Communications

Ringback tone patents

Dave Farber's IP list delivered news of a patent suit filed on Wednesday in a post titled Mobile Companies Sued Over Ringback Tone Patents.  The suit was filed by Greenville Communications LLC and references two patents, US #5,321,740 & US #5,428,670.  I thought I recognized one of them (how sick is that?), so I looked them up on the USPTO website.  Sure enough, they were patents by Mark Gregorek that I had read some years ago.

I'm an engineer not a lawyer, and the interpretation of patent claims is an arcane field, even for lawyers.  But consider:

1.  Ringback tone services are structured so the called party pays to select what the calling party hears while they are waiting for the called party to answer.

2.  Each of the independent claims in these patents include the words  "said playing means determining the announcement to play based upon criteria established exclusively by the marketing system and independently of the identity of the called station".  <emphasis added by yours truely>

At a minimum, some lawyers will make a lot of money here...

IMS Today - Hardly IMS at all

The "Informer," writing in A Week in Wireless #268 today, quotes Li Mo, Chief Architect Officer of ZTE USA, apparently speaking at this week's IMS World Forum in Monaco, as saying "We analyzed hundreds of contracts, and practically all of them are softswitching, hardly IMS at all."

I wasn't there to hear it, but this strikes a chord.  I have now seen the internals of operators' networks built by Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei and referred to as "IMS networks."  In each case, what they have is voice services controlled by a pre-IMS softswitch (based on 3GPP Release 4) plus some kind of SIP infrastructure that they are using for new applications like Push-to-Talk.

I have even seen a confidential sales presentation from a major equipment provider using the term "IMS R4."  Since IMS was first defined in the 3GPP release 5 specifications, "IMS R4" is not IMS.  In credit to the company involved, this was obviously the act of their field sales guy, as Googling "IMS R4" returns no public mentions from that company.

In any event, what appears to be deployed today is pre-IMS or, as Dr. Li Mo says, "hardly IMS at all."

Real-world P2P: Joost Network Architecture

Thanks to Colm MacCarthaigh, Network Architect at Joost, for this infomative presentation given at the UK Network Operators' Forum Meeting in Manchester on April 3rd.  I found the link in a comment Colm made to Jeremy Penston's post, Joost: analysis of a bandwidth hog.

An exciting thing about P2P is it's potential for minimizing video distribution costs by sharing data close to where it's needed, ideally with peers that can be reached at minimum cost.  Of course monetary costs aren't exposed in the Internet routing tables, so p2p applications must approximate.  The question is how and that is at least partly addressed in Colm's presentation and his comment.  Here's Colm's comment:

We have some efforts in the code to save transit costs, there is very very basic prefix awareness, and we're adding AS-level awareness using live BGP data. I have looked at adding AS adjacency information, ie prefer AS-adjacent peers, but it's a lot of work and the US internet is relatively poorly mapped, so I don't think this will come soon.

Prefix awareness refers to IP address prefixes used routing packets.  Joost gives preference to peers in the same /24 address range if possible and, if not, to those in the same /16.  AS refers to autonomous systems which are the separately managed networks that, together, compose the Internet.  In most cases, it should cost less to access a peer on the same network, be that an ISP or a corporate network, than it would cost to reach a peer elsewhere on the Internet via IP Transit services.

Other interesting facts:

1. Joost uses around 700 kbps (320 MB per hour) from the internet, i.e. download bandwidth.
2. Joost sends about 220 kbps (105 MB per hour) upstream.

The presentation also includes substantial detail on the server farms that seed the P2P sharing and host less popular content.  All-in-all, it's a good overview of what's actually needed to make a large P2P network.

To my specific interest, it appears the routing inefficiencies, e.g. the "packets flying around all over the world in order to reach me" that Jeremy mentions, are a result of the small number of peers on-line during the closed beta.  Hopefully Colm will publish additional information as usage grows.

Wideband Audio for Mobiles in Japan

As I wrote a few days ago, I've long been a fan of wideband audio for telephony, so I was pleased to hear about trials in Germany last spring.  Now this from Wireless Watch Japan led me to today's press release by DoCoMo.

TOKYO, JAPAN, April 3, 2007 --- NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced today that, in collaboration with DoCoMo Communications Laboratories USA, Inc., it has developed speech coding technology that provides exceptionally high-quality voice for mobile phones, yet only requires the low-level computing power of conventional mobile telephony technologies.

This new technology realizes a wide frequency range of 50Hz - 16kHz, which is approximately the full range of the human voice. By comparison, the frequency range of legacy telephony services is limited to 300Hz - 3.4kHz....

This is not a trial, just a demo at a trade show.  It's a new codec, not one of the existing standards and, from these graphs, it appears to use fairly simple logarithmic coding.  It's running, in software only, on a DoCoMo business phone, model hTc Z (picture & specs) under the Win Mobile 5 OS.  One issue with this new software-only codec is it may not be efficient enough to run on 2G networks — perhaps not an issue in Japan, but very real in other parts of the world.

None-the-less, it's very encouraging to see increasing publicity for wideband audio.  It's the way to make mobile phones sound better than fixed-line phones and complete the mobile revolution.

Dopplr - Looking for an invitation to the beta

Over the weekend, I noticed several people commenting on Dopplr, a new service (still in an invitation only beta) which:

... lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you're planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.

If you have an invitation to share, I'm interested.  rbt@nmss.com
Thanks.

Mobile competition in two more pockets of West Africa

While reading a friend's copy of Blycroft's latest Africa & Middle East Telecom Week (subscription) I couldn't help noticing substantial growth (25%-26% in 4Q06) in mobile subscribers in two small West African nations, the Republic of Guinea and Sierra Leone.  I've never been to either country.  Before this, I'd only heard of Guinea as one of the most corrupt nations on earth and I knew of Sierra Leone only because of their extended civil war.  Indeed, Transparency International ranks Guinea among the most corrupt countries.  And, while the civil war has ended, Sierra Leone remains one of the poorer countries, even in Africa, with a purchase price adjusted (PPP) per capita GDP of $900 per year.  But each has seen substantial mobile phone adoption in 2006 and each has increasing mobile competition and thus the prospect of even more adoption in 2007 & beyond.  Here's the data from Blycroft.

                                                                                                                                                           

	1Q06	2Q06	3Q06	4Q06	Chg Q4/Q3
Republic of Guinea
Intercel Holdings	6,800	6,800	6,800	6,825	0.4%
Investcom Guinea	0	115,000	201,000	302,017	50.3%
Spacetel	20,000	20,000	20,000	19,421	-2.9%
Sotelgui	168,437	269,000	329,338	375,411	14.0%
Sierra Leone
Celtel   Sierra Leone	190,000	195,000	202,000	243,000	20.3%
Comium	60,000	90,000	120,000	165,000	37.5%
Datatel	11,370	14,000	15,578	17,156	10.1%
Africell SL	40,000	45,000	50,000	55,000	10.0%
Millicom Sierra Leone	27,651	28,771	28,961	42,055	45.2%

Mobile adoption in Guinea in 2006 was entirely driven by the introduction of one new competitor, Areeba, owned by Lebanese Investcom which in turn has been acquired by MTN.  Teledensity reached 7.3 (per 100 population) at the end of 2006.  The good news for 2007 and beyond is that Sonatel (42% owned by France Telecom, i.e. Orange) has acquired the mobile license of Spacetel and plans to have a network operational before the end of 2007.  Even if Guinea remains corrupt, an increase in the number of viable competitors is fairly certain to lead to increased mobile phone adoption.

While quite poor and still recovering from decades of civil war, Sierra Leone has had mobile phone competition since 2004 and is now up to five competitors and a teledensity of 8.7.

Both countries have problems but these increasingly competitive mobile markets bode well for the spread of mobile phones and, as I've commented before, mobile phones lead to direct economic benefits for individuals.