Luis Benavides

Today I want to post you some quotes of US carrier Sprint CTO about WiMAX and the current multibillionaire investments to migrate the cell-phone networks to mobile WiMAX.

“A lot of people are real enthusiastic about having an ‘Internet anywhere’ experience,”

“WiMax creates a 10-fold improvement in the price-per-bit,”

“That is made possible by the fact it uses a wider channel.”

“We talked to one consumer Electronics Company about putting WiMax in a TV set, and with another about putting it in printers. Once you do that, you can then deliver other services over that [WiMax] network.”

Sprint’s plan is to have 100,000 points of presence enabled with WiMax service by the end of 2008.

Taken from:
Techworld.com
Why Sprint says WiMax is 4G
Mobile chips and lower costs wil drive it.
By John Cox, Network World

British Telecom, known as one of the world pioneers of the FMC (Fixed-mobile convergence) movement, is speculated to get now into the WiMAX game.

“British regulatory body Office of Communications (Ofcom) is due to open up spectrum in the 2.5GHz to 2.69GHz band in January 2008. Auctions are expected to be held late this year or early in 2007. These frequencies are prime WiMax ranges.”

It’s known that BT has been running some WiMAX tests on gear from Navini Networks Inc. in Birmingham.

“Sources expect BT to go aggressively after that spectrum.”They have to,” says one industry figure. “Otherwise Vodafone owns everything.””

BT’s bet on FMC involved a partnership with Vodafone in order to offer their users roaming between their WiFi hotspots and the UMTS Vodafone network. What would an introduction into WiMAX mean for BT?

PROS
- Independence of any partnership to offer services, creating owned networks;
- Establishing itself as a mobile communications company;
- Become a cost-advantageous competitor in the mobile telephony market;
- Offer services that no other mobile operator can offer and competitive prices.

CONS
- Betray its partner Vodafone;
- Creation of a fierce competence and turbid market which could reduce profits.

In my opinion, WiMAX is a clear plain bet that BT will pursue. The partnership betrayal would be though decision and could affect the relationship with other partners/providers so it has to be managed carefully. At the end, cell phone companies will definitely avoid to be drawn out of the market. Aggressive reactions and government intervention would be expected.

This information, as a speculation, has to be confirmed and I will post on it as soon as I get to know.

“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”
William Gibson

Today I woke up with a scenario in my head where I could travel all around the world being able to contact my friends and family, watch TV, listen to music, transfer files, contact my customers, pay my bills, look for maps, read the news, go shopping, take pictures, record videos, read books, play some games, pay my drinks, no matter where, no matter when with one single device.

Well, the future is here! One device, one network, one standard. The device is called PDA, the network is Internet and the standard is WiMAX.

Today, I saw the announcement of NXP (the world’s 10th biggest chip maker):
“The design is extremely small and it can live off battery power. There are companies working on similar integrated chips, but we’re already in mass production,” said WiMAX Marketing Manager Ruud van den Brink.

This chip fully supports 802.16e, which is the IEEE WiMAX standard for mobility. Hand-off/Handover is fully supported, so you can move freely with your portable device without loosing connection.

Imagine a massive adoption, like the GSM adoption in Europe, where you could move from different countries “roaming” your internet connection and using all the services mentioned above. Imagine just having to pay your internet access and being able to get in contact with other people for free.

Well, there are right now entire cities covered with WiMAX, there are right now the mobile devices to connect to these networks. All the content is out there: books, internet banking, web shops, YouTube (now Google’s), internet radio, Skype, etc… It’s just distribution missing, and when it is about technology, it is fast! So start making some savings because these devices are not cheap but they worth every cent you pay.

Since some months I’ve been looking closely to Jajah, and the whole VoIP industry. I’ve talked about ways of how the wireless internet networks could take over the cell phones and wondering how the communications would be in some years. I’ve been investigating the evolution of the different paths and I’ve get to the conclusion that “technologically” speaking, the world is yet not ready for a whole VoIP interconnected communications and Jajah has come to a solution for it.

Let’s start with two premises:
The trend goes 100% sure toward mobile: The use of fixed phones is decreasing each year. It’s neither economically (operators) nor a preferred option (people). It has become unsustainable for operators that have struggled to put video and internet on the lines to create more value.
Wireless technologies WiFi and WiMAX are not ready yet: Even if it’s the cheapest way of communications, and the trend toward deployment and development is growing, some years have to pass in order to be a reality.

WiFi and WiMAX challenges
WiFi has two limitations, the coverage and the heterogeneity. To cover an acceptable area of a city, there are needed lots of hotspots, economically unsustainable for an operator. Approaches such as FON where everyone shares the connection solve this issue in the economical matters, but the limitation is that the connection is not reliable as there’s not a direct control of the network. The second limitation is the hand over (switch from one access point to another), if you move further the coverage of the AP you are connected to, you loose your connection until you connect to the next one. There are companies such as Cisco which has solved this issue but is a proprietary protocol and there’s no standard out there.

In the other hand, WiMAX limitations are due to the high frequency it uses. It goes over the 3.4Mhz and with this frequencies, an obstacle such as a tree or a building could block the signal.

I’m for sure not saying that it’s an impossible thing to make any of this technologies work. I’m pointing out that in order these technologies to be “ready” there’s some work to be done, and some years to pass.

Jajah’s solution
Jajah is a neat VoIP platform such as Skype, Vonage, among others, that you can find in www.jajah.com where you just need to enter your phone number, the number you want to call and voila! They connect both numbers ringing first in yours and then in the destination one. The company has today stated that by the end of this year there would be ready a little application compatible with 80 different cell phone models, that would permit to start calls without the use of the internet but with the use of this little program in you mobile phone. It’s like if they had read my article “Something better than Skype?” In this article I stated that a big contra of their solution was that if it was using neither your computer nor your internet connection to talk, why should you actually use them?

Jajah has also stated today that it wanted to become “the Skype of the mobile world” If the future of communications is going to be mostly mobile, then if Jajah manages to become what it plans, for certain, it would become the leader.

Following my last post “Google earth shows us the past!”, today I found that my idea of watching some topless girls through Google Earth was not so crazy. In the beautifull country of Netherlands a girl was caught getting some sun tan. Check it out:

Click on the picture for watching it bigger.

If you want to see it by yourselves in Google Earth just try this link. Topless sunbather (You must have version 4+)

Watch out girls! Google is after you!

Recently, Microsoft launched their new “live search” that is intended to be the evolution of MSN search and would try to catch a bigger market piece from its competitors. The search market is actually led by Google(49.2%) and Yahoo(23.8%)*.

This launch is really Microsoft-like (non innovative), you can judge by yourselves the similarity with Google. They copied every single thing! Maps, answers (Yahoo initiative), picture search, video, academic etc…
live.com

The only new thing is seen in the image search section, you can add the pics you like to a basket, and once you roll-over a picture, you get more useful information. The problem is that it still has a lot of bugs; it’s slow and more complicated.

This is one of the steps until VISTA’s launch. The idea of Microsoft is to have a full integration with the LIVE and Windows platform, this way gaining more users. I think that this new copy-Google approach of Microsoft is not working, products lack of personality and in the rush to add features they are making the products useless.

* According to Nielsen NetRatings on Web search engine rankings for July

Today I was surfing with the google earth tool and discovered a somehow weird thing. Looking at my neighborhood in Bucaramanga (my city), called “the beautiful city”. I realized that the image appearing in google earth was +/- two years outdated.

The places where the two right stars are, now, there is a big shopping center. In the star at the left, now there is a condominium. The construction started more or less two years ago.

I couldn’t stop my curiosity and “googled” a little bit to understand how it works. First I discovered that in fact the images can be up to 3 years old. The thing that surprised me was that my city was not available in good resolution a couple of months ago, and when it was available, the images dated more that 2 years old.

Second, I realized that my naïve idea that this sharp low altitude images where taken from a satellite was not true. The zoom-in pictures are taken from an aircraft (as Google says). When did this airplane passed over my home taking pictures? I really thought that this satellite cameras could zoom-in so much to see the time in my watch (ok! I’m exaggerating).

Before Google earth existed, it was a program called Keyhole that Google bought. In fact the South Korean government has demanded changes in the program in order not to reveal the location of their military bases to their enemies. Even though this geographical information is publicly available from different sources.

If you haven’t tried this program I’m sure that lots of owws will come out from your mouth. Will this information be available someday in real-time? This could be a nice tool for terrorists! Or maybe we could be able to see some topless girls at Ibiza’s beaches… Now you’re thinking about huh?

In my first post I talked about the high amount of competitors that Skype was gaining each day, even though they represented a threat, they were not big enough. But today I read about the huge American leader AOL getting hands on it. The offer is:

“Free inbound calling along with your own phone number with its AIM Phoneline service. For an additional $9.95 a month, you can get unlimited calling to 30 countries” (Taken from: George Ou’s Blog).

This is really a disruptive offer in price and in services, but it doesn’t affect Skype so much. AOL is a regional company and just serves the American market. Even if USA is the biggest Skype market, it just represents the 9% of its user base. I found in the EuroTelcoblog how is the Skype’s user-base distributed in the main countries. The information in parenthesis is the position and percentage 2 years ago (2004):

[1] United States - 9.13% (1, 10.3%)
[2] Poland – 7.87% (3, 8.78%)
[3] Taiwan - 7.80% (2, 9.24%)
[4] China - 6.75% (6, 5.89%)
[5] Germany – 6.06% (5, 6.18%)
[6] Brazil – 5.85% (4, 7.24%)
[7] France – 5.62% (7, 5.53%)
[8] United Kingdom – 3.50% (10, 2.94%)
[9] Netherlands – 3.47% (8, 3.50%)
[10] Japan - 3.17% (12, 2.61%)
[11] Spain – 2.64% (15, 1.82%)
[12] Israel – 2.36% (11, 2.94%)
[13] Canada – 2.22% (13, 2.46%)
[14] Belgium – 1.95% (14, 2.10%)
[15] Italy – 1.91% (18, 1.44%)
[16] Denmark – 1.73% (9, 3.07%)
[17] Sweden – 1.62% (16, 1.76%)
[18] Turkey – 1.59% (not ranked)
[19] Switzerland – 1.42% (19, 1.22%)
[20] Australia – 1.41% (17, 1.46%)

Skype made its move at the beginning and now it’s evenly distributed, different to AOL or Vonage. This new move is a hit against Vonage. In my opinion, Vonage is going to be sold or will die soon, they are over expending in marketing (as shows their income statement in their investor section of their website) and they can’t maintain their user-base with their actual prices.

I give three months for something to happen, just wait and see if I’m wrong

Microsoft… A word that causes feelings to every human that uses a computer in this planet. These feelings go from anger, disappointment, a love-hate mixture, dependence, true-love and enlightenment, to a real impotence of doing anything against it. Microsoft is lining its army for the big launch of “Vista”, the new version of the Windows operating system.

Nobody doubts the enormous power that Microsoft has, but there’s one company that has managed to declare a public opposition-competition position and has make it to sustain its menace to the Bill Gates’ guys; it’s called (obviously) GOOGLE. It’s really amazing how this battle is taking place with every-day moves that make it look like a chess game.

Microsoft is known for its monopoly problems in the US, the huge fine of 280 Million EURO by the European Union commission for antitrust. It’s also know for playing dirty with its partners (for example: Netscape) and for establishing hard lock-ins to its customers. It’s a model of capitalist company but it’s playing in “shark-waters”. The objective of this post is to evidence how are this “chess-moves” going and how its main competitor Google is playing too.

Microsoft is always a second mover, is a reactor against pressure. In my point of view, the lack of initiative has been evident since it was created, but their huge power has let it (up to now) literally, to kick away the competence. They have an advertising based business model (or at least moving forward to it) as Google does, and here is what is recently happening:

Google launched the first big threat with the online spreadsheets beta test; and as Google always does, for free. This is a clear battle sign that says: “Hey, this Microsoft Office product you have, I’m going to give it for free”. It was a low punch for Microsoft, who immediately reacted with the launch of “Microsoft Live” that for the moment it only has: the Encarta Encyclopedia, MSN live and Outlook live, and it’s planning in the near future to release an internet based office.

Vista is intended, as in other Windows versions, to include embedded the Microsoft explorer with new functions similar to the Firefox, in order to recover audience. Bad move! – This plays against many companies such as: Mozilla Firefox, Real networks, Google, Adobe etc. Of course they reacted and they have created the alliance Real-Networks-Mozilla-Google to cross-promote their products, packaging the new Firefox updates embedded with Google bar and real player.

Vista won’t support OpenGL graphics standard (just as emulation with their Direct3D standard). Apple, Dell and Google joined the Khronos Group that has been working to bring OpenGL graphics to the mobile space. This is anyway a strange move of Google, since their Google-earth product recommends the Direct3D graphics mode, I think because Windows somehow makes OpenGL not to work properly. They are trying to avoid that Microsoft imposes the Direct3D as a standard. As more standards Microsoft owns, the more power it has.

Integration between MSN and Yahoo instant messaging, this was really a non expected move, since months ago Yahoo refused a partnership proposal to Microsoft in sharing the search engine power, and its CEO stated that there were no intentions of a partnership with Microsoft at all. The relations didn’t appear to be good, and that’s maybe why Google haven’t made a response, in the other hand, the messaging is not the Google’s hard brick. It seems to be a response to AOL instant messaging integration with AIM and ICQ.

There is an intense battle of the Microsoft-vs.-world type. As an advertising-based business model, I think that Google has a much cleverer approach, Microsoft advertising is annoying, people is tired of banners and Microsoft puts them all around, instead, Google’s advertisements are interesting, helpful, context based and subtle. In the other hand, unfortunately in this battle, Google has acquired some of the bad manners of its main competitor in terms of monopoly.

It seems that in the technology industry, monopolies will occur indefinitely, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, a new one… who knows, users just want to deal with one, and just time will say which, – hasta la VISTA!

In one of the papers published here “Strategy Models for the Mobile Industry with the Rise of Wireless VoIP” we talked about the high potentials that skype could have in a mid-long term. One of them was radio sindication, which is basically the re-selling of radio to users using the cost benefits of the P2P network.

Ok, I have to confess that they are always one step ahead. The Skype creators: Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis after making the world-wide successful Kazaa and Skype, got into “The venice project”. This project is being developed basically to create a cousin of SKY and DirectTV (Now 1 company under the SKY name) but this time deilvering TV content through the internet (obviously using a P2P network, as they are now used to).

Sources tell that:
“Zennstrom and Friis have assembled teams of top software developers in about a half-dozen cities around the world, including New York, London, and Venice.”

And that there are also working on negotiations with the most important TV networks to establish this time agreements of television content broadcasting. This time, they have learned the lesson, after all the sues and legal problems they had with Kazaa because of the ilegal sharing of copyrighted material.

Skype, as always, is not really a first mover, but it really knows how to mess everything around and get a massive audience in a very short time. The real innovator in this broadcasting matters is www.youtube.com that has gained a really big audience but has an advertising-based business model (as they claim in their website) different from the premium-service model of skype. Recently, the “I-can-do-all” Google lauched a similar (if not equal) initiative http://video.google.com that is also advertising based.

In just a matter of few months, we’ll see who will own this “new” internet-tv business, and also which other players will join the match. I’m just waiting the moment, when I can see my favorite Colombian-tv-shows from wherever I am, arrives. I know it would take a while, but I have big hopes!