Spiral Arm News

Understanding Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA).

Bill Day commented on the release of the UMA technology specifications by Nokia, BT, Motorola, O2, T-Mobile, Cingular and others. What does it mean? It's a technology that allows mobile phones to automatically switch from public cellular networks onto private networks based on WiFi and Bluetooth technologies. (WiFi and Bluetooth are both use unlicensed spectrum, hence the U in UMA).

In practice: when you're in the office, your mobile phone could use your company network for telephony, fast data access, and cost savings; when you're out of the office, the phone will switch to a standard cellular radio network.

From a technology perspective, it will be interesting to see which parts of the network infrastructure the operators open up. The more they open, the more services can be accessed from inside any business.

Currently, this is a specification which will need to be approved before it becomes part of 3G.

mmO2 report: mobile phone contributes as much as 3.23% to regional GDP.

At the SourceO2 conference this year, Mike Short announced a study on the contribution of mobile phones to the UK economy. The report is now avalable from mmO2.

Some key results:

• mobile telephone industry contributes £22bn to UK GDP in 2003 (2.2%);
• supports 197,000 jobs;
• the South East has the highest contribution figures, partly because many operators are based there.

Camera phones: Samsung's 5 megapixel model.

The Forbes infoimaging report confirms that the SCH-S250 is a result of Samsung's work with Asahi Pentax, and is due for release this month.
Reiter's Camera Phone Report has pictures of the device.

Naively following the exponential curve for the number of pixels would predict a 10 megapixel camera phone by March 2005, which ties up with predictions made by lens company Carl Zeiss last month. "That's a significant claim, however, given that dedicated professional digital cameras have not yet reached that level of detail".

Ovum: no one dominant player; "trying to be the next Microsoft is a disease".

The report, quoted in Computing, goes on to suggest that "vendors in the mobile sector should accept that they are working with a very segmented market and be prepared to engage with a variety of hardware and software platforms".

O2 customers to get public wi-fi access.

The announcement reported in The Guardian only applies to customers with O2 data cards in their laptops. These customers will benefit from the deal with The Cloud, and will gain access to broadband wi-fi in pubs, coffee shops, and other public places. To us it will make sense for this connectivity to extend to handsets. If a customer becomes use to the idea of accessing data services over wi-fi from a mobile phone, we expect they will naturally use the services over the cellular networks when they are out of wi-fi hot spots.

An interview with Dave McGlade, chief executive of O2 in the UK, in Computing (14, October 2004, p. 20) confirms some of the 3G themes being reported lately. "In my view, 3G won't take off until later in 2005 and will get much bigger in 2006 [...] with the combination of 3G and 2.5G, there'll be less need to have a fixed line."

Breakfast TV broadcaster to roll out mobile application.

Following on from recent announcements from The Sun newspaper, broadcaster Endemol and other publishers, GMTV is to provide a downloadable mobile application to present advertising-based content to their viewers, reports New Media Age.

The objective of "GMTV Club" is to build loyalty in addition to revenue.

Schools reverse phone bans: staying in touch too much of a benefit to lose.

See TheFeature full their reports on how families are using text messaging.

Mobile market trends report: consumer mobile service awareness very high.

Colin Strong of NOP presented survey results at the SourceO2 conference in London (28 Sept 2004). The summary is that there is now high levels of awareness of mobile services, even across age groups, although usage levels are still lagging. The signs are that the market is now mainstream, rather than early adopter, and this provides an excellent base for the adoption of services.

Example content awareness results (and usage), based on a sample of 742 UK mobile phone users aged 15+:

• Ringtones: 80% (usage: 31%)


• Games: 76% (18%)


• Picture messaging: 71% (26%)


• Travel information: 48% (10%)


• Video clips: 44% (5%)

On age differences: the older generation value functional information-based services and will access them when required; the younger generation tend to use mobile content for entertainment and to fill dead time.

The presentation contained plenty of interesting analysis and suggestions around the awareness, adoption, age differences, habitual usage, and download preferences of mobile services. If you'd like to know more, do get in touch.

FT IT Review on 3G (printed 6 Oct 2004)

In South Korea, more than 50% of mobile users have 3G devices. Europe is about to start catching up, with more networks launching 3G devices in the run up to Christmas. 3G Technology, we're told, is now ready, and operators are keen to make use of the extra call capacity of 3G and hope the faster download speed will kick start a take up of data services. (p. 4).

Peter Bamford, chief marketing office, Vodafone: "Go forward a couple of years and you are going to see phones with three or four megapixel camers, CD-quality sound with storage capacity for hundreds of tracks or phones that will enable a gaming experience equivalent to any game console. This is the mobile phone industry going through in five years what the TV went through in 40 years."

Dave McGlade, CEO, O2: "I have a great deal of optimism over where 3G will go, but it has taken longer than everybody expected. Now, even if it takes just a little bit longer, I'm OK with that if it means getting the experience just right".

On the promise of video (p. 6): In South Korea, 8m users are on a SK Telecom EV-DO network with supplies data at 2.4Mbs, compared to 153kbs for CMDA2000 networks. ARPU figures for EV-DO users are three times higher than those on the CMDA network. The revenue is coming from video on demand and broadcasting. It's not just the speed, you need the right screen hardware and the right content. However, there's also the DVB-H digital TV standard, which is a more cost effective way to deliver video, while using the cellular network to carry a return single (e.g., for select content). Nokia are testing this technology.

Eduardo Claudio, director of data and content, TMN, Portugal's largest mobile operator: "We know there is not going to be any killer application for 3G but that is not the issue [...] Because 3G gives you a faster network with less latency, the experience is better than using 2.5G". In other words, existing services can be improved on 3G.

Substitution (p. 7): 3G can carry more calls at a higher quality at a lower cost. "Cost and quality are the main reasons why people do not use mobile phones more [...]". 3G should, then, increase fixed-mobile substitution (FMS). Mobile call costs have the potential to fall to just one-fifth of the 2.5G rate. Where does this leave fixed-line operators? Broadband may save them. For now, just 5% of households are mobile-only, but there's a question mark over whether people moving house will bother reconnecting their fixed line.

ARC Group report (p. 8): mobile computing will generate US$130b in data revenue by 2009 (26% will be from notebooks with 3G or 2.5G data cards). Total global market for mobile enterprise services will be US$177bn by the same time.

The FT also report that
British mobile operators are attempting to reclaim VAT on the amount they paid for 3G licensing. The case has been referred to the European Court of Justice. The question is over whether the government's sale of the licenses constitutes a economic activity in the telecoms market. The Euro VAT directives normally exclude public authorities from engaging in economic activity, except in any of 13 sectors. One of those sectors is telecommunications. Definitions of "economic activity" and "telecoms" are likely to feature in the case, which will take at least a year to play out. If the ruling is in favour of the mobile operators, then the refund would be around GBP3.35bn. (Source: FT, page 1, Oct 6 2004).

Peer-to-peer news distribution: a new role for mobile in publishing?

The Poynteronline's comments picked up by TheFeature suggests a future where news organizations can seed the marketplace with a bundle of late-breaking content which consumers will forward to their friends.

The idea came from the news that "beloved Dutch singer Andre Hazes" had died, an event that caused a doubling in SMS usage for operator KPN. For news organizations "the opportunity is to package the news not in a way that simply attracts more readers, but to be easily disseminated outward by those readers." The example suggested is: "Here is a message to forward, a picture, and part of a Hazes song attached."

40% of business mobile phone users will be mobile email users by 2008; other applications grow, too.

Computing's article, Squeezing BlackBerry, reports on the growth of mobile email, and what this means for BlackBerry. "BlackBerry is clearly the current gold standard as an elegant, secure, behind-the-firewall, push-based solution [...] the chasing pack of vendors smells this opportunity and is snapping at RIM's heels with a wide variety of products and pricing strategies, although none have hit the mark for broad deployment". Some of RIM's competitors are looking at PDA-based functionality, rather than smartphones, as organizations see PDAs as a separate technology and one which is in the remit of IT departments.

The potential of the business market for 2008:

• 40% of business mobile phone users will be mobile email users (which will be about 21m people in Europe).


• Revenue generated by email to increase from €49m in 2003 to €2.9bn by 2008.


• Overall business spend on mobile data services will increase 4x to €8bn.

However, the article acknowledges that there's more to mobile business than just email: "The range of applications being written for mobilising businesses is also increasing [...] Sales automation and mobile CRM tools, service management tools, GPS tracking for logistics, mobile accounting tools for expenses and compensation management, and retail point-of-sale systems are just some of the vertical applications that have already been targeted for mobility."

The Guardian also reports on how mobile phones are being used by businesses today: email, calendar and contacts functions are used, along with job scheduling, order entry, crime reporting, and taking pictures.

In related news, TheFeature reports on RIM's latest figures: they added 317k subscribers in the last quarter, bringing the total up to 1.7m.