T-Mobile's VoLGA Webinar

On Wednesday July 1, Franz Seiser, T-Mobile Germany’s head of core network technology, will present the company’s views on VoLGA.

You may have seen a snippet of Franz from the LTE World Summit last month in Berlin where is talked about the importance of SMS for data-only LTE deployments.

The webinar will be a good opportunity to understand what problems T-Mobile uncovered with the existing voice over LTE options and why the company is working within the VoLGA Forum to develop a new approach.

See you there.

FMC in the UK: Game On!

Today Vodafone announced, during a presentation at the Femtocell World Summit, a new femtocell product for the UK market available July 1. No actual press release yet, but there are several reports from the event.

Details of the offer a bit sketchy, but according to the Register (and other insiders), the Vodafone Access Gateway will cost t £160 as a one-off price. Alternatively there are bundled options with specific phones which run a monthly fee of £15 – £30. There may also be an option for subscribers with high-tariff packages to receive a femtocell for free.

It’s not clear what subscribers get in return. Most obviously, a femto offers excellent indoor coverage. Perhaps users will also get some type of discounted calling when attached to the femtocell.

Of course, Orange has offered it’s Unique service, based on Wi-Fi, in the UK for some time now. While there has never been nation-wide promotion of Unique, it’s estimated the company has sold between 250,000 and 500,000 Unique-enabled devices.

This leaves T-Mobile and O2/Telefonica as the two operators in the UK without some type of Home Zone service bundle. Looks like it’s Game On! for FMC in the UK.

Nokia's VoIP Aspirations

Nokia’s lack of support for UMA in handsets, exacerbated by the latest research that they are 50% of the market for dual-mode Wi-Fi phones , has long been a frustration for the UMA community.

On the other hand, Nokia actively pushes their SIP client in devices, with a table listing devices and discussion framework.

The difference is that UMA/GAN is a technology which route VoIP calls to (and through) the mobile operator.

Whereas SIP is used by everyone but the mobile operator, primarily third party VoIP companies like Fring and Truphone.

Clearly Nokia believes in Mobile VoIP, but just not mobile VoIP for their primary customer base, the mobile operators.

All this got me thinking, why would Nokia work so hard to put SIP into their handsets when SIP isn’t used by any mobile operator today?

Why SMS is critical for LTE datacards

There’s a good post on the Voice over LTE blog about the critical need to support SMS with LTE datacards and netbooks. While we often think of SMS as a consumer service, in reality, it was originally developed as an operational control channel for the mobile network to communicate with devices in the field.

The lack of a traditional SMS channel in LTE will hamper LTE datacards and netbooks. According to the post, there are many, many operator systems which rely on SMS to provide customer care, management and provisioning messages to the datacards, and the lack of SMS support in LTE is a serious issue.

Look for VoLGA to step up and meet this need.

Qualcomm get aggressive on Wi-Fi

There are several articles out today talk about Qualcomm’s new 802.11n chipsets. It appears there is one chip for the home router/gateway market, and a second targeting the embedded handset market. Glenn Fleishman comments that the products are timed right to support multiple HD TV streams in the home.

It’s good to see Qualcomm getting aggressive with Wi-Fi.