Categories
Business mobile connectivity ofcom Regs

Orange avoids banana skin – Ts & Cs changed to allow VoIP

EE subsidiary Orange appears to have avoided a slippery situation by amending its terms and condition for mobile internet use

The pic below is a screenshot of a YouTube video ad published by EE on July 31st 2013 to push Orange PAYG mobile. It majors on the fact that you get “a shed load of data” (1GB) when you top up your Orange mobile PAYG sim with £10. It’s an attractive ad.

shed load of data

However this advert was misleading as it explicitly showed the logos of Skype, Whats App, YouTube and  SkySports. Whilst the guy in the ad doesn’t specifically mention these services the impression you get is that you could use your shed load of data to access them.

orangetscs1What the average punter doesn’t know is that the EE t’s & c’s for Orange at the time specifically prohibited the use of these services. Page 45 in issue 12 (September 2013) of EE’s booklet  (EE81006958_0913) ee_page45contains lots of very small print of “legal stuff” – in other words its customer terms and conditions.

Page 45: Internet on your phone/data tethering for consumers

ORANGE DATA (including mobile broadband): Mobile internet browsing or tethering (whether as part of an inclusive allowance or not) is not to be used for other activities (such as non-Orange internet based streaming services, voice or video over the internet, instant messaging, peer to peer file sharing).

ee_publication

orangets&cs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In their November brochure the TCs and Cs appear to have been changed and VoIP is now allowed. No mention is made of the other services previously proscribed but presumably this means they are also allowed.

Over the past 12 – 18 months The UK VoIP industry trade body ITSPA has been complaining to regulator Ofcom and others that some mobile networks have been exhibiting anti competitive practices by specifically banning the use of Over The Top VoIP services on their data services with Orange being a specific culprit.

The EE response has been that older networks can’t cope with the levels of data traffic generated by these services and that the restrictions were imposed to protect other users’ traffic.

EE now seems to have relented. I doubt that this was down to any ITSPA pressure though this may well have helped. More likely in my mind is the fact that a lot of Orange’s network traffic will have moved to the newer 4G service which will have freed up some bandwidth on the older 3G network making VoIP more palatable.

The final inset picture is of the latest EE T’s & Cs showing the change in terms. Click on the image for a pdf of the full page. It’s nice to be able to put this episode behind us. Well done folks.EE November brochure

Categories
4g Business mobile connectivity

O2 4G rollout schedule & EE 4G in Lincoln

4GI’ve been getting updates re the O2 4G rollout schedule.

29th August – London, Leeds, Bradford
27th September – Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Coventry
17th October –  Liverpool
24th October- Glasgow
31st October – Manchester
19th November – Newcastle, Edinburgh, Huddersfield and Wetherby

I’m not sure how the logic works for this rollout. I can understand how networks go for the big metropolitan areas first to get the biggest bang for their early buck. How did Huddersfield and Wetherby slipped into this list? Either there is a little dice rolling going on or someone accidentally pushed the wrong button. Maybe some Telefonica director has a holiday home in Huddersfield? Plausible. Don’t diss the thought 🙂

I look forward to seeing my home town Lincoln on the list. It is very close to being announced by EE – there is a 4G signal in the city. I happen to know that one cell site is already up and running with two more in the pipeline. Watch this space.

Check out the O2 and Vodafone 4G test trip in London here.

Categories
End User phones

Comparison of Samsung Galaxy S4 with Google Nexus5 phones – speed

nexus5 & galaxys4It’s handy working at Timico because people are always buying new gadgets to have a play with.  Jared from IT has just got himself a Google Nexus5 and we thought it would be a good idea to make some comparisons with my Samsung Galaxy S4.

The first thing I noticed about the Nexus5 was that it has a much nicer feel to it in the hand than the S4. S4 is shiny and slippery. The Nexus5 is more matt and doesn’t feel like it will drop out of your hand too easily which is a good thing when you take a look at the battered nature of my not so old S4.

We did a couple of experiments. This first video shows both Nexus5 and Galaxy S4 being switched on simultaneously. The S4 looks as if it is booting up faster but the Nexus5 comes up with the lock screen several seconds ahead of the Samsung. Not scientific but a good peformance indicator I think. In defence of the S4 it will also have a lot more applications loaded but I’m not sure how much affect that will have on the startup time.

The second vid shows a photo being transferred from the Nexus5 to the Galaxy S4. Android to Android but from different models/manufacturers. It is impressive. The file is 3.5MB.

For those of you who are interested here is a side by side picture taken with each camera:

galaxys4shoes nexus5shoes
And finally a video out take – click here (fwi really is w).

Categories
Apps End User mobile apps mobile connectivity phones Weekend

Lost phone phound

I normally keep my phone overnight on my bedside table – muted for obvious social reasons. It stems back to the days when I was at the top of the escalation ladder for network issues. Nowadays it’s there for a bit of surreptitious tweeting before Mrs Davies wakes up.

Well I woke up this morning and my phone it wasn’t there, oh no (sung to a blues tune). Yes I woke up this morning and like I said my phone it wasn’t there, oh no. I went downstairs and looked all around the house but still I couldn’t find that darned Samsung Galaxy S4 phone. Oh no.

At this point my imagination started to take hold. Did I leave it at the jazz gig last night? In the taxi? I rang it several times but no joy.

Fortunately technology comes to the rescue these days. I  logged on to my Samsung account and clicked “find my phone”. It was somewhere in our house. Hmm. Location info could be wrong though. I looked at the phone logs. Nobody had pinched it and was using it to call Senegal (random exotic destination that is probably expensive to call).

Then I rang the phone from the Samsung account. This overrides any volume settings on the phone. Wandering around the house I began to hear the faint strains of a Samsung Galaxy S4. It was calling to me. I’m here Tref, here I am.

I found my phone under my pillow, oh yea (followed by a riff on a Fender Stratocaster and a nifty bit of drumming to finish off.

Fat lady sings.

THE END

Categories
chromebook End User phones

Footnote to Samsung Chromebook free Galaxy phone offer

samsung chromebookYou may have read my Samsung Chromebook special offer not very customer friendly post. Well the free phone arrived yesterday. It was a Samsung Galaxy Mini. I’ve not seen it other than a quick glimpse as I got in from London at around 9pm. I bought the Samsung Chromebook on 30th September and the phone arrived on 14th November – six weeks later.

My 13year old lad took me by surprise by calling me whilst I was on the tube. Must have been an overground bit. The tone of the sporadic conversation was “is that phone for me?”. “Yes”.

When I got in I immediately received an IT support request which I promptly bounced back. I’m not going to touch the Galaxy Mini. Should all be self evident. I might see if I can persuade the lad to write a few words describing his experience once he has had time to play with it. Ve shall see…

PS anyone got the HP11 Chromebook – I’m sure we’d all like to hear more about the USB power supply overheating problem.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity

Disappointing news re mobile charger power consumption

I woke up this morning with the notion that we had far too many mobile phone chargers constantly plugged in in our house. I have one always plugged in by the bed and there were two in the kitchen and likely a couple more in kids bedrooms.

Goodness me I exclaimed! You can picture it I’m sure. These things consume power even when they are not charging a phone. How could we be so environmentally unfriendly?

I’ve dug into this and although the methodology wouldn’t pass scrutiny for a scientific paper I’ve come up with some conclusions. Disappointing conclusions.

According to an article I found on the Beeb a mobile phone charger plugged into a power socket but without a mobile phone connected to it consumes 0.01KWh a day. That would require a 115 microWatt power source.

Also according to the Beeb (fair play) there were by October 2012 six billion mobile phones in the world. If there was one plugged in charger per mobile phone then assuming they were all disconnected from their phones at the same time they would consume 6,000,000,000 c 115microWatt or around 697KW.

That means that one of the generators we have for our Newark data centre could power the whole world’s mobile chargers in their passive state (if that’s the right terminology). Interesting eh? 🙂

All a bit disappointing mind you. I was hoping to come up with some shock horror revelation that would enable me to quantify the power consumption in terms of numbers of nuclear power stations required, but I can’t.

Nevertheless I’m going to instil a discipline at home of unplugging these chargers when not in use. Except the one by the bed that is  – it’s a bit awkward to get around the back of the bedside table.

Tata.

Categories
End User phones

Google Nexus5 lead times stretching out

Thought it worth mentioning that one of our IT guys, Jared,  has just ordered a Google Nexus5 handset. He’s been given a 4 week lead time. Should just about get it in time for Christmas, by which time, at the rate of new product introductions in this game, it will no longer be the latest and greatest.

I think we need to figure out a crowd sourced way of rating new handsets – as opposed to reading the boring reviews of professional journos who really just compare specs. It’s got to be about personal experience. Why one phone is easier to use than another.

I’ll give it some thought but comments welcome. In the meantime Jared must exercise patience – he currently has a BlackBerry.

Categories
Business chromebook Cloud phones

Samsung Chromebook special offer not very customer friendly

Samsung chromebook offerI bought my Samsung Chromebook via Tesco.com. What particularly attracted me to the deal was the offer of a free Samsung Galaxy phone. The model of phone wasn’t specified so my expectations weren’t high.  The Chromebook was only £229 so it wasn’t going to be a high end phone but I figured it would be ok for one of the kids.

The Chromebook itself came very quickly – Anne collected it from our nearest store (400 yards from our house!). The phone however didn’t materialise. Hmm. The Tesco portal told me that the order was only part fulfilled so I assumed the phone would follow. It didn’t.

Categories
End User phones

Initial review of Google Nexus5

Hugo Pickering has been good enough to let us have his thoughts on the Google Nexus5. He did so in a comment on my unreview of the device but it is very much worth a post of its own so here it is. Thanks for the feedback Hugo:)

Hugo writes:

The N5 finally arrived after the Parcelforce driver failed to read the note on the garden gate telling him to walk through to my office, entailing a trip yesterday to pick it up from the post office in Chipping Norton. Setup and transfer of all apps and data was very easy, once I had taken advice from Adrian Wooster and used the excellent app SMS Backup+, which does exactly as it says on the tin.

The familiar Android interface hasn’t changed dramatically in KitKat, but I might have preferred more icons on screen at once with a bigger screen, rather than bigger icons than before. The screen itself is fantastic, with greater colour depth and clarity – photos look sharper and the detail is stunning. The camera is a huge improvement, with much better low light shooting capability. Auto Awesome looks good, enhancing photos as you go, and then backing them up to Google+.

I’m still not sure about Hangouts hijacking SMS so that all texts have to go through it, which seems a bit draconian, but understandable as it makes everything easier to backup for future migrations. I may experiment with some SMS apps to see if anything else works better, as I guess developers will want to cash in on this.

A few apps seem to struggle with KitKat, notably Movember (yes I am going hirsute for the month –http://mobro.co/hugopickering), which seems to be an issue accessing the camera or gallery – maybe the app needs updating. Those apps that have been updated and optimised for KitKat work really well, such as Ookla’s Speedtest – a hugely improved interface and UX.

Speed is another big overall improvement, with apps loading faster and swapping between them with no lag. Hardware-wise, the phone is taller than the previous model, but the same width and thickness. The change to a rubberised back is very welcome and will help to reduce breakages of the old N4 Gorilla Glass back. The phone quality is excellent and the internal speaker seems louder than most phones which is great.

So overall I’m pretty pleased. Now to sell the old N4 on eBay – anyone?

Categories
End User phones

The Google Nexus5 unreview

social network sharing on the trefor.net blogThe Google Nexus5 took me a bit by surprise. I don’t anally watch the space and nobody mentioned it when I visited Google in London on Wednesday. Maybe it caught them by surprise too.

It’s getting to the point where the devices are coming too thick and fast to review them all, notwithstanding the fact that unless you are a favoured globally read media star who gets a freebie (coming clean here, I’m not) it gets to be an expensive thing to do, changing your phone every few months.

Anyway I don’t need to have a physical Nexus5 device to do a review. I can tell without even looking. It will have a few software and hardware improvements on its predecessor. I happen to know it’s a bit cheaper as well, which is good and a sign of the way forward – the point is coming where it’s difficult to add any new sexy features because they have already all been implemented (the “beam me up Scotty”  teleporter app being the exception here. That one is still at the artist impression stage although it is the ultimate app.

Having said that if anyone has a Nexus5 and wants to  do a review then feel free to drop me a line. Also I just took a look and this month amazingly trefor.net has readers from 147 countries though the majority are in blighty. Check out the whole list here > Readership distribution of blog.

PS the pic is a random image selected from my library of uploads. I’m clearly feeling bullish 🙂

Ciao baby.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Train wifi too congested but 4G fine

Just a 4G quickie. Catching a busy commuter time train back nowf and couldn’t even get a sniff of a connection on the on board wifi. Almost certainly a good thing – if it can’t hook up using DHCP then there are so many people trying to access it that the performance will be so bad as to effectively be unusable.

Categories
4g broadband Business mobile connectivity voip

4G as fixed broadband replacement? – successful case study

4g broadband can be used as a replacement for a fixed broadband service

Blog reader Mitch left a comment about how he now uses VoIP over a 4G line that has replaced his fixed broadband connection.  His broadband had always been rubbish and 4G is now giving him speeds as fast as fibre broadband. I asked if he would be willing to tell the story. It makes for a very interesting read that many will be able to identify with. It may also give hope to those folk in the “final third” who are the 2nd class citizens of the UK when it comes to connectivity.

Categories
4g Business Cloud mobile connectivity

4G remains impressive

Using up the last of the battery on this Chromebook from my garret at a Travelodge in London. I’m hanging off the Huaweii MiFi with a 4G sim. I’m sure I’ve said it before but I have to say it again the experience is terrific. Seriously useful for business. Pages load up almost instantly. It’s as if I was using my home WiFi and my FTTC line. Fair play:)

Categories
4g Business chromebook mobile connectivity

54 minutes 315 Megabytes 4G conference call using Google+ Hangout

sweyn hunterGoogle Hangout for 54 minutes using Samsung Chromebook and EE4G Huaweii MiFi clocks up 315Megabytes.

Just had a very pleasant 54 minutes video call with Sweyn Hunter using Google+ Hangout. My Huaweii 4G MiFi (courtesy of EE) tells me that it used approximately 315MB of bandwidth – probably slightly less as I did some emails before hand.

At Sweyn’s end he had “good old fashioned BT ADSL” with maybe 512k uplink speed. He lives in Orkney. The video quality was great though it did freeze two or three times in the 54 minutes. The only slight issue was an element of half duplex/one way speech in that if he was speaking and I tried to speak at the same time. I quickly got used to that and it didn’t detract  from the quality of the conversation.

Also 54 minutes was a long hangout for what was just a casual chat – I’ve never met Sweyn but converse with him from time to time on Twitter – @sweynh – I’m sure he won’t mind me telling everyone. The point being that if we were comfortable having a 54 minute video conversation the quality must have been good – otherwise we would have cut it short.

Sweyn is an interesting bloke I’m sure he won’t mind me saying – you should follow him. He is organising an Island Govcamp in Orkney next year on 6th and 7th September.

Might try a hangout using O2 and Vodafone sims in my various phones next time. It will be interesting to see if personal video calling is going to at last get mainstream with 4G. Bandwidth cost is still going to be an issue. You can work out for yourselves how quickly you will eat up your own data bundle.

Categories
4g Business mobile connectivity

4G better than hotel WiFi – official

Sat in my garrett at the Cromwell Hotel in London getting ready to to a 5.30 meeting. There is great 4G coverage here from O2, Vodafone and EE. The hotel WiFi is totally pants. It’s so slow it won’t even connect.

During my 4G test trips I already concluded that it is better to use 4G than the WiFi of a pub or cafe. I can tell you after my scientific survey (sample size one)  that this is also the case in hotels.

It’s such a pleasure to have the connectivity on the move. This post is coming from my Samsung Chromebook hooked up to the Huaweii MiFi loaned to me my EE. On the train on the way down I also used the MiFi – it was tucked in my coat pocket so to all intents and purposes the Chromebook was “just accessing the internet directly”.

Now all I need to do is to figure out how to convert Microsoft presentations to Google format (see previous post).

Pics below are screenshot of speedtest on O2 4G on Samsung Galaxy S4 plus screenshot of “error” message when it failed to connect to Cromwell Hotel WiFi.

wifi connection at Cromwell Hotel O2 4G connection in London
It’s offical, at this Best Western Hotel, 4G is best 🙂

Categories
4g broadband Business mobile connectivity net neutrality

4G adoption in UK businesses

4g for business offers backup facility for superfast broadband

Why should business use 4G?

Yesterday I sat on a panel discussing 4G at the Convergence Summit South trade show in Sandown Park. The audience was largely resellers of communications services. What you would traditionally call a PBX reseller.

In terms of expectations of what 4G would do for this channel it would appear that it was very much a case of wait and see. There are some sceptics who go as far as to that “4G is just a faster version of 3G and won’t really have any specific applications and uses”.

Well I think they are wrong. 4G may well be “just a faster bearer” but it is going to open up opportunities in the communications market that weren’t there before.

For example Timico does a lot of good business selling 3G cellular back up solutions for broadband lines used to carry credit card transactional data. This type of application doesn’t need the bandwidth capabilities that 4G can offer (although 4G’s faster ping times could have a role to play here).

This type of back up application is not used nearly as much to back up ADSL lines to offices. 3G just isn’t good enough for this other than as a very basic means of accessing the internet. If you rely on your broadband for VoIP then it ain’t going to be any use over 3G, as much as anything because half the networks block VoIP (note to self to do net neutrality update post).

Now something is happening in the communications market in the UK and that is FTTC, Fibre to the Cabinet, fibre broadband, call it what you will. The superior speeds of FTTC make a huge difference to how businesses and indeed consumers use the internet. They are starting to make use of online resources like they have never before.

Witness the aggressive promotion of the Samsung Chromebook. Not only did I get 100GB of free Drive storage (ok only for two years by which time Google hopes I’m hooked enough to buy more) but I also get a free Galaxy phone. When I got my Samsung Galaxy S4 they gave me two years of free 50GB Dropbox which I am very much starting to use.

All this is driving the market towards using more and more of the cloud.

Now businesses when they start to rely more on cloud services are not going to be happy if their internet connection goes down. These things do happen, regularly.

With an increasing availability of 4G it is going to be a no-brainer for  business to have a 4G backup for its FTTC connection. The speeds, assuming you can get coverage, are pretty much identical. In fact 4G is likely to give a better uplink speed than FTTC.

4G networks do not (currently) block VoIP applications such as Skype and have latencies that are going to be able to support other real time applications. I can’t see 4G replacing FTTC in a business connection because of the cost of bandwith.

This may not apply for certain demographics in the consumer market. The only reason we have a phone line in our house is because it supports our data connection. The only people that phone it are scammers from Indian call centres and anti social pariahs trying to sell me PPI miss-selling compensation.

For a single person leaving home, saving on the cost of a phone line and broadband might well be enough to offset the additional bandwidth costs of a 4G subscription. I digress.

The upshot is that I think that the combination of FTTC and 4G is going to be a real driver for sales of mobile subscriptions and that the resellers sat in that room listening to the panel discussion should all be thinking of how they can add mobile into their portfolio. If you like think of it in terms of increasing ARPU for broadband sales.

On a similar but different note I met with EE last week for a chinwag on life, the universe and 4G. I had been pretty critical about the EE efforts to sell 4G (see post here). However soon after I wrote that post their subscriber uptake rocketed and I think they may well have now reached a million subs.

It would seem that this increase in interest is due to a combination of market reach (ie more people can now get 4G), growing awareness due to the continued marketing effort and more people coming up to contract renewal. The entry of the O2 and Vodafone into the market will also help by creating even more market awareness.

This same dynamic is going to happen in the business comms market. There will come a time where 4G is generally available, more or less, to all businesses and they will start to use it.

Obvious really. Ciao.

PS if you want to talk more about this drop me a line.

PPS I was driving past Coventry earlier this week and noticed an O2 4G signal on my phone. Hey Coventry, it’s on it’s way to you next 🙂

Categories
Business internet mobile connectivity Net

Trains to get faster internet connectivity #networkrail

Internet access on trains to be upgraded by 2014

My auntie told me today that the rail network is upgrading its wireless internet access or at least it will have done by 2019. I’ve mentioned the rubbish connectivity on trains more than once – here and here for example. I’m a bit of an expert because I spend so much time on the train between the office in Newark and London.

Apparently we are going to get 50Megs which is a big uplift on the pathetic 2 Meg we have to share out amongst the whole train today.

The BBC news item tells us that apparently “A new fibre optic network should be capable of handling up to 192,000 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) of data once the upgrade is complete in June 2014.” Pretty advanced stuff a 192Terabit per second network (no quibbling over definitions of what is a Terabit please).  I wonder which router they are going to use? Perhaps someone from Network Rail could get in touch and I’ll do a blog post on the subject.

Internet access on trains. Can’t wait. Ciao bebe.

Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity

Mobile data usage growth when using 4G networks

EE4GMet with EE last week. Discovered that in the early days of their 4G network rollout a significant chunk of the bandwidth usage was people doing speed tests. Bit like me. I’ve racked up around 6GB between O2 and Vodafone and more when taking into consideration the Huaweii MiFi with the EE SIM.

A pal of mine told me that last week he had already used up his 8GB bundle for September and had to buy more. He hadn’t been doing 4G testing but had been watching movies. It’s the shape of things to come. I’ll see if I can find some bandwidth usage trend stats for 4G and maybe we can extrapolate to see how much data we are going to be using in say 2 years time. Problem is there isn’t enough data specifically on 4G yet.

One interesting aspect of the meeting with EE was that they have no plans to introduce unlimited packages on 4G. Like it or not this is the only sensible approach in the near term when network capacity is still fairly expensive.

It’s too early to tell which of the operators is going to have the best 4G network.

Categories
Business phones

RIM – what is there to say?

RIM is being sold to one of its existing shareholders who will take it private and in theory reshape the business away from the public glare. The same is happening, or trying to happen, at Dell. Nokia is being bought by Microsoft. All three brands may well fade away into the distance.

Shed no tears. Shit happens. Move on. We live in a very fluid world where aside from technological advances that can in theory be forecast because of historical trends – Moores Law etc – nobody can really predict the future. It takes remarkable vision to be able to move with the times, especially if you are a huge company – it’s like trying to do a handbrake turn with an oil tanker.

I remember when I worked for Mitel I was in  pub in Kanata and one of the Execs had a Blackberry that he was constantly referring to – a bit like how I am these days with my droid. What went through my mind was “hmm I need one of those”. It was more of a status symbol thing than me wanting to be able to read my emails when in the pub.

Timico gave me a Blackberry in the early days. It didn’t last long. Devices like the Nokia E65 and E71 soon overshadowed it. The E71 was a good phone. Not as good as my SGS4, or the S3 or the S2. It’s all progress innit?

I used to think that the future was all about phones replacing PCs. PCs sales are in decline. Phones and tablets on the up. Maybe I was right. Easy really. However in trying to decide where on earth this thought process (and thus the blog post) is going I’ve realised that phones are probably not the way forward either, at least in the form factor we see today.

The screen on my SGS4 is cracked – happened when it was in my pocket. The casing is chipped and dented – it isn’t an old phone, just not a very robust one. I occasionally leave it places and have to go back looking for it. It has to have access security to stop others using it when they shouldn’t and to protect my personal data.

Surely this is a form of device ripe for obsolescence. Although I poo poo’d the Samsung Gear smart watch maybe that is the form factor that will be where all the action is in future. It won’t be long before technology is such that we will have better processing power in the watch than we have in the handset today. If we want to type we should be able to dig out cheap portable screens/keyboards that hook up with the watch. These could even be disposable or so cheap that they are everywhere and you just have to pick one up and hook your phone.

A phone is less likely to be left somewhere and won’t suffer the same knocks as a handset.

There you go. Maybe people running big brands just need to get back to the basics of what influences people to buy something. Play in the forecastable tech developments and hey presto, you are still in business. Not as easy as that I know but it’s all that’s on offer this morning:)

Ciao.

Categories
4g Engineer mobile connectivity olympics

4G speed test results in London – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone

4G4G test results in London – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone on a road trip.

Competition in 4G has been a long time coming. It’s almost a year since EE launched their service and we now have the Vodafone and O2 4G networks running, at least in London. When I took part in the O2 4G trials in 2013 the results were spectacular (43Mbps in the Devonshire Arms pub off Oxford Street) if confined to a few places – O2 used 25 cell sites for these trials. The results were great partly because I doubt that there were that many people using the network given that we all had dongles and not phones. You had to have your laptop out which aside from my coverage experiment conducted from the top deck of a moving number 25 bus meant that you had to be in a static location.

Now I have three networks to play with: EE, Vodafone and O2. It would be natural to expect that having had longer to roll out their network the EE coverage would be better. However with more subscribers using the EE service would their speeds be as good as the relatively empty networks of the new kids on the block?

The 4G test tools to hand were a Samsung GalaxyS4 running O2, a Nokia Lumia 920 on Vodafone and a Huawei 4G Mobile WiFi E5776 (MiFi) loaned to be my EE. The tests were conducted over two separate trips and on each occasion I had a Twitter pal along for the ride: @flosoft and @UKTamo. We also used @UKTamo’s SGS3 LTE running on EE.

In one sense because I was using four different devices the test conditions were not going to survive academic scrutiny. However having to go to the effort of swapping SIMs every time I wanted to run a test just so that I could do like for like testing wasn’t going to be practical. What you get here therefore is a mix of experiences with some real results mixed with subjectivity. It should provide a feel for the 4G experience in London.

4G speed testing at McDonalds KingsX We started off in McDonalds in Kings Cross. Day one was not an unbridled success as for much of the day the only network I had working was EE.  Having only just provisioned them, the new 4G SIMs on the other two took a while to kick in. Before realising this I thought that maybe the S4 and Lumia 920 needed a firmware upgrade. @flosoft averaged around 5Mbps using the McDonalds WiFi to download the software for the Samsung whereas I was getting double that using the EE 4G MiFi for the Nokia. Nokia took well over half an hour to perform the actual upgrade after downloading the software but it had still finished the job before the WiFi based software download for the Samsung had ended, let alone start the installation.

This became a theme. During lunch at the Nag’s Head in Covent Garden hanging off the EE4G Huawei MiFi was a better experience than using the pub’s WiFi. This is despite the fact that my Galaxy S4 is set to backup media to Google+ when connected via WiFi. Because of this any speed testing and usage on the MiFi will have been degraded because of the background uploading yet the experience was still good. It suggests to me that as 4G becomes more ubiquitous, cost of data aside, public venues will need to upgrade their broadband service if they want people to continue their WiFi rather than a cellular service.

As an aside during the 2012 Olympics I spent a lot of time testing mobile connectivity in London and found that when walking around the cellular networks were far more useful than the hundreds of thousands of WiFi hotspots in town.

Will 4G render public WiFi networks obsolete I wonder?

Roaming around central London saw very variable results with all three networks working on 4G. Handsets would switch between 3G and 4G by just turning a corner and 4G performance when in a low signal strength area felt not to be as good as 3G in the same circumstance. In theory 4G should be no different to 3G in this respect – maybe it just needs a bit more playing with.

4G speed testing on a number 73 busSat on the Number 73 bus between Kings Cross and Oxford Circus the EE network had more consistent 4G coverage than Vodafone – see the video. EE averaged 18Mbps on this route with only a couple of results dropping below 10Mbps to 5Mbps and 8Mbps.

Following on from the Nags Head lunch experience indoor coverage seemed better than I had been expecting. When my Vodafone 4G kicked in I managed to get 65.85Mbps at the back vodafone 4G speed test resultsof the Pop Up Brittain shop on Piccadilly. We saw 48.62Mbps down and 43.31Mbps upload with EE in a 2nd Floor Office in Castle Lane near Victoria which was the best combined performance. I was getting around 10Mbps down with both O2 and Vodafone at this location.EE 4G speed test results 48Mbps castle lane London

Vodafone and O2 are sharing cell sites so where you got 4G with one you would naturally expect the other to be present. This was by and large the case though sometimes one network would have better performance than the other at these locations which might be explained by traffic volumes.

We used speedtest.net for the testing and when comparing different networks it was important to be using the same server. For EE performance at one location rose dramatically when we switched away from the Yoda in Covent GardenVodafone London speedtest server – no dirty work on the go here I’m sure:). It was also funny that when I stood next to Yoda between Covent Garden Station and the Piazza I got a very poor Vodafone signal – the force was obviously elsewhere unless he wasn’t the real Yoda (Vodafone uses Yoda from the Star Wars movies for advertising purposes).

The fastest download seen was 73Mbps on O2 at South Kensington tube station. Sat at the Champagne Bar in Paddington I was regularly getting 58Mbps on Vodafone – indoors again (video here). The EE MiFi in this environment didn’t perform so well. Indoors in Paddington Station might be a poor EE coverage area but my guess is that there were too many WiFi enabled devices in the area and the MiFi struggled with the noise.

Overall I didn’t see quite the same peak speeds on EE compared with O2 and Vodafone. The fact that there are far more people on the EE network would explain this. As you might expect EE did seem to have better overall coverage, though this coverage was far from ubiquitous. There seemed to be pretty good 4G from all three networks in the main tourist and commuter hotspots – Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus (video here) and major train stations for example.

One additional data point is that I had to plug both the Nokia and Samsung phones in to charge by around 2pm after a day’s testing. I was carrying two Powergen Mobile Juice Pack 6000s especially for this purpose. Whether that tells you anything about battery life when using 4G I’m not sure considering I was hammering the phones. It probably does.

Overall it’s exciting to see three networks up and running now albeit only in London. It won’t be long before competition sees coverage improve everywhere – although it isn’t advertised I could get 4G from all three networks on the platform at Slough Railway Station.

Even the slower 4G speeds were pretty fast compared to 3G. I have to believe that with 4G the mobile networks have finally moved into the 21st century.

4G is definitely going to drive usage. I used almost 2GBytes in two days of testing with O2 – I’m on an 8GB package. I suspect the real issue is how quickly the networks will want to drive usage/fill their capacity. They will be able to control this with pricing. However although the mobile operators are desperate to move away from selling on price I can’t see them being able to do so long term. The market will have its way…

More speed test screenshots here from O2, Vodafone and EE. Thanks to @flosoft and to @UKTamo for their able assistance especially for the photos and screenshots of the test results. Thanks to EE for the loan of the Huawei MiFi – it’s a great piece of kit. I was hoping to be able to publish a comprehensive database of the tests but unfortunately the speedtest.net app only kept a certain number of results and the Windows 8 Phone version didn’t even seem to allow you to export the data. Ah well.

Other 4G posts:

4G as a fixed broadband replacement service here.

EE 4G mobile broadband roadmap here.

Google Hangouts over 4G here.

Categories
Engineer phones

Comparison of Samsung firmware load versus the base Android version

Bumped into Florian Jensen (@flosoft) whilst out and about in London doing some 4G speed testing. He has a Samsung Galaxy S3 which he had rooted with CarbonRom based on Android 4.3. He wanted to increase the phone’s performance and improve battery life.

I was surprised to see that there is a very noticeable improvement in speed. The SGS3 running CarbonRom was faster than the SGS4 which has a more powerful processor (s) running Samsung’s firmware. We did some videos yesterday that illustrate this. You can read Flo’s post on what he did here. Unless you are a serious geek (which I realise that quite a few of you are 🙂 )I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing it yourself.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity wearable

Le Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch est arrivee

It’s 07.11. I’m on a train again, headed to London again. I’m wearing shorts. It’s going to be 30 degrees Centigrade. In front of me is a copy of The Times. I very rarely read “the paper” these days. Only when it’s shoved in front of me as a freebie.

The headlines in the paper say “Obama calls on the world to fight Syria ‘barbarism’”. I’m sure you will have noticed that the news rarely covers good news. Only when “our Andy” wins a major or when there is a royal baby (etc). We also get an occasional “hottest summer since 1976”. Not very often, any of them.

Yesterday we also heard about Samsung’s new Galaxy Gear smartwatch. I don’t wear a watch. Not since my early twenties. They always used to break or go wrong on me and even in those days there was usually a clock somewhere that you could see to tell the time – PC or car dash.

The last time I owned a watch was when I was on my way to visit a customer in Stanmore. I was in a company pool car and blow me down if the clock on the dashboard was broken. It must have been an old car – I worked for Marconi Electronic Devices. Don’t know if that says anything.

No problem I said to myself. I’ll turn the radio on and keep time that way. Now the meeting was at 10.30 and at 10am they started an hour long programme so I wouldn’t know the time at the half hour. Hmm.  I wanted to be punctual but did not have the resources to make it so other than maybe being sat in reception for too long.

No problemo. I’ll stop at a passing garage and by a cheapo watch. Unfortunately the cheapest watch was about £15. I’d been expecting a sub fiver piece of junk that I could ditch when I’d finished the meeting. A £15 piece of junk (as it turned out to be) was a different thing. In those days you could buy a pint for 50 pence. That watch represented 30 pints!

I bought the watch and made it to the meeting on time. Two weeks later the watch stopped working/broke/something like that. It got thrown away and I have never worn a watch since.

This is a long way of saying that I am unlikely to wear the Samsung Galaxy Gear. The question I suppose is whether such devices will take off. My bet is that they will, despite me not wearing one (:) ). I ask myself will people look a little daft holding a watch up to their ear? Will they be self-conscious doing it? Is that any different to holding a phone to your ear?

Maybe of you have the watch bit on the inside of your wrist then it will be exactly the same gesture. It will look as if you are just scratching your head when actually you are on the phone. Could work though not for me as I don’t want anything on my wrist. Maybe a watch pinned to my lapel would do the job – bit like a nurse’s watch. It would get around the problem of not wanting something on my wrist.

However how would I make a phone call? I could use my phone I suppose or have the lapel device on in speaker mode with perhaps only a low range so that only I could hear it. Probably won’t work that last bit.

There must be a market for a device that stops people being buried in their small screen all the time. Something that is always there and noticeable without staring at your hand.

Musings over. If you already wear a watch then you might find the Samsung Galaxy Gear ok. It’s another drop of tech news on the unstoppable tide.

It’s now 7.49 and the train has stopped at Newark Northgate. All is quiet and I’m on the way to London, wearing shorts. You will have to wait a day or two to find out why. Catch ya later.

PS don’t ask me why I wrote the title in French. It has no bearing to the rest of the post and just came out that way. Ohohiho!

Categories
Business mobile connectivity phones

I see Microsoft are going to buy the Nokia handset business

I found out about 5am this morning via Twitter (under the bedsheets!). Between 5am and the time I got up, around 7.30ish is was being retweeted by all and sundry and Rory CJ was talking about it on the BBC Radio4 Today programme.

By the time I left for work I felt it was old news and had already been done to death. The line of discussion was “Will Stephen Elop be the next Microsoft CEO?” Tbh that isn’t really news and the BBC was certainly unable to do any more than anyone else which was just pure speculation.

Whether Microsoft makes a go of the handset business is neither here nor there in my mind. I’m not really bothered. I’d say it will take them years to catch up with Apple and Samsung/Google if  they can do it at all.

What I think is worth a moment of reflection is the passing of Nokia as a mobile handset vendor. The brand must now inevitably fade away. In my business life I have had very few different vendors’ models of mobile phone (though that is starting to change with what feels to be an unsustainable pace of new product intros) and for most of that time my phone was a Nokia.

Nokia represented quality and had the best User Interface.  Although  I still own a Nokia, a Lumia 920 handset it is very much my secondary phone. I don’t like the UI or the weight of it. I only got it to try out Windows8. The last Nokia phone I can claim to have been happy with was the N97, a while ago now, it seems.

There are always examples around of major multinational companies with big market leads that fail to move with the times. Microsoft is in one of those periods now of trying to reinvent itself. It isn’t there yet.

In the meantime Nokia has failed to keep up and is now going through the mobile phone equivalent of the death roll. Stand back and watch from a safe distance.  RIP the Nokia mobile phone.

Categories
Apps Engineer mobile connectivity olympics

Funky Cisco stadium WiFi technology at The Barclay Centre

Cisco engineer & pal Stuart Clark sent me this link to a really cool stadium WiFi network deployment at The Barclay Centre. You will all of course know that the Barclay Centre is home to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team (c’mon now – don’t tell me you’ve never heard of ’em).

The Cisco Connected Stadium WiFi Solution (for once they have a product name that tells it like it is) enables stadia to allow “visitors to keep up with box scores and player stats in real time. And for patrons who hate those long lines at half time, concessions can be ordered with the swipe of a finger from any seat in the house.” as the blurb puts it. All this from your phone.

I like this. Stadium technology is not straight forward as you will recall from the stuff  I wrote about preparations for the Olympics, ahem sorry London 2012 Olympics. The Cisco spiel uses lots of good phrases such as

  • 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to the core or distribution switches
  • Access switches that have 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) as minimum or 802.3at PoE+ ports
    (recommended) for powering access points
  • radio resource management
  • self healing, self optimising wireless networks

I can’t find any data that tells me how to go about designing a network for, say Wembley or Twickenham which would have a lot more punters sat in their seats than a basketball arena. I presume it is doable.

What I really like is the fact that the accompanying app allows you to order hot dogs etc from your seat. I can see huge benefits should they ever implement this at Sincil Bank, the home of my local side Lincoln City (up the Imps). The queue for burgers and pies at half time is massive-ish and it often takes the whole of the half time break for you to get served.

I can see problems though. At Sincil Bank you can sit anywhere in the stand your ticket is valid for, unless that specific seat is reserved by a season ticket holder (so most of them are free). The person delivering the hot dog/pie/burger/chips would have to wander around the stand looking for you, probably shouting your name and trying to make him or herself heard over the din of the tannoy announcing the winner of the raffle. The hot dog/pie/burger/chips could well have gone cold in the meantime.

I’m sure there must be a solution for this – it’s probably in a Cisco Application Note somewhere.

As I write I can think of lots of useful addons to the app, assuming they aren’t already featured. Sports such as snooker and tennis will have their own plugins – after all you can’t expect your order of champagne, strawberries and cream to be delivered to Centre court at Wimbledon whilst the game is in play. The same applies for snooker – you’d have to wait for the bit in between frames or when the players nip out for a toilet break which happens on an ad-hoc basis so the delivery scheduling would have to be able to accommodate this – easy small deliveries in between frames, larger more complicated ones during comfort breaks.

Anyway you get the drift. I can even envisage social media hookups so that fans can comment on the game in real time from within the app. I’d better stop. Got stuff to do. Ciao…

Categories
broken gear End User phones

50% of smartphones have broken screen

50% of smartphones have a broken screen. This is based on an extensive survey of the six phones in the Davies family.

The sceptics amongst you will say huh, what kind of sample size is that? My response is that we are just a normal family & I’d like to bet that pretty much most of you out there have had a screen go on their phone at some stage or other.

My kids use protective cases for their phones and despite this one of them has just had a crack in their screen. He hadn’t dropped the phone or bashed it in anyway to his knowledge. This isn’t good enough. Glass tech needs to improve.

It might be interesting to conduct a little survey here. How many of you have had a screen break on their phone at some stage? This isn’t a scientific survey but it will be interesting to see the results. I might also ask people to let me know if they have never had a screen break.

Let’s see what the results look like – answers as comments please.

Ciao…

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Competitive mobile advertising – 3

On the tube heading to a LONAP board meeting.  This ad stared me in the face & had to take a snap with my trusty sgs4.

It reinforces the head start that EE have in the 4G game. Really wondering what niche 3 will find. Obv here they are pushing unlimited data but that is an expensive feature to lead with.

Only a short post. Ciao.

image

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Garage forecourts – oh how they suffer without adequate connectivity

What can you write about a garage forecourt? They aren’t particularly attractive places, stuck as they usually are, at the side of busy main roads with lots of cars rushing by. Their canopies can be useful for keeping you dry when filling up in the winter though look out if it is windy and the rain gets horizontal.

Inside the goods in the shop are expensive but I guess that is how most of the profits are made and I don’t really begrudge them that. Occasionally I will buy a lottery ticket though I seldom have even a single number come up. It’s a mug’s game. Some people pin their hopes on winning. You see them buying ten quids worth in one go. One ticket/ten tickets. it makes no difference.

Usually these days a garage is the only place  where you can buy coal or logs. These items take up a fair bit of space which garages normally have going spare.  It’s a lot cheaper to go to the coal merchant but that does require foresight and planning. I could also get it delivered but that would require a coal bunker which we ain’t got.

Garages these days can be a source of excellent coffee. Coffee Nation guarantees a good cuppa at just the right temperature to drink straight away. I normally have to let my tea cool down a bit if I’m making it myself. I would think the temperature bit from machine made coffee comes from a paranoia about being sued by people scalded by carelessness with their hot drink. An American export.

You might be wondering where all this is going. It’s reasonable. To wonder. But I haven’t finished rambling yet.

Garages often have carwashes attached to the side of them, usually just after the place you pull in for air and water. It’s been some years since I used one of these carwashes. I use a hand carwash staffed by hard working Eastern Europeans. They do  a much better job that is worth paying the little bit extra that it costs.

And finally our first child was born on a Boxing Day. The following day the only place open that could sell me flowers was a garage. They were starting to show their age but the woman in the garage picked out the best from the whole shop and made me a beautiful bouquet for very little money.

The attached PDF forecourt magazine is a page out of this month’s edition of Forecourt Trader. I have a very eclectic taste in reading material. Have a read. It’s all about problems garages face when their phone lines go down. Timico has lots of customers in the garage forecourt game (I’m talking hundreds if not thousands of retails sites). The broadband service that runs over the copper phone line is crucial to retail businesses because it carries their credit card transaction data. When the broadband goes down the garage is going to have big problems, as the article shows.

Our retail customers can get around this with a mobile backup solution. It’s called Mobile Access Management and runs over 3G within the same secure MPLS environment as the fixed line connection. If you own retail sites where the broadband line is mission critical you should be talking to us.

Read the Murco case study here.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity UC

Working from home

It can be a joy to work at home. The sun filters through the canopy of sycamore trees that line the garden above the beech hedge. A gentle breeze occasionally nudges the conservatory doors, opened wide to take advantage of the absolute delight that is the peak of the British spring. Fresh garden smells mingle with happy birdsong.

It is natural on a day like this to want to work in comfortable clothing and my rugby shorts and very old Mitel VoIP tshirt fit the bill. Wouldn’t fit in with the office but that is ok. I’m at home this morning.

I’m off after lunch to Laandan to the Global Telecoms Business Awards where we are finalists with Genband in the Innovation category. It’s all about mobility. I have my Timico mobile VoIP client running on my Samsung Galaxy S4 on one side of the desk and a high quality business handset one the other. It is plugged in to one of the two Cat5 ports in the conservatory. I have Cat5 in all the rooms downstairs though I rarely use them other than to plug in a phone.

homework setupWhen my phone rings I normally answer the desktop handset. However the beauty of having the mobile client is that I can wander off to make a cup of tea in the kitchen and if the phone rings I answer it on the mobile instead of having to rush back to the conservatory.

I also use the mobile client when I’m out and about. It genuinely is useful, especially when I’m roaming overseas. The hotel (garret – cat swinging will cause injury to both parties) I’m staying at in town has free wifi. I’ll be able to use my work extension there and I’m pretty sure that the Park Lane Hotel where the bash is tonight also has free wifi though I doubt I will be able to hear the phone ring amongst all the noise of champagne cork popping and celebrations. You know what it’s like.

That’s all for now. Gotta go. Things to do & penguin suit to dig out.

Categories
broken gear End User phones

Samsung Galaxy S4 faulty USB socket #SGS4 problem

sgs4My Samsung Galaxy S4 has a faulty USB socket. I got this phone on 13th May 2013. Today is the 30th May 2013. The phone has lasted 17 days (I know, I’m sharp).

dead Samsung Galaxy S4 sgs4The picture of the phone is on the right. Looks dead doesn’t it. That’s because it’s switched off. It isn’t totally kaput yet but it was about to become so. I plugged in the charger but didn’t plug in the charger. It wouldn’t fit in the socket.  I tried three different cables. None of them would go. I tried them in another phone and they all fitted in as designed. Ergo something is wrong with the socket on the SGS4. The highly efficient gang in the Timico logistics department has taken control and are sending it back. I had to switch it off to conserve battery settings before making sure it was fully backed up (it now is) and reset to factory settings so my precious personal data was not accessible to whoever is going to fix it.

Ok I know what you’re saying. S*&t happens. You are right. However it seems to happen on a disappointingly regular basis with the Samsung Galaxy phones. The last one I had, a Galaxy S3 had a problem with the USB socket and separately with the headphone socket. Data transfer was dodgy and the actual charging was very intermittent, It was clearly about to go. I got it fixed. Before then I had a screen go dead on me and “water ingress” problems despite the fact that I know darn well there hadn’t been any water ingress.

I am a Samsung Galaxy fan but I have no hesitation in saying that the build quality on the Samsungs must stink. You’re not telling me I can have had all these problems and I’m the only one. In fact I know I’m not. Having written blog posts about each problem as it happen the “Samsung Galaxy S3 problem” search term in one guise or another has become one of the most popular reasons for people reaching this site. In fact there have been around 51,000 page views on the subject in the last 6 months.

In the meantime this morning I have reverted to my Nokia Lumia 920. It’s functionality is some way behind that of Samsung/Android and even, dare I say it Apple despite not being an Apple fan for unzombie-like reasons (good word structure there). What we need is the Android software running on Nokia build quality. I do accept that I haven’t been running the Nokia much but I did give it a chance for at least a month and in that time it didn’t stop charging, the headphone socket carried on working, oh and it didn’t have a dent in the casing which the SGS4 did after a few days despite, and you have to take my word for it here, me not banging it about or dropping it.

The Samsung build quality is not great. That’s all. Got it off my chest. tune in later for more mobile phone fun and frolics (though I have to get on and revise a guide to migrating to SIP trunks now so it will be a while)

Ciao amigos.

PS to make it easy for those who are interested I’ve pasted links to all the other posts that talk about Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3 problems:

http://www.trefor.net/2012/09/07/samsung-galaxy-s3-factory-reset-phone-not-charging-battery/
http://www.trefor.net/2012/06/17/headset-socket-on-my-samsung-galaxy-s3-is-not-working-audio-problem/
http://www.trefor.net/2012/09/06/samsung-galaxy-s3-not-charging-problem/
http://www.trefor.net/2012/07/06/water-water-everywhere-mobile-phone-water-damage-samsung-galaxy-s2-s3/
http://www.trefor.net/2012/09/26/galaxy-s3-mended-under-warranty-faulty-usb-socket/

Categories
4g Business mobile connectivity ofcom

Analysis of who bought what in the Ofcom 4G spectrum auction #O2 #BT #merger

google_campus_thumbThe 4G spectrum auction results were announced back in February. Five telcos won spectrum: Telefonica O2, Vodafone, EE, 3 and BT. MLL Telecom and HKT (UK) Company lost out. Before looking at the merits of each deal it is worth understanding the pros and cons of each spectrum band.

Two bands were up for grabs: 800MHz and 2,600MHz or 2.6GHz. 60MHz was available in the 800MHz band and 185MHz in the 2.6GHz band. There was therefore more capacity available and in bigger blocks at the higher frequency than in the lower. The data throughput that can be achieved in a mobile network is proportional to the amount of spectrum you can throw at it.

The higher frequencies are potentially more valuable from a network capacity perspective than the lower. Where there is a 35MHz block available you can also decide whether to use the whole block to offer a faster service to fewer people or to divide it into smaller packages and serve more subscribers with lower speeds. 45Mbps versus 15Mbs say (my guess).

The downside for the higher speed spectrum is that it has poorer in building penetration and a lower  reach and is therefore not as useful for providing a fixed line broadband replacement service as the lower 800MHz band.

One lot in the 800MHz band was designated by Ofcom as being saddled with a coverage obligation with a requirement to reach 98% of the population with a 2Mbps service by 2017.

Before rural dwellers get excited it is worth noting that the coverage obligation states that “a minimum download speed of 2Mbps should be available with 90% confidence in 98% of houses (residential properties) covered by the mobile broadband service when the network is lightly loaded. Lightly loaded is defined by Ofcom as a “single user demanding service within the serving cell, and the surrounding cells of the network are loaded to a light level (by which we mean the common channels only are transmitting at 22% of the maximum cell power)”.

In my mind that means that 2Mbps is the absolute maximum anyone will get under the coverage obligation. If this was introduced to support the government’s 2Mbps for all pledge then look out for weasel words galore when that number is not achieved by “the end of this parliament”.

Next let’s look at who bought what.

Winning bidder Spectrum won Base price
Everything Everywhere Ltd 2 x 5 MHz of 800 MHz and
2 x 35 MHz of 2.6 GHz
£588,876,000
Hutchison 3G UK Ltd 2 x 5 MHz of 800 MHz £225,000,000
Niche Spectrum Ventures Ltd (a subsidiary of BT Group plc) 2 x 15 MHz of 2.6 GHz and
1 x 20 MHz of 2.6 GHz (unpaired)
£186,476,000
Telefónica UK Ltd 2 x 10 MHz of 800 MHz
(coverage obligation lot)
£550,000,000
Vodafone Ltd 2 x 10 MHz of 800 MHz,
2 x 20 MHz of 2.6 GHz and
1 x 25 MHz of 2.6 GHz (unpaired)
£790,761,000
Total £2,341,113,000

 

Vodafone

At £790 million Vodafone spent the most dosh in the auction and came away with the best spread of spectrum with 20MHz of the 800MHZ and 65MHz of the 2.6GHz spectra. Basically roughly a third of what was available. This should give them the most optimal flexibility to provide a mix of in town and rural services. Vodafone, which is sharing infrastructure with O2 under a venture known as Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Ltd has like O2 stated a goal of hitting the 98% population coverage before 2016.

EE

The next biggest spender at £589 million was EE bringing it 70MHz of the 2.6GHz spectrum and the “minimum buy” of 10MHz from the 800MHz band. EE is already offering 4G services in the 1.800MHz band so whilst its 800MHz holding may be a little light the company still has a good spread of spectrum.

EEs head start in this game also adds an additional competitive dimension to the whole business.

O2

The O2 spectrum allocation is an interesting one. Paying £550 million for the 20MHz coverage obligation lot in the 800MHz spectrum it has paid more for this band than either EE or 3 if we use the reserve price of £225 million paid by 3 as a benchmark. It isn’t as simple as that but without spending days analysing the finer points of the auction it serves a purpose as a rough guide.

O2 is obliged to cover 98% of subscribers by 2017. In my mind this is something they will have been wanting to achieve in any case so the “obligation” is unlikely to be a particular burden. The relatively high cost of the spectrum combined with what I imagine to be a higher cost of serving rural districts might raise an eyebrow but I am not party to O2’s infrastructure cost model and plan.

What is potentially more likely to be an issue for O2 is the absence of a holding in the 2.6GHz band. O2 may be pinning its hopes on being given future permission to use its 2,100 MHz spectrum holding or there may be a clue in the recent announcement that BT will be working with O2 to provide the backbone network for O2s 4G services. Having the high capacity backbone is fine but not particularly necessary if you don’t have the spectrum capacity to drive traffic.

Hutchinson 3G UK Ltd

There isn’t that much to say about 3 really. The company was guaranteed some spectrum in the Ofcom process. It paid the reserve price of £225 million for the smallest allocation of all the networks. 3 is currently by far the smallest mobile operator in the UK ignoring the fact that BT seems likely to re-enter the market and one wonders what the long term plans are likely to be. Will they change their name to 4? 🙂

BT

BT’s acquisition of 2.6GHz spectrum at £186 million represented by far the lowest cost per meg and so on that basis the incumbent fixed line operator seems to have got the best value out of the auction.

However the obvious spectrum for BT to have gone for would have been in the 800MHz range, assuming its intention is to use 4G to improve its broadband penetration to rural areas. This would be consistent with BT’s increasingly monopolistic position in the “final third” of the country as seems to be suggested in the awarding of Government BDUK contracts.

I don’t have any insight into their plans but when people look back with the benefit of hindsight at some event or other they often say “of course it was obvious”.

If we look at the BT and O2 positions in respect of spectrum it would seem obvious that both parties should share their respective spectra. I wouldn’t rule out some kind of re-convergence of the twain/merger bearing in mind that BT sold off O2 at some stage in the medium term past.

O2 has just offloaded its fixed broadband business to Sky. BT is getting back into mobile. O2 owner Telefonica is a Spanish company and therefore likely to be suffering from the woes of the Spanish economy. BT could buy O2! Pure speculation but makes sense to me.

That’s it as far as an analysis of who bought what in the 4G spectrum auction. A bit overdue but sometimes these things benefit from digesting the information for a little while before rushing to gain first mover/publisher advantage in the SEO stakes. In the meantime developments have allowed me to add an additional dimension to the analysis.

I doubt we will have to wait much long to find out where this whole space is going. You can read up about my thoughts on time to market here.

28/9/13 update – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone 4G networks in London