Mobile posts inc connectivity, hardware and technology
My oldest boy Tom who is a good lad and is at Warwick University is coming up to contract renewal time on his mobile phone. He currently has an iPhone4 (I know very impressionable these youngsters) and is pondering an iPhone5 but a) it is more than he really wants to pay (good boy) and b) he can’t get 4G where he lives anyway.
His current phone would actually do him were it not for the fact that the connector socket is not working properly and he wants to stream stuff onto his TV.
His mobile phone company just rang to tempt him with a free handset upgrade if he renews his contract. He was offered a BlackBerry! I know not which one. What do readers think he should do? Should he accept the offer as a great deal or should he bide his time?
Suggestions in the usual way…
Just spoke with an Orange customer service representative. They sent me an email asking if I’d like to sign up for an iPhone5. Here’s the rub. Nobody has a date for availability of LTE yet. Moreover Orange and TMobile won’t be offering it. You will have to go to a brand new company known as EE to get the service.
I’m thinking this is likely to be the beginning of the end for the Orange and TMobile brands. In time all services will be 4G and according to this logic existing Orange and TMobile customers will have mostly migrated to EE. Quite clever.
The Orange person was unable to give me a date for when EE would be up and running or when one would be able to sign up for 4G though anyone buying an iphone5 from them now could be migrated in due course.
The iPhone5 est arrive. This year has seen a long list of major events come and go. Now it’s the turn of the iPhone5. Ordinarily this would do nothing for me. From what I can see the spec, in the main, is no better than the Samsung GalaxyS3. I’m not a zombie fanboi, activated by keywords in Apple marketing material, programmed to obey unquestioningly, asking only how much money to profer on the altar of the fruit.
The one feature that the iPhone5 has that makes me think about getting it is support for 1,800MHz. This is a massive coup for EE (eh?). We don’t have a real list of LTE alternative handsets yet. All the main manufacturers are on the list. I don’t want two S3s (my current phone is an S3 on O2) and I don’t see a compelling enough reason to go Lumia.
My attitude to Lumia might change when Windows8 is properly launched but for the moment it aint. So it looks like iPhone5 then.
I’m not totally convinced. Do I really want to toss my principles aside for the sake of using a LTE service that won’t work in my home town using a handset that won’t roam on any other network?
Samsung Galaxy S3 reset to factory settings for sending back to, you guessed it, the factory. Hasta la vista baby. I’ve given it 24 hours to fix itself but it is still only charging the battery when it feels like it. The symptoms are identical to those I had with the Galaxy S2 – PC doesn’t recognise USB device and can only see it intermittently.
The new phone is plugged in and charging. Rather than waiting for the full charge I’ve switched it on and it is set up to go whilst still charging. It started reloading the 98 apps at 09.51 and it finished at 10ish. It’s now doing a firmware upgrade. Not taking long.
There restore doesn’t go to the extent of organising the “desktop” or whatever the equivalent is in mobile terminology but it is still easy going.
It’s all very well having great software but there is no excuse for having unreliable hardware in this day and age, especially at the volumes that Samsung is shipping the S3.
Stay tuned…
Will Curtis is a hard working boy. He is to be found out and about around the country installing, fixing, advising, surveying and performing other general communications industry related engineering tasks.
Last night, somewhere in deepest Britain, he pitched up at a specialist purveyor of overnight succour, a little home from home for the next three days. Blow me down, settling into a small lime juice in the bar, the lad realised that he had left his iPad at home.
Now Will uses some work applications on his iPad. The iPad also uses a secure Timico SIM to connect to our corporate network. He called Fiona in the office and arranged for it to be delivered overnight to his hotel.
When it was shipped the iPad had GPS enabled and Will was able to track its physical progress using his iPhone and the “Find my iPhone ” app. The photos show the progress this morning from the TNT depot to the hotel. V cool if you ask me.
Imagine the relief on Will’s face when he 
turned up in the hotel reception to greet the courier and pick up his parcel.
In fact Will would have been able to time his breakfast (All Bran with fruit and semi-skimmed milk) knowing the exact location of the delivery van. On the screen of his phone he could watch the ipad “drive” into the car park and, I imagine, dab his lips with his (crisp white) napkin rising from the table only as the courier was getting out of the vehicle.
As the parcel was coming up the steps to the hotel front entrance Will nodded his thanks to the waitress and strode purposefully to reception.
Damned efficient. More pics below
Short news bulletin to inform you that this morning my Samsung Galaxy S3 is not charging. This follows on from the same problem I had with the Galaxy S2.
The diagnosis for the S2 was water damage despite my assertion signed affidavit that it has never been anywhere near water.
It looks as if I’m going to have to get the S3 sent away for repair/analysis. Not good. All I can say is if the same diagnosis comes back as for the S2 I’m going to be hounding Samsung. It’s too much of a coincidence or at the very least poor reliability in the design. Note this is already my second Galaxy S3 – the first had a headset connector problem.
The header photo is the “water” damage on the old Galaxy S2. Stay tuned for updates on this hot news item.
PS to make it easy for those who are interested I’ve pasted links to all the other posts that talk aboutSamsung 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/2012/07/06/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/
It’s been a busy month on the mobile internet usage, what with the Olympics and being on holiday. So far this month, and it is pretty much over, I have consumed just shy of 20GB of internet bandwidth using my Samsung Galaxy S3. That’s 2.40GB of 3G/mobile data and 17.13GB using WiFi.
My hard drive tells me I have taken 9.38GB of photos and videos and I’m sure there are a few sound files on top of that though they won’t contribute much towards the total.
The first screenshot shows the applications that were the heaviest mobile data users.
Note that Gallery is the number one user by far. I like the way that Android pulls down albums from my online Google+ store but clearly there is a price to pay for this with the data usage.
At number two Tweetdeck comes as no surprise and I’m thinking OS Services must mean operating system upgrades and / or general system management though I’m not totally sure about this. I’d normally save any major OS upgrades for WiFi.
During the month I did a lot of speed testing which shows up in the stats as that app came in fourth.
Straight internet access/web browsing was only the 6th most popular activity! In total 56 apps used the mobile data connection to some extent in August!
The next screenshot is of the WiFi usage from the phone.
Obviously it was used a lot more when in range of WiFi.
You can see that the amount of photographs taken is reflected in the usage of Google+.
I also took advantage whenever I had good WiFi, as I did in a number of places around London, to upload videos to YouTube. This way I could easily embed a video in a blog post at a later date whilst on the hoof.
In all 55 apps used the wifi connection in August.
The next screenshot is somewhat revealing and in some respects tells me I need to get a life.
I spent nearly 26 hours in the month using Tweetdeck wtf?! That’s almost an hour a day.
16 and a half hours using chrome. Interesting to note that the times spent on specific applications haven’t resulted in those apps beign the heaviest users of mobile data. Shows how light Twitter traffic in particular is.
Then it was nearly 14 hours using TouchWiz which is the Samsung user interface. All that time spent prodding the phone. I’ don’t know how much time is allocated per prod but this seems to be a lot.
Maps I can understand – that four hours is probably a couple of car journeys.
I’m not sure I know what to do with all this information but it is certainly food for thought.
You can see from the pics that the app I used to gather all this data is My Data Manager. It’s great. Go get it and let me know about your own usage.
The Ofcom decision to allow Everything Everywhere to launch an LTE (4G) service on its existing 1,800MHz spectrum has resulted in lots of press coverage this week (here’s me in the the Telegraph) and complaints from the other operators who have to wait for the auctions in the new year.
I can see both sides of the argument and like it or not I agree with the Ofcom decision to let them get on with the launch. We have to get these services out there so we can all start using them. I expect there to be no further delays in the auction process after this.
The big question in my mind is what the LTE packages are going to look like. I could be wrong but I sense that EE is not going to launch very fast services because speed uses up more of the spectrum. My bet is that the services will be perhaps 10 or 15Mbps using smaller chunks of spectrum and not the whizz bang speeds the technoogy can actually achieve.
10 – 15Mbps is still a lot faster than what we have already and allows the operator to offer faster services downstream without having to change its infrastructure. EE could alternatively offer the faster services at launch but at a premium. When it comes to it we don’t actually need 40Mbps (say) on our phones. What we will notice is the faster response rate at 10 – 15Mbps than we currently get.
Offering a speed that is not orders of magnitude faster than the existing services will also help prevent network congestion although the EE infrastructure has had a huge capacity upgrade in readiness for the launch.
The other interesting thing to look out for will be the pricing or more specifically how much data usage you will get for your money. Also which handsets will be supported?
Not long to wait now. Although Timico is an O2 and Vodafone house I will be getting myself an EE 4G SIM to play with.
That’s all folks…
The game hasn’t started yet but the atmosphere is building up.this is a great family event but be warned. Queues are horrendous for the catering concessions and not a McDonald’s in sight – so much for the exclusive sponsorship. Maybe they only care about the London venues.
The mobile data connectivity is superb though I’ve not been able to figure out how to register for WiFi. I’m not a customer of BT broadband (I am but via BT Wholesale) and though I have a KeZone account with an Openzone roaming agreement I can’t see how to use it.
This actually doesn’t matter because much O2 SIM is giving me a fantastically reliable 7.5Megs down and 1.5 Megs up.
I have 3 pics for you. 1st is a panoramic shot of inside the stadium – just worked out how to do it properly.
The second shot is a screenshot of the speeders for the mobile data.
Finally there’s a photo of the 3g small cell antenna deployed in the stadium.
Enjoy:
WordPress for android via s3
The Broadband Stakeholders Group today released an “Open Internet Code of Practice”. This is a voluntary CoP promoting net neutrality.
Specifically:
I’m not going to delve into the detail of the BSG announcement which is available here. What I am going to do is name the current signatories who are all in the main consumer service providers:
The significance of this list is in who is not on it, particularly the mobile operators. You can work out who they are yourselves. Some of them are already known to block the use of Over The Top VoIP services (eg Timico’s own VoIP, Skype et al) on their mobile networks which of course goes against the principles of the CoP being announced today.
Whatever their reasons for not signing these mobile networks will have to change their positioning as 4G gets rolled out. The bandwidth requirement for VoIP services will be relatively small compared with that required for general use on 4G networks so the “lack of capacity” argument should not work.
4G is a fairly major inflection point for mobile networks. I don’t have any forecasts but during the life of the 4G (LTE) technology we should see the mobile business model transition from being minutes driven to data driven.
I suspect that growth in “data bundle” income may not offset any reduction in voice minutes revenues so the mobile operators are going to have to work out how to find cash from elsewhere. This may come from advertising, financial micro payments, device and personal security and I’m sure many more that I haven’t thought of.
For the moment I’ll leave you to figure out for yourselves why the non-signatories have not stepped up to the plate. I can’t see how they can stay away for too long. It isn’t the actual signature but the principle of how they treat their customers who will end up voting with their feet.
I’ve discussed what BT has done make sure the athletes, journos and hangers on have a great communications experience during the Olympics. That’s fine. For me though the biggest test is going to be what kind of experience we punters have. There will be far more of us and we will be wanting to upload stuff and tweet just as much as the highest profile media type.
I’m sat in the central lobby of the Houses of Parliament waiting for a 3pm meeting with my local .MP Karl McCartney.
Time was, not so long ago, if I had my mobile out a burly member of Her Majesty’s finest would have ticked me off. Not these days.
Only problem is there is next to no signal. I don’t know how MPs put up with it.
I don’t know about you but I for one am really
looking forward to the Olympics. I have tickets for three sports – footballing in Cardiff, Kayaking in Lee Valley North London and High Diving at the Aquatics centre in the Olympic Park. I could have bought more in the last release, including the much joked about beach volleyball but at £95 just for the ticket I decided I had to draw the line somewhere.
My own Olympic story started on July 6th 2005, the day the winning bid was announced. I was in London, doing some presentations in the City. That afternoon we celebrated alongside everyone else in town, a victory tinged only with
a slight hangover as the next day London was under attack with the July 7 bombings.
Some time later I went on a sewer tour to look at the huge amount of latent communications capacity there is in the fibres running underground in the capital. I was told that the sewer runs right through the Olympic Park. I don’t fancy being a guards having to check down there during the games. Then for the last year or so the ISP industry has been starting to think about its requirements to keep the network running during the games. It’s mostly about bandwidth.
The 2012 Olympic games is going to be all about information handling. Of course it is also about winning medals, taking part and all the good sporting stuff but this will be embedded in a communications wrap the like of which has never been seen before.
In the UK the communications build up has been massive and not without its glitches – the ticketing website and process has attracted a lot of criticism. Now that tickets are being dispatched hopefully that memory will fade.
The serious communications infrastructure preparations have been going on for much longer. BT kicked off its network planning in July 2009 and most UK ISPs will now have
their plans in place on how to cope with the growth in internet usage during the games – basically by buying more bandwidth from BT.
The media build up has also kicked in big time as the torch makes its way around the country. A quick glance at the Facebook page of “Olympics” shows it has 2.8 million “likes”. The London 2012 page has fewer at 379k likes – clearly a newer page and a slightly lesser brand though far more specific to this summer’s needs.
There is a Facebook App “London 2012“ which with only 900 monthly users looks decidedly unofficial although there are lots of links to genuine Olympic resources. Then there is “ London Olympics 2012 “ which is clearly unofficial with only 3,435 likes. I’m not really here to comment on whether something is official or not, the fact is there must be a huge number of social media pages dedicated to the event.
Last night I went to the Olympic Torch event in Lincoln. I was a proud dad as my daughter was dancing as part of the entertainment. Everyone there had a fantastic time. There is clearly a huge amount of support for these games in the UK.
Most of the entertainment was provided by three of the Olympic sponsors: Samsung, Lloyds TSB and Coca Cola.
The Samsung act was particularly impressive because of its use of social media. It included “Twist” and “Pulse”, apparently a popular dance duo. It was at this point that I realised how out of touch I was. I had pushed myself to the front of the crowd of 10,000 people as I wanted a good view of my daughter dancing. I found myself there with “the kids” – mostly 12 – 16 year olds I’d guess. They knew all the acts and all the words to all the songs.
Anyway at the end of the act Twist (or Pulse – you tell me 🙂 ) went on about how these were the “connected games”. All the dancers took out a Samsung phone and started to take photos of the crowd. Twist was elevated onto a platform and took a photo of the entire crowd. That’s 9,999 people (should have been 10,000 but my youngest son was playing cricket – beat Scunthorpe U12s by 10 wickets!).
He then told us that the photo had just gone live at Samsung.com/takepart. People were then encouraged to visit the page to tag themselves using their Facebook ID. I did this – you can see me here (somewhere).
Think about this. The torch is visiting 70 locations. If there are 10,000 people on average at each location then that is 700,000 people being encouraged to engage with Samsung online. Everone who tags themselves are effectively providing Samsung with valuable social media marketing data. These people are also all going to tell their friends to take a look at them in the crowd and at the same time they are all uploading their own photos.
There are two types of person going to the Olympics this summer – us and them. The “us” are represented by all the punters, with or without tickets at the venue or milling around just taking in the atmosphere of London.
The “them” camp is divided into competitors, media and the rest of the Olympic family – the hard working folk of Olympic committees around the world over for a junket to oversee the smooth functioning of the games.
These games are likely to be the most technologically rich Olympics we have seen so far. BT has installed a 60Gbps core network in preparation. Despite encouragement from Samsung the heaviest users are going to be the media. 60Gb amounts to 2.7Mbps for each of the 22,000 accredited media personnel at the games. That’s around 30 x maximum usage per connection seen at a typical business ISP and sensibly has a significant amount of headroom built into the capacity requirements.
As we approach the Olympic fortnight I’m going to be taking a more detailed look at the technology that has gone in to making it all (hopefully) a success – both from the point of view of the “Olympic Family” and us normal folk. Stay tuned.
Also check out this video of the Red Arrows flying over the Olympic torch relay event – they are regular visitors to the skies over Lincoln. On this occasion their leader spoke to the crowd over his intercom – uber cool.
I was back in my London pied a terre garret last week – the Kings Cross Traveloge (header photo is view from my room lifted from their promotional literature). I was heading out to dinner for the evening but hooked up to the O2 LTE trial service to finish off some stuff.
I was getting 15Mbps down which was good. Seeing as I was going to be out all evening I decided to run a usage test based on 5 video streams. I loaded 3 iPlayer and 2 ITV streams (for a bit of variety – no other reason though I’d consider myself more of a BBC man than ITV – it’s Blue Peter versus Magpie for those of a certain age) and watched the usage grow.
The screenshot below is at the beginning. I’d been online for 39 mins and in that time downloaded 135MB.
Because it is father’s day I have special permission
to publish some previously unseen photos of me and my daughter Hannah. They were taken earlier this month at the Sir Joseph Banks conservatory at the Lawn in Lincoln.
As you can see she is the spitting image of me.
I have entitled the first photo “Give us a kiss”. The second is “Where’s my teef?” and the third is “The Cheesy Grin”.
The quality of the composition is clearly of the highest order though the naysayers out there will say it is easy when you have great material to
work with:)
The photos were taken with the Samsung Galaxy S2 – they predate the delivery of the S3.
Hannah is a real sport and although she has almost certainly inherited some wonderful traits her one great misfortune is that she also has my sense of humour.
I say if that is all she has to worry about she will be ok:)
It’s my blog. I decide what goes in.
Here is a picture of the label on the telegraph pole near my house. I still look most days for signs of the cabinet being upgraded to FTTC. Nothing yet. End of June is not looking good. It’s already slipped by three months from end of March to end of June. We’ll see.
Photo taken with Samsung Galaxy S3 (fwiw).
PS don’t ask me to interpret the code – someone might leave a comment explaining.
It’s the weekend. I don’t normally do trefor.net stuff
over the weekend but I have had a very productive day, whistled through the jobs list and more, and am settling down to watch the football with the kids so posting to the blog seems like an useful thing to do.
Annoying though the non functioning headset socket might be the quality of the camera on these new phones continues to impress me. The camera on the Galaxy S3 is pretty much the same as on the S2 apart from some software features such as the burst mode. Notwithstanding this I find myself taking snaps of all sorts of ordinary things just because I happen to have my camera in my pocket.
When I do this I find some interesting things unexpectedly appearing in the photos I take. The red rose on the right for example has green aphids on it. Looking at the photos I can also see what I can only call red aphids. I suspect these insects are colourless and are just showing the colours of the background object.
The next rose still has droplets of water on it after the rain. These photos all use the macro function on the camera.
You are beginning to see what a softie I am. It’s just that I’m so impressed that I can take photos like this. In the “old” days I used to have to take a whole reel of film (36 shots) to get a couple of decent photos. Now, with the screen for me to be able to line up the shot properly and great autofocus
technology I probably only discard two pictures in every 36 I take. One more rose, for luck.
I also had to put in this other ladybird photo. When I took the picture I hadn’t noticed that there was a small spider nearby. I wondered whether the ladybird was after the spider for food. There were plenty of aphids nearby had it but known:)
I liked the contrast between the bright primary red and black of the ladybird with the delicate pastel colourings of the flowers around it.
I’ll have to draw the line on nature shots for now – these pics 
take time to edit.
If someone could tell me what the purple flowers below left are I’d be most grateful. They are in our back garden.
Much as it pains me I have to tell you that the headset socket on my Samsung Galaxy S3 is not working. I found out because during the week I started to net no audio on my phone though it would work in speakerphone mode.
When this first happened I checked all the settings and there was nothing obvious. Switching bluetooth off seemed to do the trick and I put it down to somehow the phone not having unhitched itself from my Parrot car kit. I can see my car from my panoramic office window:)
It must have been a coincidence because it is now happening all the time. In the wee small hours of this morning I woke up and googled the problem. I found an android forum with a thread that showed the same problem on a different model of handset.
If you had been using the headset sometimes the sensor didn’t work to show that the plug was no longer in the socket. I had to wait until morning to confirm this on my phone. My wife Anne would not have been too happy if I had accidentally switched something noisy on the phone during the night.
I can indeed confirm that the problem lies with the headset socket. Nothing in fact works through the headset.
Sigh. Someone on Twitter mentioned that this sort of thing often happens when a phone reaches end of life. Unfortunately this is the wrong end.
Its worth noting I still haven’t finished testing all the features on the Samsung Galaxy S3. The bit where the phone isn’t supposed to switch off doesn’t seem to work all the time and I have supposedly disabled the LED for alerts but it still comes on. Early days for the S3 I guess.
We are about to find out how well the returns system works!
Other Galaxy S3 problems here.
Had a very enjoyable time at #lincstweetmeet yesterday. I gave a talk to an audience of just short of 100 social media fans on the effect that 4G will have on their tweeting, blogging and general online networking. Interesting to note that I recognised many of the twitter names from the badges as people I follow. It’s still very difficult to correlate an online persona with a real one though unless you have met them a few times.
Click on the header photo to see the actual audience. It was nice to meet them 🙂
If you want to understand the context of the post title click here.
The guess the name of the Samsung Galaxy S3 phone competition from Monday was somewhat buried in the review. It is one of the least entered megaprize competitions I’ve run. This is possibly because it was buried in a long review of the Galaxy S3 or maybe the chances of winning were slim becasue there are lots and lots of names it could have been.
I’m going to assume both so this is a short post just to highlight the competition. Then I’m going to narrow down the possibilities as to what the name might be by telling you that it has biblical associations.
I’m not going to limit the number of prizes here. The competition is going to run all day and anyone who gets the name right gets a prize. There is also going to be a further prize for anyone who comes up with the most unusual biblical name (I’m the judge and my decision is final1).
This competition is also open to Timico staff. If they turn their noses at the mug then I’ll think of a different internal prize but it’s a mug for everyone else. Btw the one answer I did get on the previous post was “Tref’s phone”. Although it is the name displayed on the locked screen I am after the bluetooth name which is different.
Get guessing.
PS if you have already won a mug in a previous competition I can find a different prize for you.
1 though it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that I can be bribed on this one but the bribe is almost certainly going to have to be for a lot more than the prize is worth.
You don’t always need a reason to write a blog post. 
I could justify this one as being a demo of a photo taken with my Samsung Galaxy S3 but it is good enough just as a nice photo of a rose. I dedicate this photo to all who blossom and have goodness in their hearts 🙂 Just close your eyes and imagine the scent. Perfect spring perfume.
Had a great night at the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel. 
I was there as a guest of BT Wholesale for the annual Global Telecoms Business Innovations Awards. My hosts won an award for their work with mobile network operator Everything Everywhere in rolling out 4G infrastructure that allowed the sharing of backhaul connectivity. Basically you can now have multiple VLANs terminating at different nodes. In the Cornwall project the BT POP was in Bristol and EE in London (I might be wrong with the specifics here – lemonade has a funny way of playing tricks with my memory but you get the gist).
The video below is of Chet Patel, MD of Markets at BT Wholesale and David Salam of Everything Everywhere picking up the awards which I’m sure will find a treasured spot in their respective HQ receptions 🙂
It’s a serious power networking evening and well worth going if you get an invite. BT won another award with Genband, the company that Timico partners with for our VoIP infrastructure.
My sincere thanks go to Dave Axam at BT for being such a welcoming host. I’ll be writing up the 4G aspects of the Cornwall project sometime soon. 4G was used to provide internet connectivity for some of the more inaccessible parts of the county.
28/9/13 update – comparison of O2, EE and Vodafone 4G networks in London
I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy S3 for three days now. I don’t think you can sensibly rush out a review within hours of getting your hands on a device particularly as these phones are not simple gadgets anymore. They are highly complex and despite any focus on usability and simplicity there is so much to learn and find out about them that it inevitably takes time.
My first concern was somewhat mundane – the size of the phone. The Galaxy S2 was just about ok for me – I struggled to read the top of the screen with my thumb and was worried that the S3 might be significantly bigger and thus harder to reach. This aint the case. Although the S3 is advertised as being bigger it isn’t that much different in real life, which is good. I also sat it next to a Samsung Note and it isn’t much smaller than that either but a lot more usable as a phone. I suspect we are getting the best of both worlds here.
The Samsung Galaxy S3 is otherwise known as the GT-I9300. I know that this is the underlying model number of the phone because whilst trying to name it something to hook up with my Parrot car kit it automatically connected itself. It was easy. All I had to do was enter the car kit pin number.
I couldn’t, in my desire to get going on a Friday evening, find out how to name the phone. It must have been me because when I discussed this with one of the kids the next morning it took him seconds to find out how to do it. I wanted to call the phone “Rosita the Dragon Slayer”. The kids thought that was daft.
I’ve been gazing into that mobile market crystal ball again. I can see nooootthhhinggggg. That’s because all the main phone vendors have sued themselves into the ground in every single market they operate in. This time Samsung is ringing the changes by suing the Australian Patent Commissioner. I don’t need to say more – you can read it yourself on the beeb.
I’m pleased I just got my Galaxy S3 because it is going to remain state of the art for years to come – until the army of corporate lawyers grow so old they trip over their ever lengthening beards, bang their heads against one another and self-destruct. That’s a wake I’d like to attend. It’ll be champagne and caviar all round all paid for out of the rich estates of the dearly departed.
Other than that you aren’t getting an S3 review until Monday although I will say that I have discovered the burst mode on the camera and it is super cool.
Le Samsung Galaxy S3 est arrive. 삼성 갤럭시 S3가 도착했습니다.Mae’r Galaxy S3 Samsung wedi cyrraedd.Որ Samsung Galaxy S3 է ժամանել.وقد وصلت سامسونج غالاكسي S3.આ સેમસંગ ગેલેક્સી S3 આવ્યા છે.Samsung Galaxia S3 iritsi da.Samsung Galaxy S3 gəlib.Samsung Galaxy S3 đã đến.স্যামসাং আকাশগঙ্গা S3 এসেছে.La Samsung Galaxy S3 alvenis.三星Galaxy S3已经抵达.The Samsung Galaxy S3 kominn.سیمسنگ کہکشاں S3 آ گیا ہے.Samsung Galaksi s3 a te rive.An Réaltra Samsung S3 tagtha.Ang Samsung Galaxy S3 ay dumating.Das Samsung Galaxy S3 ist da.Samsung Galaxy S3 прибыло.سامسونگ کهکشان S3 وارد کرده است
Ok folks. As you can see the Samsung Galaxy S3 has arrived and is in my hands. I’m going to kick the tyres over the weekend and give you a considered opinion of it compared with the Galaxy S2.
In the meantime, seeing as it’s Friday afternoon there is a prize for anyone who can tell me which languages (in order of writing) I’ve used in the above announcement. If no one comes in with them all right then the nearest best attempt wins (all assuming I can remember myself).
Ever wondered how they go about deciding where to put a new cellular base station? It’s a fairly complicated process. It’s also very much site specific, awkward locations, landlords, etc. but as an average the following table is a fair reflection of the effort (source Accelera Mobile Broadband with some O2 validation).
| Activity |
Effort (Man Days) |
| New site verification |
1 |
| On site visit: site details verification |
0.5 |
| On site visit: RF survey |
0.5 |
| New site RF plan |
2 |
| Neighbours, frequency, preamble/scrambling code plan |
0.5 |
| Interference analyses on surrounding sites |
0.5 |
| Capacity analyses |
0.5 |
| Handover analyses |
0.5 |
| Implementation on new node(s) |
0.5 |
| Field measurements and verification |
2 |
| Optimization |
2 |
| Total activities |
7.5 man days |
Now just imagine the urban 4G/LTE scenario we have been discussing, where there are ten times as many small cells as in the existing macrocell model. Research org ABI has forecast that there will be 5 million small cells by 2015.
That’s a lot of site surveys using the traditional model. A lot of man days. The only sensible answer is to deploy Self Organising Network. SONs seem to have some way to go before they are mature enough for full scale deployment but there is time, in the UK at least.
A SON has, in theory all the features you might expect from the name. Cells should self-configure, regularly self-optimize parameters and algorithmic behaviour in response to observed changes in network performance and atmospheric conditions. Self-healing mechanisms can be triggered to temporarily compensate for a detected equipment outage whilst waiting for a permanent fix. Nirvana really – plug and play. As we have already found out in the lamp post story plug and play is probably some time away but it will come.
I’m sat in a pub in Covent Garden in a race against time. I’m meeting Dr Sue Black at 4pm for a chat about stuff. She is, unfortunately, on a train stuck in the sidings at Wimbledon because someone is trying to commit suicide in Wimbledon station.
These things happen. V sad. The problem is that my phone is running low on juice as is Sue’s. I have the laptop but nowhere to plug it in. I could probably move to find somewhere to charge my phone (I only have a USB cable to attach it to the laptop) but I then run the risk that Sue’s phone battery will run out and she won’t know where I am. I don’t actually need the phone at my end as long as I have power left in the laptop because we are staying in touch using Twitter.
I have plenty of time. It is now 4.48 and my train is not until 7.06 (pm). I can plug both phone and laptop in on the train so I just need to husband resources until then. Also there are only so many glasses of mineral water a man can take…
Little glimpses of life in the early days of the mobile internet – real life drama lived out in Twittercolour on the www.
Ever thought about where to site your mobile data connectivity service? I have to admit I’ve not spent much time on it myself. I’d probably come up with a topographical map of where I was providing the service and plan a series of base stations to give me optimum coverage – most bang for my buck. Nothing new really.
That’s why the chart on the right makes interesting reading. Provided by Ruckuswireless the graph shows the relative demand density for data usage in Mbps per 10m2 based on type of location. Most of the high demand locations are indoor. The high street, which is where most of us would think of putting in capacity ranks 8th.
Ok the stats come from
In the wifi hotspot game first mover advantage is becoming critically important. Experience shows that landlords everywhere are initially happy to allow a network provider into their mall/stadium/building. Once in however they decide they don’t want the hassle of doing it again or don’t really like the infrastructure they are now stuck with but have to keep.
As a result there is a market for the first movers in reselling capacity or subletting space on their infrastructure. We are therefore seeing a land grab in places around the world where operators are snapping up as many sites as they can.
In London The Cloud is looking at 1 hotspot per 200 persons. Time Warner is putting 15,000 wifi access points in Los Angeles and PCCW have 10,000 hotspots in Hongkong where peak time traffic has 50% going over wifi instead of mobile networks. For PCCW in Hong Kong their resold wholesale wifi capacity is their single biggest revenue stream1.
O2 is rolling out massive coverage in