Man files FCC complaint over AT&T FaceTime blocking

With the wireless Broadband access more services can be provided with good quality of service... and more and more, the operators are becoming as transport networks and probably not making enough revenue from the services they provide.

Claims are filed with FCC against AT&T for charging for Apple's FaceTime video conferencing on its 3G and 4G networks, and AT&T seems not to have a competing service to offer here!

See text here.

Reprogrammable SIMs

Ofcom has published a report on the imminent move from traditional form factor SIMs to reprogrammable SIMs — eUICC modules.

As we see an expansion of devices using the cellular network to include smart meters, cars, potentially medical devices and other products, the need for an ultra small form factor, non-removeable SIM is increasing, and eUICC is one of the proposed mechanisms for achieving this.

From an operator point of view, this is potentially quite scary — whole countries of smart meters could be switched from one provider to another in a matter of seconds, or even jumping between multiple providers per day, leveraging the best pricing deals. Conversely, there needs to be a secure, trusted mechanism for enabling over the air updating.

Plenty of nice juicy legal issues here!

Four of UK’s largest mobile operators enter joint venture to bring about 4G

From IT Pro Portal:

Four of the UK’s largest mobile service providers have come together in a bid to speed up the rollout of 4G in the UK.

EE, O2, Three and Vodafone have formed a new company in conjunction with the UK government and communications regulator Ofcom. The company’s primary mandate is to ensure that consumers continue to receive Freeview TV signals unimpeded by LTE networks.

What do you think of this approach? Is collaboration a good idea, to help get 4G in the hands of users faster, or would you have concerns about competition implications — or is there sufficient consumer benefit here?

Regulators demand patent licence clarification

With the "Patent war" among, mainly, smartphone vendors brought the US and European regulators to call for patent rules to be "improved" following complaints about the way some smartphone makers had sought to defend their rights.

In my view some or most of these patents "in the patent war" are not considered within FRAND as they are not seen “essential patents” .... so to solve this issue new guidelines are required to handle the "non-essential patents" competing in the same market place.

The BBC article is here.

"Measuring the Information Society 2012"

The ITU has published a report "Measuring the Information Society 2012" — you can download an executive summary (still 36 pages) here. The report contains some perhaps quite startling conclusions:

• Around 6 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions by the end of 2011
• Almost twice as many mobile-broadband as fixed-broadband subscriptions
• Mobile-broadband penetration is expected to continue growing at double-digit rates over the next few years, reflecting the spread of mobile Internet services
• By end 2011, 2.3 billion people (i.e. one in three) were using the Internet

The six billion cellular subscription figure is really rather impressive, as it's pretty close to the estimated world population of just over seven billion. That's only going to grow, with India increasing numbers of users, and also as we move from the nascency of machine to machine communications (M2M) into real rollout — as SIMs find their way into cars, fridges, display boards, gas/electricity/parking meters and so on, the number of connections is going to increase rapidly. (From a regulatory point of view, M2M will bring its own challenges, of course, particularly in terms of ensuring that the networks can support the increased data throughput, but, in some ways, are likely to be easier to handle that traditional person-to-person services — how many machines need to be able to call emergency services, for example, or are require protection against unwanted marketing messages?)

The report is well worth perusing, if only to get a better ideal of the scale and scope of communications technology. One area which seems a reasonable omission is any mention of numbers of people using over the top communications services — Skype, Viber, Facebook chat and the like. Whilst the use of traditional services will increase, I'd see the rate of growth of over the top services being even greater, and it's something which both network operators and existing service providers need to consider very carefully if they wish to continue to operate lucratively, and which regulators and policy makers need to bear in mind also.