WiMAX or HSPA?

Following my earlier long post about 3G and WiMAX I found some interesting reports, which made wonder if this would that mean WiMAX will be left behind by UMTS?


As per the GSMA reports - The number of live HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) connections will pass 150 million globally this summer, while according to a report published by Marvedis this week WiMAX has just 3.5 million users. This puts HSPA firmly ahead of other mobile broadband technologies.

As per Wireless Intelligence reports , EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) have 49.5 million HSPA users currently and almost 60 million predicted by the end of the summer. Asia-Pacific is a close second at 47.7 million subscribers and by the end of September will have over 56 million. The U.S. trails significantly, with about 32 million HSPA connections growing to perhaps 37 million by September, while the rest of the Americas will hit just over four million subscribers in the same time frame.

HSPA is an attractive option for mobile operators as the technology allows operators to upgrade their existing 3G networks, often by simply upgrading the software. This gives HSPA a leg up over WiMAX, which requires new network infrastructure. Further, its performance rates are attractive, as well. HSPA download rates range from 3.6 Mbps to 14.4 Mbps, and a handful of operators are beginning to roll out 21 Mbps using HSPA+.

The GSMA reports that there are more than 300 upgraded networks across 127 countries. More than 1500 HSPA-enabled devices are on the market. Its rapid adoption — faster even than SMS — has led the organization to embrace HSPA as the dominant mobile broadband technology.

The report expects growth to continue at a rapid pace, predicting 200 million connections by the first quarter of 2010.

Mobile Number Portability

Since Jordan is looking forward to implement number portability “soon”, I thought this information would be interesting - Over 600,000 Mobile Numbers Ported in Israel Since MNP Introduced. After 1 year and a half since number portability was implemented in Israel, 607,000 mobile subscribers and 418,000 fixed subscribers have switched companies, reports the Ministry of Communications.

According to figures from the Mobile World, Israel ended Q1 '09 with an estimated 8.7 million mobile phone subscribers, with an additional 500,000 subscribers acquired from providing services illegally in Palestine.

What is 4G ??!

Wherever you look in Jordan’s WiMAX advertisements you see them claiming to offer 4G, just to show that they are on the cutting edge of technology ..... in fact there is no 4G standard until now… and that the 4G is just a phrase invented by marketers and advertisers who cannot explain the difference between UMTS, WiMAX and LTE.

In short the standard of 3G/UMTS is called IMT-2000. It is a standard that was created under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) years ago, a standard that was created to enable telephones, infrastructure and services to function across networks from different manufacturers, in the same way as we know from a number of other areas in the telecom industry.

if we look on the WiMAX and LTE standards they are part of the IMT-2000 standard therefore thety are part of what we daily call 3G or UMTS. In practice, LTE is a natural evolution of UMTS and part of the same standard that is the foundation of the 3G networks that are in operation today all over the world. Simply put one could say that LTE is a 3G technology in the same way as UMTS, UMTS-HSDPA, UMTS-HSUPA etc.

when the IMT-2000 standard was created it became the foundation of 3G and the start of an evolution that is based on a number of technologies moving from UMTS to LTE - an evolution that has given millions of people access to mobile broadband and that will result in over one billion people using mobile networks as their primary Internet access technology in just a few years.

To call WiMAX or LTE 4G is simply misleading and is contributing in moving focus away from the possibilities created by mobile broadband and over to a technological race with nothing else than the number of G’s deciding whether something is good or bad.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

A lovely chat with a dear friend in the past week has engaged me in a second full time job which is reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.... although I have watched the movie earlier but this novel is so additive and suspenseful that I put all my activities after work on hold except reading it to the extent that I couldn’t resist having any wasted time without it so I bought the Audio book edition and currently having it in my iPod where I can listen to it in the places where carrying a book is inappropriate e.g. whilst driving or walking!!

I usually discuss whether reading those novels which were adapted into movies should be before or after watching the movie, normally I read the book and then I watch the movie but in this particular time, I did the other way around, so the novel is now detailing the explaining the movie … I started also to find out the differences (and sometimes justify them!) between the movie and the novel, more also how the actions in the movie are moving much faster and briefer than in the novel, for instance in the novel Charlie told Bella about the Chevy truck on the way back from the airport but in the movie she knew about it after getting home more also the whole section about the blood type test is not in the movie and in the movie Bella and her mom never exchanged emails (all phone calls) unlike the novel…etc.

The novel is a teenage human-vampire romance story, where Bella fall in love with the vampire Edward who (and his family) drink animal blood rather than humans, although Edward has initially avoided her because the scent of her blood was so desirable to him…

Normally forbidden love stories are like the forbidden apple on the novel cover make people tempting for them and find their way directly into people’s heart and so did this one being the international bestselling novel, it excelled in the way it has been written being so reasonable, delicate, direct to the point, and easy to follow novel.

Normally romance novels has the 2 normal people who fall in love, so a male reader can imagine himself as if he were the male guy and sometimes even learn from the way he acted, the words and actions the hero was doing, even trying to think and maybe dress like him or whatever… but in this story it is impossible since Bella’s love was basically built on how ideally Edward looked like, on his supernatural power, his changing eyes color, the way he showed her the world from the top of the tree, and maybe his driving on top speed habit which I liked most J …etc. all of these things are impossible for normal human, hence it might become frustrating for a male reader unless he put himself in Bella’s shoes!!, who looks normal, drives an early sixties Chevy truck, cannot dance, doesn’t play Volleyball properly …etc. but get loved and love the perfect person; beautiful, speaks in an angelic voice and most importantly sharing and caring person who doesn’t hide secrets and tells all the facts as they were even though they might cause big problems for them both.

The story is lovely and I recommend everyone to read it (boys and girls) but boys don’t try to stop a moving van using your handsJ

Enjoy reading….

Almost 2010 and no 3G in Jordan!!!!

An interesting discussion has taken place between a friend who lived big part of his life inside mobile operators in the region, he has a real extensive experience in mobile startups and good vision of the future of the mobile telecommunications, I usually have heated discussion with him regarding the future of the communication since I have a vision that data will be the leading bearer for the future and voice will be carried just like any other service over data (with a higher priority and QoS control..etc.) , while he believes that voice will always be the ”king” while data and broadband connections will be no more than internet browsing and downloading of files.

While I normally don’t agree with him, we tirelessly spend hours and hours discussing these subjects; however a latest discussion has really surprised me when he extended his conclusions to justify the current situation in Jordan with regards to the 3G licenses.

To those who doesn’t know Jordan is a very limited country in terms of natural resources, no oil or gas, a small agricultural country with very limited water sources, however the Jordanian market was considered one of the most competitive markets in terms of the telecommunications industry, the country of the 6m populations has currently 4 mobile operators, Zain (formerly Fastlink) the first operator in the region that launched its services back in 1994 being one of the leading mobile operators in the region, which was initially considered as a test bed for the giant Motorola so basically back in 1994 when no other neighboring country has launched the GSM services Fastlink was enjoying the latest technologies and services as those offered in Europe, later on Fastlink was acquired by the Kuwaiti MTC and got rebranded under the one-brand (and one-network) Zain

On 2000 MobileCom has launched its services with France Telecom as a controlling shareholder, then followed by Xpress which the first commercial iDEN operator in Arab World the and lately Umniah which was acquired by Batelco.

Unlike most neighboring countries the operators that launched mainly depended on the Jordanian staff starting from the executive level across all the major functions inside the operator, which made Jordanian staff very well sought for from the other operators as they proved their capabilities of launching Greenfield operators and turning them into success stories.

But it seems something wrong happened with the regulatory body there, after they have issued the license for the 4^th mobile operator they changed the licensing scheme and hold issuing the 3G license, until lately when they issued a public consultation for issuing the 3G license where everyone told them that the bidding is not the best way to offer the license, however seeking for some 25millions JDs for the license they did issue the bid and “not surprisingly” only one operator applied for the license (Orange) which even didn’t comply with the requirements which it forced the TRC to withdraw the bidding and not issuing the license. On the other hand the TRA has issued many WiMAX licenses and in Jordan you can find 4 or 5 WiMAX operators competing side by side with the 5 or 6 ADSL service providers, claiming that they are offering the 4G services! Although WiMAX is actually classified as 3G service which is nowhere close to the 4G rates (360/80 Mbps Uplink/Downlink)

Back to the discussion with my friend, he is saying that since WiMAX is being offered as the wireless broadband service then why to go with 3G!!! especially when Zain can provide you with the e-Go which is a WiMAX USB dongle that can be used for those looking for mobile broadband, and he is saying that the 3G will go nowhere other than a pure broadband access which is already given by the WiMAX!.

Here I have to stop and respond to him in 3 directions; the first one is from a pure analysis and market comparison perspective, the second response will be from a pure technical perspective, and I will keep the third one dedicated for ourselves as employees in this industry.

While the first 3GPP WCDMA was launched back in 2002 until now there are more than 300+ active WCDMA networks in the world, the number of the WCDMA subscribers is more than 200 million, when the new Greenfield 3 3G operator launched its services in UK (which has the highest non-voice ARPU the world) it increased the 3G penetration to 8% in almost no time. In Japan the 3G penetration is more than 25% after Docomo’s launch; and everyone knows that Docomo was the first operator to support the 3G and pushed the technology further actually I actually need to dedicate a post for the Japanese market especially with Docomo’s i-mode and the way of supporting the 3G in addition to the soon to launch Nokia MVNO there.

Another important point that has to be kept in mind that the mobile business market is driven by the availability of attractive CPEs, so to be able to reach a major market share, handsets offering for all market segments is really key, currently there are more than 300 different WCDMA terminal models from more than 30 suppliers. Look at the Nokia terminals when they launched the first 3G handset in 2003 currently it is hard to find a new Nokia handset that doesn’t support 3G!

Now let me put the technical hat on and start talking about how the 3G was meant to enhance and provide a better user experience than the normal 2G+ currently being offered in Jordan; once launched the WCDMA subscribers should be increasing and it should allow the 3G network to carry bigger share of voice and data traffic, and since the WCDMA technology provides many advantages over the existing 2G network it should enhance the end user experience because it will not only enables high speed data but also improves basic voice services, the offered voice capacity in 3G is very high because of interference control mechanisms including the frequency reuse of fast power control and soft handover, so WCDMA offers considerable more voice minutes to customers and at the same time it can also enhance the voice service with wideband AMR codec, which provides clearly better voice quality than the 2G and even better than fixed network. So the bottom line is 3G offer more voice minutes with better quality.

In addition to the better spectral efficiency, 3G provides even more dramatic evolution in terms of base station capacity and hardware efficiency, thanks to the wideband carrier which allows a large number of users to be supported per carrier and were radio frequency carriers are required to provide the same capacity, so with the fewer RF parts and more digital baseband, 3G can benefit from the fast improvements in the DSP technologies.

Last but not least 3G operators are able to provide new and interesting data services including browsing, peer to peer video calls, video IVR, video mail, sports and news video clips and mobile TV, 3G enables simultaneous voice and data which allows for instance browsing or emailing during voice conferencing, or real time video monitoring using the 3G cameras. Which I agree that they sounds interesting but despite the numbers and the MOUs are considerably low in the countries that launched them it doesn’t mean that not offering any of these services is a wise decision especially when everyone has a 3G handset and never used any of the 3G services!

Since my friend and me are working in this industry we got the experience from the used to be biggest telecom school in the Arab world (Jordan) we then travelled around the region and participated in launching new operators, I personally left Jordan in 2005 when no 3G was around in the region and witnessed the first 3G launch in Saudi Arabia, I also worked on launching a 3G network in Palestine and currently working closely to a 3G operator in Oman, so basically I learnt the 3G concepts, skills and techniques of the 3G outside of Jordan, but for those who haven’t left Jordan yet, I am not sure if terms like HSDPA, HSUPA, IMS, Node B or RNC would ring a bell for them or they are still working in the GPRS and EDGE worlds.

Halafoni the new mobile brand for youth

A couple of days ago i attended the launch of a new mobile brand (halafoni) the service is offered by Friendi mobille which an existing MVNO/Reseller which has launched 3 months ago the new mobile service is tied with the local radio station HalaFM.

The new service is targetting the youth segment by offering a cool brand with a cool slogan (cool ala tool) in addition to some new ideas like the download points being offered as part of the cool Jelly welcome pack, so the subscriber can use these points to download ringtones, wallpapers..etc directly to his mobile, to be more accurate this is what they claim!

To those who doesnt know Friendi has Oman Mobile as thier HNO which until the moment is not giving Friendi's subscribers access to the data services.
In other words, these points should be used to download content through data which is (data) not available to the customer! Surprisingly not many people are complaining which might indicate that people either didnt understand what those points are or that no one is interested in the content services!!!

Virtualization vs Blades

Today I attended the  Dell’s Next Generation Datacentre Roadshow, which is basically introducing the new 11^th generation of the Dell servers and the other new technologies Dell has introduced recently like the DMC, consultancy and support services.

It is interesting to see how Dell is trying to fill the gaps left by the other vendors like HP and IBM, while you see the other giants working hard in the countries like UAE and Saudi, Dell is trying to invest and focus on the smaller markets like Oman, Kuwait and Qatar…

Personally I am a big supporter for the virtualization, I installed all the whole corporate infrastructure we have on a Para-virtualized environment using Xen, which has been running smoothly so far. but when Dell focus on the virtualization technologies and claiming 9:1 reduction in power and data center space, it reminds me when the Blade servers came out also claiming almost the same advantages!