Fujitsu-Qualcomm WiMAX Tussle

This is the kind of story that I wish I had broken. But instead the honor goes to Heather Forsgren Weaver, a writer with RCR Wireless News who opens her article with this:

Qualcomm Inc. is trying to delay a mobile WiMAX technical standard until it can be shaped in such a way where the CDMA chip giant will not feel threatened, charged Fujitsu Ltd. Wednesday.

Mike at Techdirt writes "What's amazing is that Intel hold back from making these comments themselves, though, they probably fear the inevitable Intel vs. Qualcomm articles that would appear like wildfire."

Nancy Gohring at Wi-Fi Networking News reporting on the spat had this tidbit from the newsletter FierceWireless:

...some industry insiders suggest that Intel is encouraging Fujitsu's accusations in order to avoid a direct confrontation itself with Qualcomm.

Could WiMAX be a huge threat to Qualcomm? There are actually two threats. To the extent that WiMAX is utilized as a data service on licensed spectrum, it is a clear competitor (with key advantages) to Qualcomm's 3G plans. And everyone else's for that matter. More interesting even is the potential for WiMAX to be utilized in license exempt spectrum -- which could be bad news for Qualcomm and Qualcomm's customers who currently rely on monopoly control of the airwaves for their pricing regimen. And don't think this is just about data -- license exempt spectrum will be supporting VoIP calls under WiMAX about two minutes after the first data packets are sent...

IP Inferno as Martin Geddes sees it...

Martin writes from VoN:

Listening to predictions by the speaker on the death of big iron telco gear, Geddes Jr quotes: “The world of IT is going to take over the world of telecom because it has better APIs.”.

His full post is here.

The HSDPA Bandwagon

Never wanting to be the last at the party, IP Inferno would like to jump on the HSDPA bandwagon with Techdirt Wireless. What is HSDPA you say? "High Speed Downlink Packet Access" -- 3.5G -- WiMax, Wifi and whatever killer (as Techdirt wrote...)

3g.co.uk has a press release that "Siemens Communications will be the first vendor..." to launch HSDPA services. This is supposed to offer 2 to 3 MBPS speeds... According to the article:

Field tests will begin with mobile operators in Japan and Europe in second quarter 2005. The HSDPA solution from Siemens, comprising network equipment and HSDPA PC cards, will be available for commercial operation beginning from the fourth quarter of 2005.

US operators when? I guess the US will continue to use "whatever."

AT&T and WiMax

IP Inferno previously published a note on the 10 billion reasons (each year) that AT&T has to promote WiMax. The Register has just run an article, AT&T To Deloy WiMax by 2006. However, this is an article on AT&T Wireless (soon to be part of Cingular) not to be confused with AT&T itself -- now two separate entities. So stay tuned for real AT&T to announce their WiMax plans...

Mobile/Computing Convergence

As I was talking on Skype this morning to a friend on the other side of the planet, it dawned on me that convergence is sneaking up on us. Increasingly I find that I am using my laptop as a phone (via Skype) and that I am using my phone as a computer...

I have the new Sidekick II and love the relatively full-function web browser and email application. I use it almost every day when I am walking somewhere, or waiting for someone. I read the news, blogs that I keep up with, etc. And I have the email client hooked up (using POP) to my email provider so that I can send and receive messages.

The ability to have the web in my pocket and the phone on my computer is changing the way I work and communicate... Truisms that we all repeat every day but startling all the same when you realize that you are actually doing what you have been preaching...

Owning the Next Digital Frontier

I have watched the news from Redmond and Espoo recently with a sinking heart. On the one hand, Microsoft seems to be accelerating their mobile vision with great success. Nokia, the only company capable of offering an alternative to a Microsoft monopoly, on the other hand is stumbling.

My particular bugaboo (after four years at Borland) is the development ecosystem. I firmly believe that the mobile phone is going to become a computer in our pocket. There are 1.34 billion mobile phone users in the world and only 676 million Internet users. For the vast majority of the world, the phone will become the primary access vehicle to the Internet, and thus the portal to information, communication, and data creation.

As the phone becomes a computer, and while the market is fragmented into Microsoft, Symbian, and potentially Linux operating systems, software development will be the crucial battleground for phone manufacturers in differentiating their product offerings. Microsoft understands the developer and the importance of the development ecosystem. It was no surprise to learn this week that Microsoft has released a free mobile application development environment. Needless to say they will back it up with education resources, support for publications (books and magazines on mobile development), support for companies creating applications...

At Web 2.0 last week, Stewart Butterfield (founder of Flickr) told an anecdote about Microsoft. As his team was building their first product, they got a friendly phone call from Microsoft developer support. They person calling said, effectively, "hi, I am not calling to sell you anything -- I just want to know if there is anything Microsoft can do to support you as a developer." Needless to say, Microsoft can't call every single software developer in the world with this offer. But this kind of outreach is an indicator of how seriously they take the 3rd party development community, and the lengths they will go to to help developers be successful.

Where is Nokia? I joined the developer community. I asked for information about how I could get ahold of the product -- I am even willing to pay for it -- that we wanted to target for development. Nothing. Not even an email letting me know that the product was now commercially shipping, so even though they hadn't been able to provide me with a pre-release version, I could now buy it at a Nokia store.

How about LifeBlog (Nokia's effort to integrate data on the phone with the PC)? Great that they announced a partnership with SixApart but where is the open API and developer support program so that ANYONE can build a compelling application that integrates with LifeBlog, not just Christian Lindholm's friends?

How about just getting syncing right? Russell Beattie rightly points out in his blog that Nokia can't even synchronize address book and calendar data with the PC -- again, where is the open API with developer support so that the 3rd party community can fix this for Nokia?

Recently Nokia announced that they had licensed application development technology from Metrowerks. Nokia CTO Pertti Korhonen (who I hold in high regard) was quoted as saying

“This agreement illustrates Nokia’s commitment to Symbian as the best operating system for advanced mobile devices as well as our support to Symbian as the leading mobile platform for device creation and application development... The transaction will enable Nokia to provide developers with a comprehensive wireless tools portfolio, helping them to grow their mobile application revenues. We are very happy to work with Metrowerks in this important area.”

This is the right rhetoric, but a month and a half have gone by and developers have heard nothing more. The same "personal edition" of CodeWarrior, for a purchase price of $399 is listed on the Nokia Developer web site.

For Nokia to succeed in challenging Microsoft, they will have to be 10 times more effective in wooing developers. Here are a few of the things that have to be done well: open supported developer APIs to all aspects of the device, synchronization, and the programs around the platform such as LifeBlog; a free high-quality development environment that makes it easy for developers to utilize these APIs, test their applications, and deploy across the Nokia family of devices; pro-active support for the third party development community starting with sponsorship of magazines and books and conferences and continuing through to pro-active outbound calls to developers to offer consulting, developer kits, phones for testing; interaction with the VC community to educate the VCs on the opportunity to build successful companies around the Nokia ecosystem...

It is an uphill battle and the news I keep hearing indicates that it is a battle that is being lost. It may be that as soon as 2006 Microsoft has become the dominant player in the smartphone category -- the category that I believe will eventually take over all phone sales worldwide.

Microsoft and VoIP

I have said before that everyone will be a VoIP provider in the future. Mary Jo Foley writing for Microsoft Watch reports that Microsoft is expected to play up their Live Communications Server 2005 "...as a key piece of its quest to conquer the telephony market." Mary reports that

Microsoft also will use LCS 2005 as a way to gain a toehold in the voice-over-IP (VOIP) space, according to sources claiming familiarity with the company's plans.

In 2006 who will your phone company be? SBC? AT&T? or Microsoft?

Telecom Lobbyist Funny Business

How did a top secret lobbying strategy document end up posted publicly on the FCC web site? John Windhausen would probably like to know, and he will have a lot more time to seek out the answer to this question now that, as the Washington Post reports that he has lost his job over the matter:

John D. Windhausen Jr., president of the Association for Local Telecommunication Services (ALTS), resigned yesterday after an uproar over the document, which starkly characterized the policy positions of FCC members and lawmakers and described the need for the association to hire, for $120,000 a year, a "heavyweight Republican [lobbyist] that can navigate between the FCC chairman and the White House."

According to TelecomWeb "Julia Strow, vice president for Regulatory and Legislative Affairs at ALTS member company Cbeyond, will take over as acting president of the association during this transition period." TelecomWeb also promises a report on the contents of the document.

One place that Windhausen might look as a starting point, according to an article in Phone Plus Magazine is the association's law firm Swidler and Berlin. According to Phone Plus:

Swidler & Berlin inadvertently released the ALTS strategic plan last week after an ALTS member had forwarded it to the law firm, Windhausen told PHONE+ in an interview this afternoon. ALTS is an association representing the interests of facilities-based CLECs.

Phone Plus has some additional news on the content of the strategy document including the news that "...FCC Chairman Michael Powell is likely to promote President Bush's broadband agenda before the election." IP Inferno hasn't located a copy of the document itself, but we will publish when possible.

Why WiMAX? AT&T's reasons...

Behzad Nadji is a busy man. Vice President of AT&T Labs Research, Vice President of AT&T Network, OSS and IT Architecture. I had the opportunity to spend an hour with Behzad to hear about the issues his group is addressing.

Here is the simple math for why AT&T will be an enormous customers for WiMAX - $10 billion in annual local access fees paid to the local exchange carriers... 75% of this amount spent on connecting to customers that are using less that 5 T1s and are less than 3 miles from an AT&T central office. That is $7.5 billion PER YEAR that AT&T can spend to replace the local loop.

Another intersting tidbit -- 1.4 petabytes of data flow over AT&T's data network every day. The largest IP network in the world.

Conversation with Peerio's CEO

Peerio's CEO Dmitry Goroshevsky spoke to me by phone this morning from Paris, following up on our conversation at Supercomm. I expressed my disappointment that his company has still not shipped a product, despite the plans and announcements in the past.

Regarding his free software download, Peerio444, Dmitry told me that sound quality has been a major problem which is why it has not been made generally available. He told me that an important licensing announcement would be made *soon* which would provide a solution, but would not commit to a schedule for delivering this technology to the marketplace.

Regarding the company's commercial offering -- OEM'd versions inside commercial handsets, Dmitry promised that real product from real partners would be demonstrated at the VoN tradeshow... So if you are going, swing by their booth for me and let me know what you see.

I raised my primary critique with him again -- that Skype has such an enormous lead, that upstarts like Peerio (Nimcat, Litfiber, etc) were unlikely to become very important in this market. His counter to this point was twofold --

First, he said, Skype does not have the professional feature set required by businesses to adopt P2P VoIP technology. Peerio does, and is delivering this in handsets with partners.

Second, Skype is not a "true" peer-to-peer platform. Peerio is serverless. This is, according to Dmitry, a fundamental and game changing difference -- and not just for VoIP but for many different kinds of networked applications that will ultimately run on the Peerio infrastructure.

I am certainly interested to see whether these claims will bear fruit -- but at this point I want to see something working before I get excited...