Happy 25th Birthday to the UK Mobile Network

We recently saw an article saying that the UK mobile network is 25 years old on 1st January 2010 and it got us thinking about life before mobiles.

We are old enough to remember a time before mobiles and email, we had pagers and the new fangled message pagers where you would get a message saying ‘call the office’ and after pulling off a main road, trying to find a pay phone that worked and if you had change only to be told it was not urgent and you could have called when you got to your destination !!!. Life certainly has changed and we are very dependant on mobiles in day to day life but of course not only for voice but with SMS and data access we are always in touch.

There is an interesting article about this over on the IET website here and the history of how the market has developed is fascinating.

Femtocells – Another Route to Market ?

We see that a UK manufacturer of Femtocells has decided to make an attempt to go direct to the consumer market rather than the usual business model of via the Mobile Carriers.

Hay Systems Ltd have ignored the regular route of making deals with Mobile Carriers in favour of a straight to consumer sale. The problem they have is they will need to get agreement with the carriers to do this and so have launched a website  www.femtonow.com where members of the public can register their interest so they can approach carriers with potential numbers of consumers.

The HSL product has the ability to work with any Mobile Carrier, or even multiple Mobile Carriers, over a regular broadband connection. To achieve this HSL needs to do two things: obtain a radio spectrum in which to operate, and integrate into the mobile Carrier’s back end.

We think HSL are going to face a few obstacles, firstly their  Femtocell is 2G rather than 3G and every network operator in the UK is moving towards 3G deployment of Femtocells.  Secondly the Femtocell is attractive to a Mobile Carrier as it is a way to lock your customer’s onto your network increasing the ‘stickyness’ of contracts so it is unlikely a carrier would encourage technology that allows customers to move easily from network to network.

We wish Hay Systems well and hope they can succeed in this venture.

See the Press release from HSL here.

Are landlines set to die ?

We saw a really interesting article over on VON  here about the decline of landlines in the USA, this got us thinking about some predictions we remember from the recent past.

Wth the explosion of mobile phone use and when WiFI was becoming popular it became clearly expected that all offices would become mobile and that fixed networks and PBX systems would die, to be honest we were believers in this. Mobile and WiFi has clearly had an effect on the way we do business but no where near to the extent that was predicted, desk users still prefer a PBX phone and a monitor, full size keyboard and mouse so for the majority of users not much has changed. For casual office users such as those on the road or home workers then their use of office technology has been made much easier and the growing use of FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) has meant their mobile phone can become an extension of the PBX when they are in the office.

For sure landlines re reducing as many new house owners do not bother getting a line connected and the growth and improvements in mobile broadband mean a user does not need an ADSL line, however we cannot believe that fixed land line use will die 100% as there is still a place for such technology.

We all remember watching old sci-fi films that showed the future (as in now) with us all driving flying cars and of course the reality is somewhat different !

www.voiceandip.co.uk

On the IridiaBlog in the main we like to talk about the VoIP and GSM industry in general but now and again we make a plug about our own business (something has to pay the bills !!!)

We have recently seen a demand from users who wish to purchase GSM and VoIP gateways online as they feel they have enough technical competence to implement them themselves with out the need for a reseller. So due to popular demand we have launched Voice and IP our on line store at www.voiceandip.co.uk

You are able to purchase our most popular gateways online and we will be adding more products over time. You will receive our usual high quality after sales service.  Pop over and have a look.

Having trouble Locating Mobile Cells

From time to time when we are installing a mobile GSM or 3G gateway we find some remote sites with poor mobile coverage and it would be useful to know what mobile base stations there arte in the area.

Ofcom provide a very useful site Sitefinder’ Mobile Phone Base Station Database that allows you to put your poscode in and see what base stations there are in your area.

This site has helped us a few times to pick the best provider in an area where coverage is patchy at best.