Sony Ericsson Dominates User Survey

In an informal survey on UMAToday.com, 48% of web site visitors who voted selected the Sony Ericsson G705u as the best UMA handset, as compared to the LG KF-757 with 26.27% and Samsung’s P270 with 25.33%.

Sony Ericsson launched its G705u in September 2008. Us UMA enthusiasts rejoiced because, not only was this Sony Ericsson's first UMA devices, it was one of the first 3G/UMA devices ever. Orange was the first to grab the phone for its Unik customers.

The G705u features include a 2.4-inch display with automatic screen rotation courtesy of an accelerometer, aGPS with Google Maps for Mobile, 1GB included M2 memory, built-in FM radio, RSS reader, and full HTML browser. It also features a 3.2 megapixel cam that can capture video and then upload directly to YouTube under a new partnership with Google.

There’s a new survey at UMAToday.com now. Let us know what you think about femtocells.

What Are You Gonna Do Now, Mr. Operator?

Google Voice is coming out of beta, and the blogosphere is buzzing. Unfortunately for mobile operators, this is yet another over-the-top competitor that threatens to take over.

GigaOm’s Om Malik doesn’t mince words when he states:

“The Google Voice app essentially reduces the cell phone carrier to a dumb pipe.”

Google recently announced it will soon make its voice service widely available to users in the U.S. Mobile versions will allow users to manage Google Voice connections accessing and playing back voice mails, sending and receiving SMS messages and reading message transcripts, as well as making local and long distance calls from mobile phones. The apps will be fully integrated with contacts on the phone, so you can call via Google Voice straight from your address book.

Here's a screenshot from GigaOm:

In a Fierce Wireless article, Mike Dano purports that "[Google Voice] should give entrenched wireless operators pause. They've based their businesses on providing voice calling to millions, and if they can't at least stay on top of the innovations in that segment, what hope do they have of remaining relevant in a mobile broadband future?”

While FMC services like UMA and femtocells don’t provide all the bells and whistles of Google Voice, these services can go a long way for operators when competing with over-the-top services. One of the key features continues to be discounted international calling, and operators can bill calls made over Wi-Fi and/or femtocells at a dramatically reduced cost per minute, attacking one of the most important consumer issues.

UMA Workaround?

When will we get UMA on the Android? I’m not the only one lamenting this sad state. Chatter on the Android Forums is chock full of techies hoping for a workaround or that T-Mobile will add it. Consumer demand is there, it’s time to get UMA on these new Android products.

Sprint Embraces Wi-Fi

Sprint in the US is not and has never been a UMA operator. Still, I’ve written about the company before. Now, Sprint is making things a little more interesting for the dual-mode handset market.

"Sprint is embracing WiFi in all its major devices going forward," Jeff Clemow, the carrier's director of business product marketing, was quoted in a recent article in Fierce Wireless.

"It is now a requirement for all our PDA equipment suppliers to include WiFi," Clemow said, pointing to the new Palm Pre, which sports Wi-Fi, as evidence of the carrier's new position. "Several quarters ago we made a conscious decision to require all of our PDA suppliers to support Wi-Fi."

We have to say it. Sprint is behind the eight-ball on this whole “Wi-Fi is the way thing.” RIM has been leading the device market with Wi-Fi (and UMA-enabled) BlackBerries for some time, and spoke about how it was inevitable back in May 2008. The whole European market’s been bullish on Wi-Fi for some time now. In a study published in summer 2008, the European Union reported that within the EU27, 46% of households with internet access have Wi-Fi.

Even with a femtocell service, Sprint is realizing the best way to provide offload is with Wi-Fi. Now let’s talk about UMA…

A UMA-Enabled iPhone?!

Someone is making a compelling case for a UMA-enabled iPhone, and, surprisingly, it’s not me.

In a recent article in PC World, IT Manager Michael Scalisi writes that he likes the new iPhone 3GS; Apple did a good job. However, it doesn’t quite cut it for business users.

"...However, the lack of a keyboard, UMA and better battery features allows the competition an edge with business users.”

Michael proposes the 3GS ‘B’ – another version of the much-loved iPhone. The B stands for business. That, he says, is what will cut into RIM’s ‘remaining share of the smartphone pie.” And, it’s a good business decision for Apple.

Michael makes a compelling case. It’s what I’ve been dreaming of for quite some time.

The argument is simple and a win-win for Apple and business users. Michael sums it up:

“A business model iPhone with a full QWERTY keyboard, UMA and a longer battery life would eliminate some of the last reasons for BlackBerry users to abstain from switching to an iPhone.”

VoLGA Webinar Redux

Did you get a chance to listen in live to the webinar the VoLGA Forum sponsored with Light Reading? If not, the replay is available now.

The topic was "Solving the Voice & SMS over LTE Problem." The focus was on understanding the issues from an operator's perspective. The concept of VoLGA, or Voice over LTE via the existing 3GPP UMA/GAN standard, is to “elevate” voice and SMS services to become packet applications over LTE. Today there is no viable mechanism to support SMS over LTE. VoLGA can be used to deliver SMS over LTE and solve this immediate issue facing service deployment.

Gabriel Brown, a senior analyst with Heavy Reading who covers the LTE landscape, introduced the topic and discussed the current landscape. The bulk of the presentation was by Franz Seiser, head of core network architecture with Deutsche Telekom (formerly T-Mobile International).

Listen to it at your leisure. Interested in more about VoLGA? Visit the VoLGA Forum site and VoiceoverLTE.com.

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.

Mi-Fi

Having spent a week in Germany hearing about the need for speed and ubiquitous connectivity via LTE, I was intrigued by the headline “Will your mobile phone become a Wi-Fi hotspot?”

Several presentations during the LTE Conference focused on potentially billions of Internet connected devices (GSMA prediction was 50 billion), presumably enabled by low-cost, high speed mobile (LTE) access. The question, or problem, with this scenario is a natural need to separate a subscription from access. I might want my refrigerator on the Internet, but I don’t want to put a SIM in it or have it tied to my mobile service provider.

This is the beauty of Wi-Fi. I pay for a subscription, in the form of DSL service (and presumable LTE in the future), and any device with Wi-Fi/IP connectivity can use it.

Skip ahead to Mi-Fi, a new technology concept pioneered by chip-maker Atheros. The idea is that your mobile phone uses mobile data service (HSPA, LTE) on the WAN, and the Wi-Fi radio on the phone can set up a localized HotSpot. Now Wi-Fi enabled devices within proximity of your phone can get access to the Internet via the mobile broadband subscription.

Very clever.

Medium

During my trip to Berlin this week, I was faced with the question which has confounded American diners in Europe forever:

Do I want water that is ‘still’ or ‘with gas’?

Any time I’m at dinner and that question comes up, everyone glances around the table, wondering who will answer.

Yet on this trip, it was clear some entrepreneur spotted an opportunity in the confusion. For when the waiter saw the puzzled look on our faces, he offered “medium”.

Who new there was lightly carbonated water? A cross between still and sparkling. I wonder if they keep it around just for the Americans.

LTE World Summit

I’m just back from Berlin at Informa’s LTE World Summit event. There is no doubt that voice was a hot topic. Voice over LTE permeated all three days of the conference.

While IMS remains most operator’s long term voice strategy, it’s clear that a more immediate solution is required. To date a technology called CS Fallback has emerged as the primary ‘competition’ to VoLGA.

Marc Fossier, vice president for Orange/FT Group, articulated the general perception of CS Fallback, when he said in his presentation that “…2G/3G fallback is not a very nice solution, but it could be usable.” That’s a vote of confidence!

Later in the conference, Franz Seiser with T-Mobile presented VoLGA. Mr. Seiser articulated the drivers for T-Mobile to push VoLGA. T-Mobile requirements for voice over LTE include:

• Provide a good customer experience
• Use the LTE radio
  
• Build upon the existing Rel-4 CS network and investment
• “do not touch the MSC”
• Build upon fully 3GPP compliant Rel-8 EPC/LTE network
• Reuse existing CS roaming/interconnect regime
• Minimize impact on handset, especially the UI

For this, T-Mobile has ruled out CS Fallback. After this conference, I suspect other operators will as well.

CS Fallback

The primary alternative to VoLGA for voice over LTE is an approach known as CS Fallback. Defined in 3GPP release 8, CS Fallback is widely accepted as an interim solution to solving the voice over LTE ‘problem’.

As the name implies, CS Fallback ‘falls back’ from the LTE network to use the Circuit Services inherent in the 2G and 3G network to make and receive voice calls.

If this sounds counter-intuitive, that’s because it is.

LTE is the fastest, lowest cost access mobile access network the world has ever developed. Why would an operator deploy LTE and then *not* put its primary revenue generating service (voice) on it? Even worse: devise a system that forces users back to the previous network. It doesn’t make any sense.

With CS Fallback there are implications on the user experience with LTE. First, there is undoubtedly an additional delay in making a phone call. Switching networks takes time, and that’s added time the user is waiting to make or receive a phone call.

Switching networks is also when call drops tend to happen. So when’s the best time to hand over to another network? The exact moment the user knows they have a call coming in? Probably not.

Next, the phone needs to stop what it is doing on LTE (streaming a video? Internet radio? …) and re-connect to the 2G or 3G network. As a user, you need to decide to cancel your data session to answer the phone. Not exactly ideal if you bought the phone for high speed data. The data session may be able to hand back to the 3G network, but certainly all is lost if the phone falls back to 2G.

Thinking of using LTE for combinatorial services (voice and video)? Good luck. No voice, no combinatorial services on LTE. Everything will have to be on 3G.

Then there is the cost. To support CS Fallback, a new interface must be developed on the MSC. If there’s one thing mobile operators don’t want to do, it’s change the MSC. Not only are MSC upgrades expensive, they require a fair bit of testing and validation. The MSC is the heart of the core voice service so any change is approached cautiously.

As an interim solution, it’s clear that CS Fallback falls short.

Congratulations, Orange! Orange continues its successful service. The company’s Unik (UMA-based) service was awarded Best WiFi Product or Service from Wireless Broadband Innovation (WBI).

Unik was one of four finalists in its category and was selected as the winner by a panel of independent judges.

Orange has proven itself to be a big winner. Most recently, it received a Global Telecom Business Innovation Awards.

The UMA-based Unik service offers a low-cost, high-performance service at home. Orange was one of the first operators globally to bring UMA technology to its customers. Today, Orange continues to expand its offerings based on Unik, including offering multimedia services with its new 3G UMA platform. Unik has generated a 19€/month ARPU increase per household; and household traffic has increased 50 percent, while mobile calls from home have tripled.

VoLGA Forum Keeps its Nose to the Grindstone

The VoLGA-Forum continues its quiet preparation. Late last week on its site, the group published a draft of the Stage 2 / Architecture specifications.

This is the latest spec publication from a group comprised of leaders in the wireless industry seeking to enable mobile operators to deliver mobile voice and messaging services over LTE access networks based on the existing 3GPP GAN standard.

The group’s next step is to finalize these specs and move them from the draft category to final.

VoLGA = Operator’s response to Mobile VoIP

The ‘skype-hype’ is reaching a new level, and for good reason. By some accounts, Skype (through Skype Out or point to point) now accounts for 30% of the massive international calling market today.

And now VoIP is going mobile. Gartner just released a report suggesting that in the next 10 years, more than half of mobile voice traffic will be VoIP based, with much of that enabled through the introduction of LTE. It seems to me that launching an LTE service without voice is inviting mobile VoIP into your network.

This is why the voice over LTE ‘problem’ is so critical for mobile operators, and why more and more operators are investigating VoLGA.

VoLGA lets mobile operators leverage the voice infrastructure already in place to compete directly with Mobile VoIP. With VoLGA, mobile operators can weave their voice service into the myriad of Web 2.0 applications, leveraging the unbridled innovation of the Internet while embedding their core revenue generating service.

In addition, VoLGA lets mobile operators take their voice service beyond handsets, turning it into a VoIP object which can be downloaded to laptops, ultra-mobile PCs, mobile internet devices, or embedded into LTE home gateways.

From the beginning, the power of the UMA/GAN specification has been to extend the mobile operator’s core service to the internet. Now more than ever, mobile operators are turning to UMA/GAN to solve this problem.

Free UMA Service For Enterprises

As reported by Xchange magazine just a few minutes ago, T-Mobile is making some significant changes to its enterprise service offer.

First, enterprises with 100 or more lines of service from T-Mobile can receive free nationwide Wi-Fi calling with UMA-enabled Blackberries. No more $10/month for service.

In addition, T-Mobile is adding Research In Motion’s MVS product to its portfolio. MVS extends the PBX desk phone to Blackberries.

This is a significant step towards FMS in the enterprise. Employees can get a UMA-enabled Blackberry and receive free unlimited calling in North America, along with email service and potentially MVS. Sit at your desk, roam the halls, work from home, it's free calling when attached to Wi-Fi. Very compelling.

I'm sure the Yankee Group, who recently published a story about their move to enteprise UMA, is happy to hear about this development.

It looks like Enteprise UMA is picking up.

Is UMA Today Prophetic?

Stephen Lawson of IDG News Service wrote an article recently that was picked up by Network World and a few other publications. The article, IPhone Skype May Be Tip of the Iceberg for Carriers, delves into the challenges mobile operators are currently facing by the proliferation of over-the-top mobile VoIP services. For example, Skype, now available on the iPhone, has been downloaded more than 2 million times.

Flash back to the first UMA Today newspaper (now magazine) we published in January 2006. Look at this cartoon we drew up to illustrate the major hazard VoIP poses for mobile operators. So have we come full circle, have we not advanced at all, or is UMA Today simply a prophet?
All good questions, but the answer is not quite so mysterious. VoIP service providers have been and continue to be a key source of competition for operators. Some, like 3 UK, have chosen to give up their voice service to Skype, while others are using UMA to combat mobile VoIP.

UMA was originally envisioned as the operator’s response to Skype. Provide a VoIP service integrated with the mobile service, provide features that other VoIP services don’t have, and give consumers the best mobile experience for a great price over the Internet. It’s a story that doesn’t get old.