Is this Ultra stuff working anywhere or is it just some PDF marketing? <massive and at times almost emotionally unbalanced commitment by gigantic public companies to PowerPoint marketing and hypeterism > They forgot PDF files.
BTW, who are all these guys and gals, do I care or just that the stuff they write is somewhat correct. Hard to get the whole story from the source, just try asking about sync frame buffers.
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By and large, everyone agrees that sharing the sites where transmission antennas are set up -- from rooftops to church towers to lampposts -- is a good idea, given rising costs, political opposition to more clutter of the landscape, and unresolved questions about the potential health hazards of wireless phone signals. It's sharing the electronic gear placed on those sites that starts to raise questions.
"Right now there are some 18,000 mobile telephony antennae sites in the U.K., two-thirds of which are shared," said David Harrington, director general of the Communications Management Association (CMA), a group of U.K. business communication users, in an e-mail response to a reporter's questions. "The estimate is that a further 9,000 will be needed for 3G in the next two years. The industry very much wants to share locations, because planning laws and health fears in the U.K. are making it increasingly hard to find new sites ... However, once you begin to talk about sharing antennae then you're in a different ballgame, involving electronic, rather than real estate, infrastructure sharing -- which might or might not be seen as being anti-competitive."
It's up to regulators to draw the line, of course -- and they insist their primary concern is protecting consumers. In sparsely-populated Sweden, for example, license conditions allow operators to share infrastructure outside major metropolitan areas, while building separate networks in the cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmš.
But some observers say watchdogs in Germany and the U.K., where the license rules explicitly forbid network sharing, are relaxing their grip, in part out of a sense of guilt over the huge sums their governments raked in for 3G licenses last year.
"I think the regulators have a slightly bad taste in their mouth because they extorted these really high license fees and their pet telcos now can't afford the services," said telecommunication analyst Bernt Ostergaard of Giga Information Group Inc. "One of the ways the carriers can meet the cost is to have this infrastructure sharing. Personally, I am very, very doubtful about the strategy, and I don't think they are giving us the whole truth here."
The new head of Germany's telecom regulatory agency Regulierungsbehšrde fŸr Post und Telekommunikation (RegTP), Matthias Kurth, raised eyebrows recently when he seemed to suggest license terms requiring each operator to build its own infrastructure could be relaxed.
Kurth sees a "certain responsibility" to "help where we can," he said in an interview published in the newspaper Die Welt. RegTP technicians are currently checking where network elements can be shared without violating the terms of the licenses, he added. RegTP is expected to issue a ruling on the question by next month.
"Obviously we're interested in network sharing," said one German wireless executive, on condition of anonymity. "The costs could be reduced as much as 40 percent."
RegTP "has realized there's a possibility they may have to share sites as a result of the huge cost of acquiring licenses and rolling out network," said telecommunication analyst Paolo Pescatore of International Data Corp. "So I think the German government has realized that operators need a hand, but ultimately it has to benefit consumers."
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cnn.com
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A slew of bugs have been exposed in a new range of high-tech mobile phones, which offer permanent Internet access as well as voice services, and telecoms companies have been forced to recall hundreds of thousands of faulty handsets.
"It has taken four years for [current] GSM phones to stabilise, and this new technology is going to destabilise it [mobile phones] again," said Hugh Brogan, chief executive of British mobile phone maker Sendo.
In Japan, the first country to pioneer mobile Internet access, Sony and Matsushita Communication Industrial offered to replace over half a million phones which suffer from software glitches. The problems struck a few months after a range of bugs emerged in hundreds of thousands of handsets of NTT DoCoMo, Japan's top mobile phone group, which are made by Sony, Swedish Ericsson and Hitachi Kokusai Electric.
Software glitches have also prompted NTT DoCoMo to delay to the autumn its planned launch of the world's first, third-generation (3G) mobile phones, which are billed to offer super-fast Internet and multimedia services.
In Europe, where debt-laden telecoms companies have spent 120 billion euros on 3G licences and are expected to spend around the same again to develop and deploy the new services – despite nebulous future revenues – this sends a stark message.
Amid recriminations between telecoms operators and suppliers, British Telecom this week also delayed Europe's first 3G phones on the Isle of Man because of dogged problems with handsets.
"This is not magic, it takes time to test the phones and networks," said Lauri Kivinen, communications vice-president at Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker. But even while industry players such as Nokia are pushing back once aggressive timetables, the long-established GSM technology, which has been around since 1992 and has grabbed around 60 per cent of the worldwide mobile phone market, still suffers from setbacks, as Finnish wireless operator Sonera found on Wednesday.
Sonera said it would recall 360,000 SIM cards, which identify the phone and authorise its use, because phones were freezing up due to faulty software on the chip.
"In some ways it is to be expected, because the horsepower of these phones is increasing and the networks become more complicated," said Bob Schukai, European director of third-generation products at US-based Motorola's phone unit. "The phone software is not only used to retrieve some telephone numbers from a SIM card, but now it must also retrieve e-mail and calendars."
These "phones-on-steroids" are becoming so complex that engineers have been working around the clock to solve software problems on 3G phones in Japan, which had been scheduled to launch at the end of this month. "The only thing that seems to work right now is the video conferencing," one industry source told Reuters.
A key problem with 3G mobile phone networks is the handover between base stations if a mobile phone user is moving out of the coverage area of one mast and into the next. Both in Japan and on the Isle of Man, this handover glitch causes phones to drop connections. This is caused by the infinitely more complex structure of 3G networks. While experts do believe this problem can be solved, it will take time.
Another problem for 3G phones is that they not only need to distinguish between voice traffic and Internet data, but they also need to be able to fall back on to a slower second-generation network when the phone moves out of 3G coverage areas – which are expected to be limited to top cities.
Even if the industry has figured out how to settle these issues, 3G specifications need to be accurately implemented across different equipment from dozens of manufacturers. "It'll take years to solve," said Deutsche Bank analyst Pontus Gronlund.
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thestandardeurope.com
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Handset mars GPRS debut
12:06 Monday 21st May 2001
Daniel Robinson, IT Week
Handset usability problems now add to the woes of the UK's first consumer GPRS service
Broadband mobile services finally entered the mainstream last week when BT Cellnet began offering General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) network access via Motorola handsets. However, according to tests conducted by IT Week, usability is poor and could delay uptake until better client devices are available.
BT's GPRS system uses three time slots to give a peak data rate of about 30kbit/s, faster than GSM's 9.6kbit/s, but nothing like the rates over fixed connections. GPRS offers always-on access to the Internet via the WAP gateway, so users do not have to redial to call up pages. Because of these features many observers regard the GPRS so-called 2.5G service as a big advance for the mobile Internet. Greater bandwidth will arrive with 3G UMTS mobile services, but they will not launch until next year at the earliest.
BT Cellnet's GPRS service is currently only available with the Motorola Timeport 260, a £199 handset that cannot take full advantage of the network's capabilities. IT Week Labs found that even basic tasks such as setting up and using email were difficult when using this handset. The phone has tri-band support - useful for regular travellers to the US - but its cramped screen and difficult input are disappointing.
The very small monochrome screen means that a lot of scrolling is required to read email messages or Web pages. The display is reflective to take advantage of ambient lighting, but this only very slightly improves readability. There are no dedicated jump keys or touchscreen features so navigating can be slow. In its current form, the BT Cellnet package is only likely to appeal for basic tasks.
Peter Lisle, GPRS programme manager, said BT had waited for terminals to be ready. "I expect a range of devices will be released over the next three months," he said. "Always-on is much more user-friendly than circuit-switched WAP. You get all your data at one press of a button."
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