Anna Bradley, the chair of the Communications Consumer Panel: "The key message is that people think broadband is at a tipping point. It's fantastically useful for everyone, essential for some now, but will be essential for everyone in the near future. It is being compared by consumers to gas and electricity - things which they think we all ought to have access to, almost as a right."
Consumers questioned in the survey supported broadband access for all and said that:
It should be possible to have broadband at home, regardless of where people live (84% agree, 46% agree strongly).
It is everyone's right to be able to have broadband at home (81% agree, 42% agree strongly).
It should be possible also for people to gain the confidence and skills to make full use of broadband at home (80% agree, 32% agree strongly).
It should be possible to access broadband at home, even if they have a low income (73% agree, 32% agree strongly).
But, if we do indeed consider broadband to be a utility that should be available to all, the UK has some way to go both compared to its peers internationally but also domestically.
According to research commissioned by the BBC, about three million homes in the UK have broadband speeds of less than the magic 2Mbps. What's more, the physical distance of many homes from the local exchange mean it is practically impossible for them to get anywhere nears this speed.
The map of these so-called Broadband NotSpots put the scale of the problem in context (check out ThinkBroadband and SamKnows for their NotSpot maps).
Richard is director of AxiCom’s telecoms and wireless practice. He joined AxiCom in 1999, initially working across multiple IBM accounts before going on to found and build the telecoms expertise within the agency.
Prior to joining AxiCom, Richard graduated with first class honours in International Politics and International History from the University of Wales and went on to lecture in economic history at Aberystwyth.
Should events ever take a turn for the worse in the world of Technology PR then Richard has been trained in bushcraft by Ray Mears, he can light a fire by rubbing sticks together and make a rope out of stinging nettles.
With summer holidays now upon us (well, if you're 14 maybe but not if you have to work for your living), OFCOM has launched an online safety campaign.
Though surely the better advice is that handed out by that classic children's television, "Why Don't You ... just switch off the television [or computer], go outside and do something less boring instead."
