The super cellphone cometh

Mobile technologies have long promised an effective solution for Africa's infrastructure to leapfrog the First World and solve the problems of access and the last mile. How far away are we from a truly mobile solution to broadband? What is the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) doing with the VANS licences? Will municipalities have a part to play?

Present at an ITWeb roundtable discussion, to give their thoughts and industry experience, were Siyabonga Madyibi, director of regulatory affairs at Internet Solutions; Steve Smith, operations manager for Nashua Mobile Internet; Robert Wuestenenk, senior manager for broadband networks at Ericsson SA; Nadia Hufkie, PSG country category manager at HP SA; Danie Gordon, unified communications product solution manager at Microsoft; and Ian Isenberg, GM of telco services at Internet Solutions.

ITWeb: What is the state of WiMax in SA? What can we expect in the next year to 18 months?

The problem is that ICASA has a permanent moratorium on all WiMax licences.

Siyabonga Madyibi, director of regulatory affairs, Internet Solutions

Robert Wuestenenk, Ericsson SA: I think WiMax definitely has a place as a good rural ASDL replacement technology. When we look at the 802.16e range, that's where there will be the fine line between WiMax and HSDPA, and newer mobile technologies such as LTE. LTE is much more advanced in that mobility space, but having said that, there is huge uptake in HSDPA and the forecast is to have 1.8 billion people connected by 2010. The only way you can do that is by having relatively cheap handsets or integrated devices. In SA, there will be opportunities for last mile and we are restricted a bit by coverage issues, but the uptake is fast.

Steve Smith, Nashua Mobile Internet: I'm very excited about WiMax. We sit with a situation with thousands of users who want ADSL and have to wait for a line. WiMax can be rolled out in a very short space of time. I know Vodacom is rolling out soon and it has 120 base stations already. The fact is that it is a quick solution, both in rural areas or townships, but also in areas like Sandton where you can't get ADSL because there aren't enough ports. Just to clarify, we are not applying for a licence, but we will be working with our partners.

Ian Isenberg, Internet Solutions: We've tested both 802.16d and 802.16e from multiple vendors and we look forward to the day when we can obtain the correct licences - obviously, everything now is still being done using test licences - and we're placing a lot of faith in it. We've seen that we can deliver broadband replacement services for business, SME and enterprise, and consumers as well as a Diginet through-the-air service. We can give a normal corporate client a limited speed through-the-air that works as well as Diginet and we look forward to the day when we can deliver these kinds of services. The range varies and ideally you can get to 27 to 30 kilometres, but your weakest link defines what you can offer your other clients. It is possible to put rules in place that say you won't push that far because it will impact everyone else. It depends also what ICASA starts giving out in terms of spectrum as to how many stations you need to put up in a particular area.

ITWeb: What is happening with ICASA and spectrum?

The trend is towards one device that does everything.

Nadia Hufkie, PSG country category manager, HP SA

Siyabonga Madyibi, Internet Solutions: The latest indication is that ICASA is currently going through the process of converging existing licences and they've indicated the first step will be to issue network licences. They've said that only those companies that have been awarded network licences will be in a position to apply for WiMax licences. Now the timelines, unfortunately, have been shifting. It moved from November last year to January this year and now it looks like April. The problem with that is that only once those have been issued will we be in a position to apply for a WiMax licence. We're crossing our fingers that it won't be extended further because whatever delays take place on the network side will impact WiMax plans. Most of the metros have been looking at various WiMax technologies for last mile because most of them are sitting on fibre right now, which they use for their backbones. The problem is that ICASA has a permanent moratorium on all WiMax licences, no matter whether you are a metro or a commercial network provider. Until this whole converged network issue has been sorted out, no municipalities will be allowed to use WiMax.

ITWeb: Is there an alternative future for mobile broadband?

Danie Gordon, Microsoft SA: We've been hungry for bandwidth as mobile consumers and having more options is great. We need different alternatives and that's good for cost and price. From an applications point of view, the applications that we have and that people are using now are already built around having the ability to work anywhere. If you're on the road, it's not just about being able to read e-mail, but using high-speed broadband to answer your phone at the office using VOIP. In this country, there's no guarantee of 3G or HSDPA coverage, unfortunately, so the functionality will drop down to the next level of coverage. But, in the future, using applications over WiMax wherever you go is obviously much more flexible than using copper.

Nadia Hufkie, HP SA: From a hardware vendor perspective, the next generation of handheld devices is just coming out now and the trend is towards one device that does everything. Our new phones are 3G- and HSDPA-enabled, WiFi-capable, GPS-integrated and a have 3MP camera so you don't need a separate device for each of these functions. Our biggest challenge is having the security features that you need in such a device because of the demands of mobility. HP has acquired a remote management company so that we can secure devices remotely if necessary. WiMax would obviously help. In 2007, we sold more notebooks than desktops, so the trend is towards more mobile.

Smith: If you sit with a cellphone plugged into Office Communications Server with WiMax, WiFi and GSM, that device should be able to roam in your office, at home, in a hotel or wherever else you are. The device should just be able to bounce around the network and I think that's where we're heading. The end-user will have one device. I carry this laptop because it's the smallest one I could find, but I would get away with carrying my cellphone - it has GSM and WiFi, it can link to a laptop, it has everything I need. The feedback I got from the Mobile World Congress was that HSDPA was going up to 200Mbps. So why have fibre into your house? The costs of running it into your house are horrendous. If you have a portable device, there are no restrictions. When we sell to customers, we ask them whether they will be moving around. And if they say no, then we'll look at iBurst or ADSL. But if they move, then in the future we'll be able to offer WiMax or HSDPA. The problem other than lack of bandwidth out of the country is that running anything other than GSM on a mobile phone means the battery lasts for half a day.

The mobile operators are definitely moving towards the higher speed services.

Robert Wuestenenk, senior manager for broadband networks, Ericsson SA

Wuestenenk: Whatever is happening in the wireline business is moving into mobile, especially the applications. I don't think we should discount the wired infrastructure. If you look at the wired infrastructure, we've progressed to higher capacities that are more than capable for applications like decent IPTV. But when the bandwidth requirements exceed the copper-based infrastructure, there will be a strong drive towards fibre. Now there's nothing much to choose in the cost per metre of deploying copper versus fibre, but you'll see that trend when we start getting relatively high bandwidth at home - the way we'll develop is that the backend will be immaterial, whether it's copper, fibre or radio. The network you use to roam between office, home and your car will be the important one. Finding a device that can do everything will be as important.

Isenberg: We started off with broadband into the home with a single high-speed link into the house. This was true for SMEs as well, but now you're starting to find that a home has multiple broadband links, perhaps an additional mobile broadband as well as the fixed ones, with multiple operators and with WiMax to come. Quite often we have clients with specific requirements and we can't fulfil them because they happen to be in an area where they don't have ADSL. Sometimes they don't have HSDPA because there isn't coverage there. The technologies we do have don't cover the entire country in a manner that allows you to roam fully. Right now, we rely on all the above. Until we get a single solution that blankets the entire country, we will use whatever we have, which means there's room for all of them. Some of the equipment manufactures are putting in WiFi, WiMax and 3G so it shows that they are not banking on any single technology.

Wuestenenk: I think the mobile operators are definitely moving towards the higher speed services. This year we'll see version 7.2 of HSDPA. Next year, depending on trials and commercial availability, we can push it up to about 42Mb on the network that has been deployed today. But, like most things, your access network is very much dependent on taking the information on that network and passing it on to the core network. That is where a lot of the costs are absorbed by the operators in the backhaul space.

ITWeb: What sort of effect will new mobile applications have?

Hufkie: We are approached on a daily basis by vendors to integrate applications on our handhelds. AC Nielsen, for instance, has scanners that we test on our iPaq devices. There are a huge number of application providers using the mobile device as a platform for specialist applications.

Smith: We have already written software for a customer who looks after some retail stores and we have an online application that uses PDAs to check stock and pricing, the customer signs on the PDA - it has character recognition - and the official order can be completed. I saw an example from Microsoft a few years ago where a family went to the zoo and the entire electronic contents of the zoo was downloaded to their PDA: the maps, the animal information, the trips you could take. They could then take pictures and upload them to grandma who couldn't make the trip. The mobile device really is the future. I've been to presentations where the mobile device displayed the presentation through a VGA cable to a projector. If I lost my laptop tomorrow I could still keep up to date with meetings, e-mails, stock and weather.

Gordon: What's primarily driving this over the past two or three years is cellphone evolution. The cost of memory has gone down a lot. There are the location-based services and, yes, the mobile device will absolutely drive mobile broadband adoption. I think we're moving into a scenario where we can talk about ultra-mobile devices where the laptop and the mobile device will merge completely. You can take that sort of device abroad - the keyboard and the screen will be a little smaller - but you can do everything with it. And users will start demanding the level of functionality that they have in the office, which will put network operators under pressure to provide speed and coverage.

The World Mobile Congress in Barcelona in February was characterised by the usual annual releases of new handsets and services from global vendors, but several trends stood out. Firstly, there was the recognition of the effect that social networking is having on service providers and manufacturers.

Almost all handset market leaders touted new integration with popular social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

The second trend was the incorporation of map and GPS services. Although already quite popular - Nokia alone shipped more GPS-enabled devices last year than the whole specialist GPS market combined - GPS devices on cellphones have been clunky and not very reliable. But the new generation is very impressive, with compass-based direction finding and fully orientated maps.

The third was more evolutionary: browsers and applications on cellphones are getting better very quickly, enabling the kind of mobile applications that only laptops could do a few years ago.

In SA, we may be a little slower to get these new handsets and services, but whether they will be fast enough and deployed widely enough will depend on ICASA's issuing of the network licences. Our hunger for broadband is, yet again, in the hands of the regulator.