Everything Everywhere sells spectrum to Three (but they cant use it)

Everything Everywhere (EE) the combined company made up to Orange and T-Mobile has sold off some of their 1800MHz spectrum to Three UK (3). The terms of the deal have not been specified.

EE has 2 x 60 MHz bands in 1800MHz and they were forced to relinquish some of this spectrum by the European Competition Commission (2 x 15 MHz chunks) and they have no done this by selling it to 3.

However there's a twist as 3 won't actually get hold of the spectrum until 2013 (which is pretty much the maximum time frame the Competition Commission allowed), which gives EE a whole year to offer 4G (LTE) services in the 1800MHz band and be a UK monopoly for 4G services (Ofcom granted EE a license variation to allow 4G services in EE's 1800MHz band earlier this week).

All of the other mobile network operators have cried foul play as they have to wait for spectrum to become available in 800MHz and 2.6GHz as part of the digital dividend, but Ofcom won't auction the spectrum until 2013 and it's not expected to be available until at least the end of 2013.

By offering LTE services it's likely devices such as the iPhone 5 and other smartphones and tablets will be able to use these frequencies as they're already used in Australia and some Asia Pacific countries. Though UK Broadband is also offering LTE on their spectrum, it's in a band that's not commonly used for LTE and they are having specific devices made to use it.

Amazon now offer Glacial storage

Amazon have announced their Glacier storage system that competes with traditional off-line storage such as tapes. Storage can cost as little as $0.01 per MB per month (so about $10 per TB) and though archival is relatively quick, retrieval can take 4 or 5 hours. Amazon expect users to utilise their notification service so that retrieval jobs are run in the background and users will be notified when the job has been completed. This should be extremely compelling for companies who want to archive data but don't want to invest in network attached storage or slow tape backup solutions. Users should note other charges will be added such as data transfer charges (which can quickly add up).

CS Odessa adds AWS components to Concept Draw Pro/Office

CS Odessa produce a drawing package that is compatible with Microsoft's Visio called Concept Draw Pro (also included in Concept Draw Office which also contains Concept Draw Project and Mindmap). As part of these packages they provide network diagrams and now have released a compete set of Amazon Web Services components allowing users to design and document their AWS configurations. The pack will cost $29 but is available free for a while for registered users of Concept Draw Pro or Office.

Everything Everywhere is allowed to offer LTE services

Everything Everywhere the merged efforts of Orange and T-Mobile have been allowed by Ofcom to operate LTE (Long Term Evolution) or 4G services in its 1800MHz spectrum.

All of the other Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) didn't want EE to be able to do this, but Ofcom have decided that it's in the public interest for them to do so, even though it may give EE a short-term competitive advantage. O2 have published their disappointment in this result.

EE currently have 2 x 60 MHz bands in 1800MHz though under the agreement with the competition commission they have to divest 2 x 15 MHz as part of its merger (leaving them with 2 x 45 MHz). Ofcom have allowed EE to utilise LTE on the full bands, not just the bands that EE will retain after the digital divide auctions expected next year (Ofcom will auction the 800MHz and 2.6GHz bands and EE's spectrum will become available as part of this).

It is rumoured that devices such as the iPhone 5 will be able to use LTE services in this band, so EE will be the only UK operator that allows full use of the iPhone's data capabilities.

Ofcom has also published a statement on the interference of LTE in the 800MHz bands which could affect TV services in the future, though their testing has shown that actual interference should be minimal for real use scenarios.

Ofcom's full statement is here.

iECG my new start-up idea

I'm developing an ECG monitor that uses a new chip/sensor that allows ECG measurements to be taken by placing the sensors on or near the body.

Some hardware will be developed that will do the filtering/digital signal processing work based on ARM CPU and the clean signal can be displayed on consumer hardware such as an iOS or Android phone/tablet or even a PC. There are many consumer applications such as heart rate monitoring for general health, sports activities and such like. The system could also be used to monitor babies by placing the sensors into a cot and check for things like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). There's also real medical uses such as in ambulances as utilising a sensor that can be wiped clean has many cost saving advantages to current ECG pads which cost around $20 a set and are single use. Please view this video as need votes

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BERG Little Printer available to pre-order

BERG London made a bit of a splash when they announced the Little Printer, which is now available to pre-order from the Berg Cloud site for £199.00 plus £6.50 p&p.

The printer connects via wireless to a Cloud Bridge (which in turn connects to a wired network that connects to the Internet).

Once signed-up to BERG Cloud, users can then select services to subscribe to and then these will print out on the Little Printer at the scheduled time, services could be email, Facebook, calendars or events from other systems.

BERG have pblished an API for service providers so they can offer their services to the Little Printer and the specification is here.

Though the mood is positive about the device itself, the £199 price tag seems to be the sticky point as it's quite expensive for a novelty printer that display information that is available on the Internet anyway.

BERG London are offering consultancy top help companies make their services available to the Little Printer and can offer a custom services for people to offer 'private' services.

Samsung demonstrates Exynos 5 processor

Samsung has announced its Exynos 5 processor based on an ARM Cortex-A15 design and has 2 cores running up to 1.7GHz using a 32nm process. The ARM Cortex-15 design can actually support up to 16 cores running at 2.5GHz, but Samsung has used a dual design to reduce power consumption for mobile applications. The Exynos 5 also has an ARM Mali T604 graphics processor with four cores supporting a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and can also support stereoscopic 3D. It also supports panel self refresh allowing for lower power as the display will only be refreshed when pixels change. The chip also supports USB 3.0 for high speed data transfers. Samsung expect the chip to be in tablets and other devices in early 2013 and is set to directly compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors (which are already being fabricated using 28mm process).

Nokia dumps Qt

Nokia has sold the Qt business to Digia including 125 staff mainly from Oslo and Berlin. Digia had already purchased the Qt licensing business from Nokia in March 2011.

Qt is a cross platform set of libraries allowing developers to use the same front-end code for MacOS X, Windows and Linux (as well as other embedded system like Symbian, INFINITY, VxWORKS and QNX). Qt was originally developed by Trolltech which Nokia bought in 2008.

Nokia has lost its way in recent years having dropped its lead in the mobile phone markets (though it still has a large base in 3rd world countries) as is now concentrating on a smartphone market using Microsoft Windows Phone.

Digia is hoping to further develop Qt which has been used by over 450,000 developers and Digia is hoping to rapidly support MS Windows 8, Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

The commercial version of Qt will be maintained at Digia and the open-source variant at Qt-Project.

Spotify hits 15m users

Spotify, the music streaming service has now reached over 15m active users and over 4m paying users.

Though Spotify are not in Apple's league with iTunes, they are gaining ground and if they can continue to grow and get traction with paying users (and the licensing authorities don't put their pricing up) they may actually succeed and keep going.

BT installs a lot of WiFi

BT has installed 500,000 (HALF A MILLION) WiFi access points in London and the Olympic Park in Stratford to cope with the number's of users on site. When spectators are leaving one game and the next set arriving there can be up to 300,000 people on the site and that's a hard peak to cope with. Operators (Everything Everywhere, O2 and Vodafone) are offering their customers free access to around 4,000 of the WiFi access points to off-load the mobile networks which will be creaking under the loads. BT has installed around 3,000 miles of fibre and the network is carrying about 60GB/s (i.e. around 480Gb/s). BT has installed around four times the capacity that was available at the Beijing games.

LOCOG bans mobile hotspots

Visitors to any of the Olympic events can bring smartphones and other devices, but are not allowed to bring mobile hotspots or 3G hubs, these are prohibited along with many items (you'd usually expect) and are listed here. Though difficult to police this is probably just to avoid WiFi interference as it's really difficult to maintain healthy signals when there are lots of random devices transmitting. There are also possibly security implications as any WiFi traffic going through the official access points can be logged, while random 3G access points would require tapping at the 3G network, which isn't so easy. Policing (if it happens) will probably be reactive when someone complains they cant access WiFi when they should be able to. Then searching out rogue hotspots is relatively easy and they can be quickly located and shut down (and anybody using a rogue 3G hotspot can be ejected and banned from future events).

Qualcomm drops Mirasol

Qualcomm has decided not to continue developing the Mirasol colour e-ink display solution, though it will license the technology to other parties. Mirasol uses a MEMS display that uses low power and can produce both static displays suitable for reading and if required video (though higher power is required in that mode as the display only uses power when the image changes). One major advantage of Mirasol is that it performs well in outdoor conditions under sunlight. Qualcomm originally purchased Iridigm Display in 2004 for $170m and subsequently purchased Pixtronix for $175m in January 2012 to strengthen the Mirasol technology. Qualcomm is still going to utilise Mirasol for niche applications but will adopt a licensing model for general use.

Ofcom announces 4G auction

Ofcom the super regulator has published a statement on the forthcoming 4G auction of 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum.

The 800MHz spectrum has become available due to the switching off of analogue television services (the digital divide) while 2.6GHz was reserved for future IMT-2000 (3G) services.

The 800MHz spectrum will be auctioned as 2 x 30 MHz blocks (paired spectrum) while the 2.6GHz band will consist of 2 x 70MHz blocks and a 50 MHz single (unpaired) block. This spectrum amounts to an 80% increase on all spectrum allocated to date.

Existing spectrum holders can bid for increased allocations, though spectrum will be reserved for a new entrant (i.e. one that isn't Telefonica O2, Everything Everywhere and Vodafone), this new entrant could be Hutchison 3G (who currently do not have any 2G i.e. sub 2 GHz spectrum.

The 800MHz licensee will have to meet 98% indoor coverage which implies 99.5% outdoor coverage, by 2017. The licensee will also have obligations to cover 95% of the populations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ofcom will not reserve any spectrum for low power localised services, though a low power provider can apply for a national license.

Ofcom is reserving spectrum portfolios for a new entrant, these are

Portfolio	800 MHz	1800 MHz	2.6 GHz
1	2 x 15 MHz
2	2 x 10 MHz		2 x 10 MHz
3	2 x 5 MHz	2 x 15 MHz
4		2 x 15 MHz	2 x 20 MHz

EverythingEverywhere have to relinquish 2 x 15 MHz paired spectrum as part of their arrangements with the EU when they combined T-Mobile and Orange. Ofcom have considered the request from EverythingEverywhere as to allow them to ref arm their 1800 MHz spectrum for LTE us independently from this spectrum auction and will announce its results later this year.

Ofcom has published a draft legal document which implements the auction rules, the consultation will close on 11th September 2012.

Ofcom will invite application to bid before the end of 2012 with the auction starting in 2013 and licenses awarded in March 2013.

Winners of spectrum are expected to roll-out LTE services on the new spectrum starting in the middle of 2013 with consumer services being available after that.

Ofcom to start charging Telcos for scarce number blocks

Ofcom, the Super Regulator that looks after telecoms, spectrum, broadcasting and media and now the Post Office has published a statement on "Promoting efficient use of geographic telephone numbers". This is a fundamental change to the way Ofcom issues telephone numbers as it will now charge telecommunications providers for number blocks. This initially only applies to 11 exchanges where numbers are in short supply (these will now have a 5 digit area codes). This change will also mean that in these areas local users will have to dial the full telephone number including the area code instead of just the local part of the code. This is so that 0 and 1 can be used in the local part of the code (i.e. Bournemouth has the 01202 area code and the local part is ABCDEF, currently the A digit can not be 0 or 1 or there would be confusion when dialing numbers starting with 0 or 1 such as 118XXX, by enforcing the area code is dialed, this adds another 200,000 local codes). Smaller providers likely to suffer Many telecoms providers just reserve numbers across all the area codes so if a customer joins their service (whether it's a traditional landline telco or a new VoIP service) customers can just get a local number (many VoIP providers allow customers to select their own number). This has been the way to do things ever since the telecomms market was deregulated by the Communications Act 2003. Now providers will have to pay for these blocks of numbers in these protected area codes and blocks of 100 numbers can be purchased at a time (in unprotected areas allocation normally occurs in blocks of 10,000 which is legacy and due to the fact that providers have to tell all the other telcos what blocks they own and this was done by sending faxes around). This will generally only burden the smaller operators such as VoIP providers who are running on very thin margins and having ot pay for number blocks will directly impact their revenue models. Players such as BT will be affected but the actual percentage costs will be negligible. It's also an issue as this is a retrograde charge so all providers who have numbers allocated in the protected areas will have to start paying for them and since previously blocks were made up of 10,000 numbers those bills could be large. Obviously the networks can return them to Ofcom, but this may be problematic if numbers haven't been issued sequentially from the start of the block as then the provider may have to pay for 100 numbers even though only 1 has been allocated in that 100 block. Future The UK is an anomaly and many countries already charge for number allocations. If this pilot scheme works for Ofcom, it's likely to make this happen for all number allocations and not just for areas which have a shortage of numbers available. This then will have a major impact on the smaller providers. Unfortunately the UK is actually hindered by having such a a well established telecommunications system as many of the processes involved have been around for 10's of years and they are still in operation and very hard to change.

Samsung gets serious with mobile chips

Samsung is buying the mobile chipset division of Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) for $310m. This will add Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth chipsets to Samsung's already hefty portfolio as well as 310 employees and the IP. CSR was formed in 1998 and went public in 2004 and was one of the 'blue eyed' technology companies that was ahead of its time and it dominated the world of Bluetooth followed by GPS and WiFi. Unfortunately in recent times its mobile chipsets haven't been doing so well due to lacklustre sales from partners Nokia and RIM and revenues have fallen by 50% over the last 2 years. Samsung get a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive license of CSR's intellectual property rights used in its handset connectivity and location products" which means less royalty payments for them while other handset manufacturers will now have to pay Samsung. Samsung will also get a stronger hold over Apple as they already manufacture the A4 and A5 chipsets, provide some of the retina displays and now own the CSR components used by Apple too. The combined GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth/FM combined chipset market is dominated by Broadcom who control 51% of the market, followed by Texas Instruments (31%), now Samsung play take a bigger role in this $3bn market. Samsung have also taken a 4.9% in the remaining part of CSR.

The Draft Communications Data Bill - why it's posiibly evil

The Government is proposing a new Act of Parliament, currently known as the Draft Communications Data Bill or DCDB, which will effectively give them access to all your Internet activity. The premise behind this is that they want to be able to fight the war against terrorism and other "crimes enabled by Email and the Internet" as Theresa May put it. There are already measures in place allowing the Goverment to get hold of data from ISPs. The most recent piece of legislation follows on from a European directive known as the Data Retention Directive 2002/24/EC which ensures Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or telecommunication providers (telcos) maintain logs for 12 months (of data they already collect). This generally relates to such things as billing records or call records (i.e. who made a call to whom and for how long), but the important but is that ISPs/Telcos only need to retain what they already store and aren't required to log anything new. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIPA) allows the authorities (and this is where it gets nasty) to ask an ISP to store specific data about a customer (without letting the customer know or anyone else know as that's an offence under RIPA too). The 'authorities' covers a wide range of organisations and can be the normal suspects such as the Police or Government angencies and also your local council and other angencies (for example may be investigation benefit fraud). There are other oddities in the Act so if your sending encrypted Emails, you can be asked to surrender the encryption keys and it's an offence not to hand them over and you can languish in jail until you do. The DCDB extends these powers so that ISPs will have to monitor more services and store more information about users. This includes things like emails (who sent an email to who and at what time) and what websites are being visited, it may also extend to VoIP calls (which might originate from say a VoIP phone used by the customer but the service used it not run by the ISP). Most ISPs don't monitor these things and don't actually have the equipment to do so and the Government is proposing to put 'black boxes' into the ISPs' network and they will do the snooping. Currently the Government will pay for the boxes. This sounds reasonably fair but as with everything there are potential issues. There are very companies that have the technology to do this, but there are a few so it's likely that the Government will just use them. This means that they are known systems and they'll be the target of every hacker as they'll be storing a wealth of useful information that will be valuable to someone. Most ISPs are using fast internal networks running at 1 Gigabit per second (Gb/s), some are using 10 Gb/s networks and some even 40 Gb/s networks (and in future networking technologies will increase to 100 Gb/s). The black boxes will work at a specified speed (say currently at 1 GB/s) so if an ISP increases the network speeds, more black boxes will have to be installed in order to keep up with the increased network traffic. Who then pays for more boxes? The Government may try and restrict the ISPs from increasing the network speeds so they don't have to install faster or more boxes. This already happens in countries where their Governments have resticted policies on what customers can view etc. The Government may also want to snoop on web traffic, that's pretty easy when it's normal HTTP traffic as you'd use to visit say The Next Web as the ISP can just put a web proxy and force all web traffic through the proxy and log whatever's been requested and send the request on the the actual site that's been requested by the customer. It may be slightly slower, but the customer wouldn't know that the traffic has been intercepted. However sites also use HTTPS or encrypted HTTP. This is where it gets very nasty as putting a proxy in the middle doesn't work. The web traffic is forced to the proxy and it establishes the encryption protocols to the proxy and the proxy then starts it's own encryption to the desired site. Except that the browser 'knows' that it's not really the remote site as the encryption certificate wont match what the browser's expecting and thus the little padlock that shows that the connection is secure wont be locked and the customer knows the connection has been intercepted. It is possible to fake the secure connection (by installing a Government security certificate) on all the UK browsers, which is difficult but not impossible. This then would match all certificates issued by anyone and thus the proxy could pretend to be whatever site it wanted to and all UK browsers would believe it. However that's a HUGE security risk and anyone managing to break into the proxy could steal huge amounts of valuable data including secure connections to on-line banking and other services. Anyone stealing the Government certificate would also also be able to emulate any secure site they wanted to too. So if the DCDB does become the Communications Data Act, then ISPs may be forced to stiffle technology advances to ensure the Government can keep up with the snooping as well as making the UK a massive target for terrorists attacking the snooping systems themselves.

Candy Labs the new acquisition from Mindy Candy

Mind Candy the parent company of Moshi Monsters has acquired Origami Blue which will become Candy Labs their new R&D division. Origami Blue are a games studio based in Brighton formed by ex-Disney Blackrock studios creatives Edd Smith, Mark Knowles-Lee and James Ovnik to create world-class character animation and innovative experiences. Candy Labs will develop new intellectual property (IP) to allow Mindy Candy to bring out new entertainment in the digital and non-digital arenas. Though Moshi Monsters is huge (and still growing), there are more and more competitors emerging and this will allow Mindy Candy to expand its portfolio and keep themselves in the forefront of entertainment.

MediaTek wants the smartphone market

MediaTek has released a new chip the MT6577 which combines an ARM Cortex-A9 dual CPU with their 3G/HSPA modem and a graphics subsystem based on Imagination Technologies' PowerVR Series5 SGX. This will allow 1080p encoding and playback at 15 or 30 frames per second (using a 1080 by 720 display) and supports an 8MP camera and can support a stereo camera too. The 40nm process silicon is being produced by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited) and MediaTek are already in talks with vendors and devices should be available by Q3 this year. MediaTek are already the largest supply of baseband units, but it's a high volume low margin business. This should add value, however this will enable smart phones to be produced in the $150 - $200 range while existing smart phones with similar specifications cost around the $500 mark. This puts MediaTek directly against Qualcomm and their Snapdragon cores.

Everything Everywhere 4G LTE trial in Cumbria

Everything Everywhere (the combined Orange and T-Mobile mobile network operators) has been running a trial in Cumbria using LTE in it's existing 1800MHz spectrum. The trialists were made up of users from local businesses and they either used dongles or mobile routers. Speeds of up to 20Mb/s (download) were achieved, though this depended on the number of users per mast and distance from the mast. The area isn't well serviced by fixed line broadband which meant high speed mobile via mobile was a boon to users. EE have applied to Ofcom for a license variation to allow them to utilise LTE on their existing 1800MHz spectrum nationally and Ofcom have opened a consultation on whether to allow this. The other MNOs are objecting, though EE have to return some of that spectrum as part of their merger conditions.

Ofcom Telecom Complaints Q1 2012

Ofcom the Super regulator that covers telecoms, broadcasting, spectrum, media and the postal system has released details about Telecoms complaints in the period January through March 2012. This covers fixed line telephone, fixed broadband, mobile telephony and Pay TV services. Ofcom itself receives around 300 complaints per day, usually when a consumer can not resolve an issue with the relevant supplier. These reports are logged, while there are many more issues reported to the suppliers themselves that Ofcom never gets to hear of. Fixed line telephony: BT Retail, Sky, TalkTalk Group and Virgin Media of which TalkTalk had the highest number of complaints with Virgin Media receiving the least number of complaints. Most complaints related to billing and customer service issues. Fixed broadband: BT Retail, Sky, TalkTalk Group, Virgin Media and Orange Home. Again TalkTalk had the most complaints and Sky the least mainly about line faults and other service issues. Mobile telephony: 3UK, O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile with Three getting most complaints and O2 least relating mainly to disputed charges and customer service issues. Pay TV services: Sky, BT Vision, and Virgin Media with Sky getting the least complaints and BT Vision the most mainly relating to their sales processes and problems with billing. The Ofcom summary can be found here.