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ABI Research Blog (125)

Cisco Exiting the WiMAX Base Station Market

Mar 5, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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Let me get my umbrella out first . . . the media will be cloudy with a high chance of impending-doom-for-WiMAX stories.

OK. Is this really a bad thing for the WiMAX ecosystem? No. This is good for the WiMAX ecosystem and good for Cisco.

This is good for the WiMAX ecosystem because:


  • Cisco was not aggressive in marketing its WiMAX base stations that it acquired from Navini

  • There is one less WiMAX base station vendor - more opportunity for Alvarion, Huawei, Motorola, Samsung, ZTE, nd other smaller players


This good for Cisco because:


  • WWAN RAN was outside of Cisco's core competency

  • Cisco was not getting any significant business - likely because Cisco is not known for WWAN RAN

  • Staying outside of the WiMAX/LTE political game (however unreasonable it all is, it still does exist) is the smart thing to do


On the last point, it's not that Cisco ever chose sides, but rather simply the possible perception that could exist since they did not have any LTE base station products, and it would not have made sense to go up against the giant WWAN RAN vendors in that area.


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Apple sues HTC – it’s not an Android thing

Mar 3, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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First and foremost, I would like to state that I am not a patent lawyer, nor do I intend to become one…EVER.



The Nexus One, Touch Pro, Touch Diamond, Touch Pro 2, Tilt II, Pure, Imagio, Dream, myTouch, Hero, HD2, Droid Eris are the models that Apple has decided are in violation of illegally using Apple Inc. IP.



Listed below are the devices and the operating systems that they run. Touch Pro – WinMo 6 Touch Pro 2 – WinMo 6.1 Touch Diamond - WinMo 6.1 Tilt II - WinMo 6 Pure – Winmo 6.5 Imagio – Winmo 6.5 Dream - Android (1.6 donut) myTouch - Android (1.6 donut) Hero – Android 1.5 (cupcake) HD2 – WinMo 6.5 Eris – 1.5 (cupcake) Nexus One – 2.1 (clair)



The first thing to note is that on the surface this law suit does not appear solely to attack HTC’s use of Android specifically. In fact the patents in the federal part of the filings (non ITC part) seem to focus on attacking HTC’s user interface and how it is implemented over Android.

Through a reading of the non-technical descriptions of the patents, the ITC related claims question the way that one object (say a button on the home screen, or a object in the OS) requests information or action from another object (say a piece of information, system status, or starting a program) and how that process is managed. It is important to note that it is only in the ITC complaint that Window Mobile phones are referenced, and only on one of the patents in this complaint. This particular patent is also being brought up a against Nokia, although that case has been temporarily put on hold for the moment. The real confusing part here, is why is Apple bringing this type of complaint to HTC when most of these patents address core OS functionality.

In regards to the Windows devices and operating system, I believe that this argument becomes a moot point going forward for handset OEMs. With Windows 7, Microsoft has pretty much stated that they own the home screen and the OS now and that alterations are not openly welcome. As such handset OEMs will not be tinkering as much with the UI and exposing themselves to direct litigation.



In regard to Android devices, the future is a little more complicated. One of Google’s key value propositions was that handset OEMs could do whatever they like to the UI, and thereby establish their own brand over the Android OS. Now one of the top handset OEMs is in the line of fire for their UI technology that runs over Android. It can be expected that OHA (Open Handset Alliance) members, particularly the handset OEMs are going to pay careful attention to how Google manages this situation. In the short history of the OHA Google has been accused of being too powerful and having full control, not doing enough to help its alliance partners bring devices market, or suddenly becoming their competitor when they released the Nexus One device. Google has been very cautious in trying to strike the right balance of heavy hand and velvet glove, seeking to direct the ecosystem but not control it.



In this particular case, Apple is the financial heavyweight that has thrown the first punch, and HTC is the blindsided underdog struggling to develop its global brand awareness on the back of Android. Should Google offer to help support HTC’s legal defense and perhaps use them as a sheild to keep Apple from wining any groud towards the core Android OS; and if they do what type of precedent will this set for the OHA if Apple goes after every other OHA member for their custom designed UIs?

I would have to believe that Google does not want to defend the coding practices of every single Android licensee on the planet, but they do not want to alienate their partners or put Android itself at risk either. I believe that in practice, Google may attempt to make a few tweaks to Android in an attempt to minimize the potential for OEMs getting sued, but when it comes to paying legal fees, their stance will have to be ‘it’s not an Android thing’.

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Scribd Unveils Mobile Strategy for Online Document Viewing

Feb 25, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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Known for being an online repository of electronic documents -- self-published books, marketing presentations and brochures, and clippings from other Internet sources -- Scribd claims more than 10 million online documents on its servers. The company recently unveiled a campaign to address mobile users that want to access Scribd documents on these handheld browsers along with emerging eBook Reader devices. Can the company pose a challenge to electronic booksellers Amazon or aggregators like Apple to view electronic content on a broader range of mobile devices?



There is no shortage of content available via the Internet – both good and bad quality. And there are as equally many ways to consume this content today – via web browser, proprietary document viewers, and even dedicated devices. One aspect that has remained elusive is how to organize and present this content in a meaningful way to each user. The opportunity for content delivery networks – whether an online bookstore, a document repository, or user-generated video clips – is to create some stickiness for an audience that cares.


Apple is tackling the challenge with the launch of the iBook store, whichwill initially be available to future iPad owners. Perhaps their strategy will broaden at some point and expand to include the installed bases of iPhone and iPod touch users. In contrast, the Amazon store is useful to those who have a dedicated eBook reader device or a document viewer app for their PC, Mac or smartphone.



Scribd has a differentroadblock entering the mobile market because it is not tied to a specific hardware platform. One might argue that the lack of a tie should make it easier for Scribd, but it means the company has to market and build awareness to the millions (not 'billions' as the company's CEO is quoted as remarking) of PC and smartphone owners who are interested in consuming digital text. It's a formidable task to take on alone, but the company thinks it is up for the challenge.
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More WiMAX Products from Cellular Modem Vendors are a Sign of WiMAX Growth to Come

Feb 25, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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Cellular modem vendors are typically the first companies to produce WWAN products based on the latest technologies. The newest WWAN air interfaces have always seen their introduction in external cellular modems first, followed by miniCards (mini-PCI in the past) for embeddeding into laptops (and now netbooks, MIDs, smartbooks, tablets, e-readers, etc. as well). Sierra Wireless launched its OverDrive 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot on Sprint's network last month. Novatel Wireless announced its MiFi Intelligent Mobile Hotspot with WiMAX, which should be shipping in the second half of 2010.



The fact that the large cellular modem vendors are entering the market is a sign - among other signs and proof - that the WiMAX market is starting to take off. This year, Clearwire will build out its network to the point where its network will expand its population coverage from about 36 million (by ABI Research's estimates) to 120 million people. That is a nice market to sell to into within the United States while they wait for LTE networks to launch.
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Clearwire is Doing Well Based on 4Q09 Report

Feb 24, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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Clearwire had its 4Q09 earnings call today, Wednesday 2/24/2010. I won't focus on the financials - I'll leave that to Wall Street. Here is a snapshot of the information relevant to the way ABI Research tracks the market:



Clearwire now has 688,000 total subsribers - both proprietary and mobile WiMAX. In the world of WiMAX and 4G, the relevant number is the number of mobile WiMAX susbscribers, which was 438,000 subscribers.



There are 250k proprietary subscribers. As Clearwire builds converts its proprietary markets over to mobile WiMAX, it leaves up the old network for about six to nine months as it coverts the exixsting susbscribers. The ratio of mobile WiMAX subscribers to proprietary subscribers has now shifted in favor of mobile WiMAX. There are nearly twice the number of mobile WiMAX than proprietary subscribers as of the end of 2009. It's probably more than twice at this point in time.



Clearwire has surpassed Russia's Yota as the largest mobile WiMAX service provider in the world now.


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Wholesale Applications Community – MNOs Can Change the Game With Web-based Apps

Feb 15, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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Today at the Mobile World Congress, some of the world’s largest MNOs got clever about mobile applications.


The Wholesale Applications Community initiative, backed by 24 MNOs from across the globe have unified themselves behind the idea of a single platform where mobile application developers can come and access a broad range of mobile subscribers, theoretically the largest addressable market for mobile applications on the planet.While this initiative is a long ways from becoming a reality, if the MNOs get it right, by 2011 we might see mobile application developers flock to the platform.


The announcement focused on standardized APIs across the participating MNOs, leveraging OMTP BONDI requirements.What wasn’t as apparent but perhaps the most important element of the announcement is the fact that these mobile applications will be web-based. That means mobile application developers can develop their applications one time, in HTML standards such as JavaScript HTML 5 and avoid specific and therefore costly development for Mobile OS, such as iPhone, Android, Symbian, RIM and more.Since July of 2009 ABI Research has been promoting the idea that a migration away from native applications to web-based applications can solve a great deal of fragmentation issues for mobile application developers and potentially open the floodgates on mobile apps for a very broad range of consumers.


But the group will have to get it right.Browsers in most phones will have to significantly improve. MNOs are notorious for talking about standards but then adding minor alterations by network which can defeat the intent of the standards.It will most likely take some time for the group to agree to standards they all can live with for PIM, LBS and particularly billing. It will also be difficult for MNOs to not get greedy.The announcement mentioned revenue sharing, alluding to a 70/30 split between app developers and MNOs.Competing app stores see mobile apps as a means to an end, and not the other way around, and this group will need to do the same.
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AT&T selects ALU and Ericsson for their LTE rollout – what are the network infrastructure implications?

Feb 10, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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In the run up to MWC and the flurry of announcements that are starting to already pour in, AT&T has announced that they will be going with ALU and Ericsson for their LTE rollout. Here is the press release. Commercial services are scheduled to begin in 2011.



While Verizon had taken the opportunity to announce their LTE vendors at MWC 2009, AT&T is doing the same this year. The interesting part is that AT&T have chosen the same vendors as Verizon. Having chosen to go with ALU and Ericsson was somewhat expected as both vendor's 3G kit is present in AT&T network.



This is definitely a big jolt for Huawei having lost out on both the North American LTE deals. They were also snubbed for the Teliasonera LTE rollout in Scandinavia. 2010 should be interesting in terms of market share wars for RAN equipment as Huawei battles it out with ALU, Ericsson and NSN.



A big part of LTE is going to be transitioning existing base station infrastructure i.e 2G/3G base stations to LTE. AT&T’s LTE network will be deployed on 700 MHz spectrum, which means they will need new radio heads and most probably new baseband channel cards. It’s not going to be a seamless ‘software only’ upgrade as most vendors claim. My guess is that there will be sufficient use of remote radio heads in the network from both Ericsson and ALU allowing for lower OPEX costs and improved performance. While both Ericsson and ALU have SDR capable radio heads which can do multimode in a given spectrum band i.e using re-farmed 900 MHz or 1800 Mhz spectrum to support GSM and UMTS or UMTS and LTE, in the AT&T case this doesn’t really apply. One of the interesting differences between Ericsson and ALU kit is that Ericsson's solution is not software reconfigurable in the baseband/channel card while ALUs kit is software configurable both in the baseband and the radio.

What will be interesting to see is how many of AT&T’s 2G/3G base stations might be decommissioned to give way to new state of the art Multistandard Base Stations from ALU and Ericsson, which are meant to consolidate multiple technologies into one cabinet saving running costs to the operator. This depends on how many of those are nearing end of life. Also what is AT&Ts strategy of using pico and microcells for their LTE rollouts? These are some of the things I will be looking out for in the next few months.



Also, one of the interesting sub announcements that has come out of ALU is that AT&T will be using their 9900 Wireless Network Guardian solution which is primarily aimed at real-time monitoring of network usage and reducing congestion. Its essentially dynamic IP traffic management – something that AT&T badly need going forward especially as they move to LTE.



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Mobile Apps Beware -- Rapidly Accelerating Mobile Touch Web Is Perfect Example of Mobile Cloud Computing

Feb 4, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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On Wednesday (Feb 3), mobile analytics firm Taptu http://www.taptu.com released a new metrics report detailing the size and characteristics of a new breed of mobile website – the mobile touch website.These sites are optimized for touchscreen devices with finger-friendly layouts and lightweight pages which are fast to load over mobile networks.According to Taptu, there are currently more than 326,000 of these mobile touch websites.In recent estimates, there are less than 200,000 mobile apps available for from iPhone, Android, Ovi and Blackberry app stores.


This is the beginning of the end of the mobile app as we know it, as we predicted in our report, Mobile Cloud Computing http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1003385-Mobile+Cloud+Computing .More and more, we will see developers turn to web apps so they can tap larger addressable markets.From Taptu’s report:


“Proponents of Mobile Web development cite a number of reasons why developers will increasingly favour Web-based services over apps. Unlike apps, which only run on single device platforms, Mobile Touch Web sites run under any mobile browser which is built on the open source Webkit components. With support for HTML 5 features already being rolled out in

these browsers, it’s getting easier and easier to create rich touch screen user experiences with the browser without having to create platform-specific apps.




In the future, using open standard APIs (e.g. the Bondi initiative) Web developers will be able to access deeper device functions such as geolocation. Once created, these Web-based services can be easily wrapped (e.g. using Phonegap) as apps for distribution in app stores. This gives the developer two parallel discovery mechanisms: i) visitors clicking on organic results in mobile search engines and ii) visitors downloading from app stores.”


What is striking about Taptu’s findings is the rapid deployment of mobile websites built using HTML 5, an advanced standard for mobile.


HTML 5 is the next iteration of the markup language upon which the bulk of the web is built.While it is certainly still a work in progress, the new version includes several features important to the acceleration of Mobile Cloud services, namely geolocation capabilities and support of offline data access, or “caching.”Caching in particular helps address one of the issues of mobile web applications versus native applications — the fact that most web applications depend on continuous Internet connectivity to operate.In HTML 5, caching is made possible, giving web applications an opportunity to get on more equal footing with native applications.

This is not to say that downloadable, native-running mobile apps will disappear.Far from it.It does indicate however, that the market will increasingly focus on rich mobile website development and perhaps less on native mobile application development, democratizing mobile content for a far larger audience to enjoy.

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KDDI selects Airvana and Hitachi for femtocell trials

Feb 2, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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KDDI, Japan’s second biggest operator has finally come clean on femtocells. This after their two main competitors Softbank and NTTDoCoMo already having launched commercial femto services. For details of the launch here is the link to the press release http://www.airvana.com/news/news_1011.htm



The one big difference between KDDI and the others is that KDDI is a CDMA operator. I don’t necessarily really see this as having hampered vendor selection as the CDMA space has a number of suppliers including Airvana, Motorola, Airwalk, Alcatel Lucent and Samsung.



However, there is a difference in the price of CDMA femtocells versus UMTS femtocells as most of these solutions are not built on dedicated silicon yet. The one vendor who has plans in that area is Qualcomm, but has yet to make samples available. Mobile World Congress could change that but we will have to wait and see. In the KDDI case this could have been a factor in their delay on femtocells.



If we take the Sprint case, they were the first to launch a 2G femtocell back in 2008. In June 2009 they announced an upcoming launch of 3G femtocells with Airvana gear. Since then things have been quiet with no public updates available. Again, this could be because the business case doesn’t stack up as well as it does for UMTS femtocells. UMTS femtocells are known to have already reached the $100 price point.



In any case, this is another feather in the cap for Airvana. They are also one of the few vendors apart from Alcatel Lucent providing both UMTS and CDMA femtocells. Airvana’s tie up with Hitachi as a network integrator is something that has been known about for a long time, something that seems to finally bearing fruit for them.



The question is whether this will convert to a commercial launch and how soon? My bet is that Airvana is in a strong position and KDDI will not really want to waste time now that it has its trials commencing in March 2010.







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Apple’s iPad and LBS?

Jan 29, 2010 12:00:00 AM / by Admin

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The hotly debated iPad tablet features a built-in GPS-receiver.More precisely the 3G version does, the Wi-Fi only version has to do without, similar to the iTouch. This is yet another example of how GPS is spreading to an ever larger number of portable devices following its appearance in digital cameras, netbooks, and MIDs. Equally important, it is based on the same platform as the iPhone allowing it – in theory at least - to run more than 4000 LBS applications available on the App Store. Unfortunately the iPad inherits the same major iPhone shortcoming of not supporting background processing. It remains to be seen though how these applications will cope with the higher 1024-by-768 screen resolution. Undoubtedly developers will have to tweak their apps to accommodate the higher resolution – or design apps from scratch for the iPad -, the start of fragmentation of the much applauded monolithic iPhone platform.


More importantly, which LBS applications and/or use cases come to mind when thinking of a 9.7 inch tablet? Turn-by-turn navigation? ABI’s New Navigation Form Factors Research Brief describes alternative navigation form factors such as netbooks, MIDS and UMPCs. The iPad certainly fits in this list, though its size preempts the use for pedestrian navigation and installation on the dashboard for in-car navigation seems equally unlikely, perhaps with the exception of large vehicles such as motor homes or for use by passengers.


What about other LBS services such as local search or social networking? The lack of portability of a 9.7 inch screen device essentially limits the use cases to indoor environments and hence reduces its potential for LBS. By the way, indoor GPS performance is notoriously bad, although complementary Wi-Fi and Cell-ID based positioning largely addresses this shortcoming. Nevertheless, adding location awareness to a tablet device does remain useful for location-based information such as weather or advertising.


Arguable the main benefit of a large tablet form factor is the possibility to display detailed maps including 3D landmarks, satellite imagery, photographic “StreetView” content or even topographic maps all of which suffer from bad readability on small smartphone screens.While a digital compass is included, a digital camera is lacking precluding any augmented reality applications.


Clearly the positioning of the tablet form factor between the fully portable phone and the static desktop remains challenging, caught in the dilemma between portability and ease of use. This is largely uncharted territory for both Apple and the end user. One thing is clear though: Apple has put the tablet form factor firmly on the map, keen to improve and/or redefine earlier incarnations by other vendors with the availability of GPS only being one of the many features allowing developers to come up with innovative use cases and applications. Who would dare to state Apple will not be able to pull off yet another win?
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