Mobile Phones Blog

The GSM Association which represents the interests of hundreds of cellular operators around the world, has cleverly positioned mobile broadband initiatives as a replacement for Wi-Fi and convinced all the leading laptop suppliers to move one step beyond broadband dongles in one concerted leap, to putting a chip on the PC motherboard for devices delivered across 91 countries. They will also the devices have broadband capability with a “Mobile Broadband” badge. The move has echoes of the “Intel Inside” and the “Centrino” campaign which triggered mass take up of Wi-Fi.

PC makers, operators and chip providers all lined up to back the move, this week including 3 Group, Asus, Dell, ECS, Ericsson, Gemalto, Lenovo, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefonica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba and Vodafone - which includes operators serving 760 million customers, around a quarter of the global cellular market.

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Something of a late arrival to the party this; Virgin Media have just announced plans to make a move in on the burgeoning mobile broadband market. The Quad Play provider, which punts cable broadband, digital cable TV, along with fixed line calls and mobile services, already supplies some 4 million UK customers with broadband services, and naturally wants to combine the ‘mobile’ and ‘broadband’ aspects of its business.

Virgin Media will be launching a single 18-month mobile broadband contract, which will allow users to connect to the web on the go for just £15 a month. As far as we know, there is no set-up fee, and the cost of the USB modem is included in the contract; there is a 3GB monthly download limit.

No official word on the top download speed available to customers, but seeing as Virgin Mobile piggybacks off of the T-Mobile network, out guess is that the Virgin Media mobile broadband service will do the same, and therefore the speeds ought to be around 4.5Mbps, the same as they are with T-Mobile’s closest equivalent service (Plus USB Modem Stick 24 Months).

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O2 have officially announced that the current free/discounted MacBook/O2 Mobile Broadband rumour is just that. An O2 spokeswoman yesterday confirmed that there are “no such plans to launch an Apple MacBook laptop offer,” and that the rumours are “untrue”.

As we all know, O2, who along with Carphone Warehouse, hold exclusive carriage rights to the iPhone, were thought to have worked out a deal with Apple which would see them match the current slew of free laptop offers available from mobile broadband providers and network rivals T-Mobile, Vodafone, 3 Mobile and Orange.

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Mobile phone companies are joining with chipset and laptop manufacturers to promote integrated mobile broadband support on laptop computers.

The united front of industry giants will build wireless modules into laptops designed to provide fast access to mobile broadband. A “Mobile Broadband” logo (see image) will mark out computers that will accelerate current third generation speeds and are compatible with future fourth generation technology. It is expected that the new laptops will be on the market in 91 different nations before Christmas.

Companies that have joined the alliance include laptop manufacturers Dell, Toshiba and Lenovo as well as 3, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Ericsson, Orange, Qualcomm and Vodafone. The coalition of companies has said it will spend about £554m ($1bn) altogether on promoting the logo and informing customers about laptops fitted with the new technology. The agreement to produce the modules, build them in to laptops and to campaign around the Mobile Broadband logo has been brokered by the GSM Association (GSMA) - a trade body that represents 80% of the world's mobile phone companies.

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There is talk abroad of a deal brewing between Apple and O2 that could see customers who sign up for either of O2’s mobile and home broadband offerings getting MacBook or MacBook Pro laptop throw into the bargain.

The two companies, apparently still cosy in their iPhone relationship will be offering free hardware to subscribers in a bid to match the current free laptop offers available to Carphone Warehouse customers who sign up with Orange, 3 Mobile, Vodafone, and T-Mobile.

It is as of yet unknown whether the Macs will be available free, we presume, given that Apple stuff generally costs a pretty penny that the MacBook will either be available as a free gift, or at a lower cost that the Pro version.

We always go on about how tough it is that the UK cannot get its hands on decent mobile TV services, mostly due to a lack of spare spectrum for DVB-H or other broadcasting services, but there turns out to be more than one way to skin a cat.

A year ago a small US company called Broadcast International introduced a completely new concept in video over a constrained network like a DSL line or better still a switched cellular connection. The idea is fairly simple to describe, but tough to build, it takes 5 or 6 different approaches to digitizing video - using different encoding algorithms - and digitizes and compresses video using all of them in parallel, and picks the outcome with the lowest bit count to use for each frame produced. Previous approaches used one standard encoding approach like MPEG2 or MPGE 4/H.264.

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In the early days of the mobile internet, software and services were provided by specialist firms that were expert in eking the best experience possible from the limited resources of simple handsets and basic browsers. As users move to sophisticated smartphones with large amounts of memory, big screens and full operating systems, the PC internet firms like Google will look to take over. But while smartphones are becoming cheaper and more accessible, there is also a rising tide of internet use on simpler handsets, and this could ensure the survival of the mobile-specific companies like Opera on the browser side, or AdMob in advertising engines, even against the attack from Google.

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In the wake of the recent EU roaming charge price adjustments, we’ve heard all sorts of roaming charge holiday horror stories, but this one takes les biscuits.

Iayn Dobson opened his mobile phone bill to discover he had been charged £31,000 by Yes Telecom, the small-business arm of Vodafone, he assumed it was a ludicrous mistake. “The figures looked like they had come down from the moon,” he said in an interview for the Telegraph. “I just laughed. There had to be some mistake”. Although he was aware that his bill would be higher than usual, he expected charges “to the tune of about £150.”

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O2 UK will launch the 3G iPhone on July 11 and has added a new incentive for users, via a free hotspot access deal with BT Openzone. This deal will give iPhone users access to BT’s Wi-Fi locations as part of their monthly tariff. This is additional to O2’s existing arrangement with The Cloud for its 6,000 hotspots. In addition, O2 has outlined iPhone 3G pricing, including the option to get the handset for free with a high end data tariff.

This arrangement shows how operators are increasingly tempting consumers with bundles containing more and more services. In particular, cellular and Wi-Fi combinations are important, and in this market, BT and its roaming partner The Cloud are seizing a strong commercial opportunity and boosting the return on their building of Wi-Fi networks across the UK. BT, which no longer has a mobile network of its own having sold off Cellnet to O2 way back when, is increasingly looking to work with the cellcos in order to increase its own revenue streams, for instance by providing them with backhaul for their networks, and with hotspot partnerships.

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