OneVoice for LTE + IMS : Necessary but not sufficient

This will surprise a few people: I'm actually quite impressed with the announcement the other day about the OneVoice profile for defining an IMS-based approach to voice on LTE. I've now had a chance to read through the full document.

It essentially de-options a lot of the implementation vagueness and distracting flexibility around using IMS for mobile voice, creating a lowest common denominator "Profile" from the existing standards. It strips away a lot of the unnecessary fripperies and boils it all down to what amounts to the minimum set of requirements for basic telephony to work - if you happen to be an operator bought into the IMS world-view, that is.

Exactly two years ago I published a report on VoIPo3G (which included an analysis of the role of VoIP on LTE, HSPA and EVDO). I wrote "Too much emphasis is placed by 3GPP on unproven ‘multimedia’ telephony concepts rather than ‘plain’ VoIPo3G". More than three years ago I wrote another report on IMS-capable handsets (or the lack thereof) in which I wrote "There is little consensus on the answer to the question "What exactly is an IMS phone?""

Well, this document is an IMS-centric take on "Plain VoIPo3G", and it does go a little further in defining the capabilities of an IMS phone. It makes it very clear that "other media types" like video are not essential, for initial deployment at least. There is not a single mention of the word "presence" in the whole document. It talks about AMR codecs and not the "HD" wideband version AMR-WB.

It appears to have taken a long hard look at the unloved MMTel standard for mobile IMS VoIP and turned it into something more practical. It might even make "bare-bones IMS VoIP" a bit cheaper and easier to implement for some of the operators who are skeptical.

All of which is good. -But the problems it addresses have been obvious for at least 2 years, and this announcement is a start of a process and not its end. This document is just a suggestion, not a standard. It will be forwarded to 3GPP and GSMA and other bodies. It's written on a template that *looks* like a standards document, but for now it's just a helpful suggestion from some interested parties. "this specification defines a common recommended feature set and selects one recommended option when multiple options exist for single functionality"

Hopefully, it will become more widely adopted over time - although it will be interesting to see if any changes are made when other companies have their say. Notable major omissions from the roster of participants are NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, LG, Apple, RIM, Motorola, Telecom Italia, T-Mobile, Qualcomm, NEC and quite a few others.

Various other commentators have suggested that this means that OneVoice is "One Ring to Rule Them All" (....and in the darkness bind them), spelling the end for Frodo (aka VoLGA), Gollum (CS Fallback) and all the other hobbit-like contenders for Voice on LTE.

I disagree.

OneVoice is necessary but not sufficient. It makes IMS less painful for mobile voice, but it doesn't make it ideal either. It makes interoperable IMS mobile voice less slow to develop, but it doesn't make it fast. It makes it less cumbersome, but doesn't make it elegant. It makes it less costly, but it doesn't obviously make it profitable. It's an important step, but it isn't the whole journey.

When the OneVoice press release came out, I was at the Telco 2.0 conference listening to Vodafone's Internet Services team discussing 360 and commenting on IMS RCS, saying "it was going in the right direction, but taking too long". They also mentioned they might think about putting a VoIP client into 360 at some point. I initially thought Voda's presence in the press release a bit strange given it seems in no hurry to deploy LTE, but on second thoughts I see no downside for them either: simplifying IMS is either neutral or positive for them, depending on which part of the company you talk to.

Either way, OneVoice isn't going to happen ubiquitously, nor overnight. Handset vendors must be breathing a sigh of relief that they *finally* have bits of a specification to work to for IMS handsets. But it's unlikely to be quick to hit the market or be optimised. And the overall business case for mobile operators to deploy IMS is still not exactly pretty, as it offers no obvious new revenue streams. For fixed IMS, there have at least been some decent arguments around cost-savings. But it's far from clear that the mobile IMS spreadsheets have a similar bottom line benefit.

So there is still likely to be a need for an interim solution for several years - as well as something that works on non-IMS LTE operators' networks. CS fallback is a bit of a train-wreck which nobody seems to like. So I think that VoLGA still makes sense for those wanting to make the most of their circuit-switching assets. And Internet-based voice services like Skype or a future "VodaVoIP" may have appeal for the more 2.0-style operators deploying LTE.

Music industry: stop whingeing

OK, a little off-topic here, but having sat through a lot of hand-wringing during the Media session at the Telco 2.0 event this morning, I thought I'd stick my oar in as well. There was a lot of discussion about banning P2P filesharers, DRM, ISP responsbilities, traffic-shaping and so on, particularly about music. We had the esteemed presence of 1980s singer Feargal Sharkey.

Now don't get me wrong - I produce content myself, and I don't like it when fake spam blogs rip of this site, and I also take steps to protect my published research from illegal copying.

But at the same time, I absolutely disagree that the whole of the Internet industry should be paying much attention to a very small minority, worried about a very small amount of what the Internet is about. I've written before that content is just a small, special sort of application, and the more I think about it, the more my opinion is confirmed.

There is no reasons that music piracy should drive government policy or Internet regulation, any more than software piracy or the online sale of fake pharmaceuticals. However, the entertainment industry tends to enjoy cosier relationships with policy-makers (the French President's wife being a musician, for example, while UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is closely linked with the content industry).

Ultimately, the music industry is designed to be (a) noisy, and (b) emotive. That's it's job. So it should be no surprise that they tend to be louder and more emphatic when it comes to shouting about its concerns.

Yet I cannot believe that anyone entering the music industry in the last 10 years has done so expecting to make $$$ from record sales. All the musicians I know are well-aware of the score. They've probably illegally downloaded music themselves. They know the value of live performances, which have been incredibly strong in recent years. If they want to exercise their creativity for purely money-making purposes, they'd be writing iPhone apps instead.

I'm not aware of any decline in the number of bands being formed, despite reducing music sales. A quick glance around the web suggests that musical instrument sales are still pretty robust too.

Bottom line - while piracy is definitely bad news for the record labels, it doesn't seem to be too apocalyptic for performers. But irrespective of the rights and wrongs (and I'm not especially animated one way or the other personally) the noise generated by the music industry is far out of proportion with its overall importance. Turn it down, please.

Finally, an MNO breaks the service/access link. Vodafone 360....

I have long been of the view that the greatest challenge to operators' hold on mobile value-added services will not necessarily come from Google, Skype and other Internet players. It will come from each other.

The unspoken threat has been that other MNOs could represent the scariest so-called "over the top" risk. That they would decouple access from service, and start providing branded services over *each others* networks and handsets.

In particular, I suggested in June this year that Vodafone's acquisition of Zyb might turn into its attempt to break out beyond the narrow confines of its own access-customer base. This follows on from an early warning last year when it launched a cross-operator Facebook SMS app.

I wrote: "My view is that it's an extremely healthy development - if you're Vodafone, or for that matter NTT DoCoMo or a small mobile operator from Africa, why *shouldn't* you have inhouse-developed cool mobile apps, which you want to make available to everyone, not just people on your own network? Sure, maybe you *optimise* for people who have both access+app from you, but why not distribute your software as widely as possible?"

In a nutshell, I was right. Vodafone 360 is available to everyone, not just Voda access subscribers. It's on PCs, there's a client downloadable to other operators' (or vanilla) Symbian or Java devices, plus there's support for other OSs in the pipeline. Yes, the in-house optimised phones from Samsung and others give a *better* 360 experience, but Vodafone has recognised it has to be available as widely as possible to gain traction.

In a way, this is completely intuitive. Businesses like Facebook can succeed because they are addressable by *all* Internet users, not just those confined to a specific broadband provider. This is the way to gain network effects, scale, loyalty and ubiquity. Why would anyone prefer an operator-specific, walled-garden service? The same is true for music (I'm watching Spotify present right now), video (YouTube) or many other services.

One last comment: Vodafone 360 is not based on IMS or RCS, it's. If at some point that changes, I might revise my views on RCS.

Update: just listened to Voda's Director of Internet Services Marketing on a panel talking about 360. RCS was "going in the right direction, but taking too long".... so they used standard web technologies instead.

Obfuscating customer behaviour to maintain privacy

Listening to a discussion about telecom operators aggregating customer data, profiling people based on behavioural software and so on. Not surprisingly, there's the usual questions about privacy, peoples' dislike of personal advert-targetting and so forth.

Don't get me wrong, some of this stuff may be useful in terms of making sure adverts are more interesting and entertaining. But many people (and some countries' legal systems) will take an exceptionally dim view of telco data mining. It fits a bit into what I mentioned last week about the "social web" last week - who really wants all their contacts and behaviour and calls and traffic aggregated and analysed?

For those who do value their privacy, I see a broad set of options emerging to ensure fragmentation will endure. Firstly, the ability to share and federate anonymised connectivity via devices using Joiku Boost or MiFi-type connection sharing. And then I would also expect to see software that makes decoy calls/SMS's with your "spare" minutes and texts, or visits random websites on your flatrate data plan. That should make for some interesting "social graph" analysis.... lastly, I expect a fair amount of messaging or other traffic to be extracted by independent platforms like Facebook (and maybe Vodafone 360)...

Telling anecdote about US views on prepay mobile

I'm at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm in London this morning. I just heard a comment which, to me, epitomises the difference between US views on prepaid mobile versus most of the rest of the world. It was made by someone who looks at subscriber data management, talking about crunching data for a "hypothetical" prepay provider.

Setting the scene, he referred to the likelihood that c50% of users would be "illegal immigrants or former convicts".

Utterly amazing. I've always recognised that prepaid had a stigma amongst many people in North America, but I hadn't realised it was that bad.

The "Social web" - does anyone actually want it?

Is this another example of The Emperor's New Clothes?

I've lost count of the number of pitches I've heard recently along the lines of "a single client to manage all your social network connections", or "a feed of updates via homescreen widgets" and so on.

I've also often been bombarded with the hideous phrase "social web", which I'm starting to think is utterly cringe-worthy, and ties in with a lot of nonsense talked about "social graph" and the farcical notion that you might be able to link together all your various communications channels.

I am genuinely unsure why anyone would want to link their various social networks or contact lists / directories, or tie together their calling and messaging patterns.

Personally, I work incredibly hard to make sure that I keep Facebook and LinkedIn almost totally exclusive. I'm happy that my Skype friend list has minimal overlap with Yahoo contacts. (Sidenote: on average Skype users have<10 contacts, but they're very "intimate").

Like most people, I'm happy with multi-tasking and compartmentalising my communications channels. I don't meet or talk to people who find they have a problem with fragmented social networks or phonebooks. And I certainly don't want *anyone* to be able to derive collated intelligence from across all of my different ways of interacting with friends, clients, acquaintances and so on. Fragmentation is safer and more comfortable.

I suspect that the only people that only really want this are aggregators and/or operators slightly irked by being usurped by Facebook et al. Plus some of the "social media connectivity freaks", who are generally just those in the social media industry itself, or its immediate neighbours like PR and politics and entertainment.

I reckon there's a near-100% overlap with the type of people people who think Twitter is important, ie a very loud and very small group who like shouting at each other repeatedly via 100 different media. The same group that sit in conferences obsessed with back-channels and Macs with Tweet-deck or whatever else they're playing with this week.

But I've seen no evidence that normal people identify with the types of problem that the "social web" attempts to cure. It's possible I'm projecting my own prejudices here, but I don't think so.

Edit: One specific problem will be that of de-duplication of messages. I already have 50%+ of personal emails being Facebook notifications, as well as the little notification icons on Facebook.com itself. So if I also had them replicated to my phone's homescreen, I'd be getting them in triplicate. Wonderful. (And no, I wouldn't turn off the email notifications as I want them on my PC as well as phones - yes, phones *plural*)

Back to low-power GSM: licence exempt?

I'm at eComm in Amsterdam - and currently listening to a very interesting presentation from James Body (historically with Truphone but wearing a different hat today).

A few years ago, I wrote about the UK's low-power GSM auctions, and the subsequent slow-burn deployment of various GSM picocell-based services from companies like Teleware. It's never really lived up to its promise, though.

I hadn't realised this before, but apparently it is now legal to deploy low-power GSM in the guard band in the Netherlands, *licence-free*. I'm not sure exactly how this is implemented, as presumably there needs to be some sort of coordination to manage interference. Maybe you act as "your own MVNO"? One of the audience reported that the Dutch military was already using this option to build their own mini GSM networks on their bases and ships.

More interesting still - apparently this approach conceivably be rolled out Europe-wide. Worth watching....

Sharing multiple mobile broadband connections - possible already

About a week ago, I wrote about the exciting possibility for the new WiFi Direct technology to enable sharing of multiple mobile devices' connections via WiFi. I also noted that this would further help to reduce the historic link between "subscription" (ie SIM) and "identity", which I have long felt is one of those areas where MNOs have taken their role for granted unrealistically.

I wrote "I'll bet one of the most popular will be some form of bandwidth-sharing or load-balancing between multiple phones or other products. I can think of numerous "reasonable" use cases here, eg de facto user-driven "national roaming" to work around coverage blackspots. I'm sure there will be some cool connection-sharing iPhone or Android apps, as well as ones for PCs"

Well, I was wrong on one score - the first connection-sharing app is for Symbian S60, not Apple or Android. I saw a presentation by Joiku this morning about their new JoikuBoost Beta, which does precisely what I had been talking about, multiplexing together multiple data connections, on multiple devices, potentially via multiple operators, and creating one super-fast WiFi virtual hotspot. This can either be open or secured. The technology could also be used by a single device to effectively combine two or more separate HSPA connections (or even HSPA and LTE and/or WiMAX I guess, if devices with suitable OS's become available).

Given what I wrote yesterday about doubling up HSPA channels to compete with LTE... well, it looks like a radio network standard might not even be necessary. Now I think about it, this is even a good way to combine two separate frequency bands - have one phone on 2.1GHz and one on (say) 900MHz, and you've suddenly got the perfect indoor/outdoor solution without all that cumbersome messing about with handoff.

The ramifications of this type of technology are huge - I can see it eventually enabling users to create their own ad-hoc shared meshes, bridging operators, frequencies, radio technologies, tariffing plans and so on. There's no reason that it shouldn't incorporate dongles and MiFi-type devices with Linux or other OS's as well.

Not so much "dumb pipe" as "dumb aether". I think this could be truly disruptive in time.

I think there's probably 100 enhancements you could do in software to optimise, set up groups, manage power, share costs equitably between users and so forth. There's also some fairly horrible things this could do to operator business models - although it potentially also enables congestion problems to be mitigated by the cross-operator load balancing functions. In a way, it's software-defined radio at the application layer. Exciting/scary stuff....

HSPA in 2.6GHz?

I'm wondering.....

... if LTE looks like it might be delayed, for example because of poorer-than-expected performance, difficult optimisation, continued wrangling over voice/SMS implementation, or because operators don't want to be strong-armed into IMS...

... then does it start to make sense to put HSPA/HSPA+ into the 2.6GHz bands, especially given the flurry of upcoming auctions in 2010/2011?

After all, HSPA is a "known quantity" in terms of radio deployment and operation, it's not too difficult to add another band to existing handset platforms, and it's got voice built-in out of the box.

Let's imagine a situation in markets with existing consumer use of mobile broadband, say Europe or Australia or parts of Asia. Now imagine the end of 2012 - there's a lot of 2.6GHz spectrum that's now owned by MNOs. LTE still has teething problems for whatever reason... and in any case, there's several hundred million PCs, dongles, smartphones and other gizmos running on HSPA, albeit only on existing bands like 2.1GHz. I've got to believe that a 2.1/2.6GHz HSPA+ netbook on sale for Xmas 2012 is going to be cheaper and more reliable than a 2.1GHz HSPA + 2.6GHz LTE one - and with broadly similar performance and network efficiency.

On the same theme, do any readers familiar with the innards of UMTS specifications think it might be possible to tweak R9 or R10 HSPA to support flexible channel size, from 5MHz-only to something more like LTE's range of options.

New personal phone - might finally get around to getting an iPhone

A real life case study in handset decision critera & thought process: Me.

This is my genuine thought process about choosing a phone. Probably not typical, but nonethless a realworld example.

At the moment, I mainly use two handsets

- A SonyEricsson C902 for my personal use, billed to D Bubley esq, and only used for voice & SMS (plus originally for camera, although the images are worse than my old S-E K800i from a couple of years ago), on O2

- An unlocked Nokia E71 for work use, used solely for web, email and VoIP. Currently mostly using a 3UK prepaid SIM, although occasionally other SIMs if I'm travelling. It's billed to Disruptive Analysis.

I also occasionally use other devices I have around on loan or that I get through other channels, usually with the 3UK data SIM. I've also got a 3G dongle & a MiFi.

My personal S-E is on a contract coming up for renewal. Also, the software is very buggy, it keeps hanging during calls and occasionally losing inbound speech while a call is live. It's a pain.

Question: what do I replace it with? My normal preference is for my personal handset to be a featurephone, not a smartphone. I have no personal interest in downloading apps at all - I only use download mobile software for work reasons. If I wasn't in the industry, I'd just want a decent browser and email client, and maybe a mapping app.

... however. I'm quite tempted by the idea of a personal iPhone. I like the UI, even just for scrolling through the phonebook and camera album. And I might resuscitate my old & broken iPod music on my PC. And maybe... just maybe... I might try some free apps (I don't have an iTunes account, so I won't be buying anything).

Otherwise, the only appealing options are things like the new widescreen LG Chocolate, the Samsung Jet and maybe the Nokia 6700. The S-E Satio looks tempting and has a camera with a xenon flash, but unfortunately I've lost faith in S-E after the C902, and anyway it's a smartphone so not what I'm looking for. At some point I may play with a BlackBerry, but that's as a replacement for the work E71, not person.

For whatever reason, the HTC Hero and the various Moto devices have no appeal to me right now.

So to be honest, I'll probably get the iPhone - because I'm fairly sure that the "smartness" won't get in the way of me using it as a basic device. My main question is whether the 3Gs if worth an extra £100 over the basic model - essentially a question about whether the camera's any better, as I don't care at all about either video or speech control.

Anyone have any alternative suggestions for a non-smartphone with a good camera, ideally Xenon flash, which looks cool & has a decent browsing experience?