Mobile

Data Roaming Woes

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This post is pretty longas it has about 8 months worth info in it.

The past 8 months have been pretty interesting (or annoying), I’ve been bouncing up and down with one of the local mobile operators in South Africa regarding an error on my data roaming bill. I’m not sure if I should mention the companies name yet or not, as the case is still currently open (I am tempted to though).

I know quite a lot of people have received huge shocks on their bill when data roaming, it is no doubt expensive. As it turns out though, telco’s can and do sometimes make mistakes with their billing. The problem is, without any sort of technical knowledge, you’re most likely going to land up paying the bill, as the telco will not really look into the validity of each and every line item.

Fortunately, I have an awesome network of colleagues, who are in the field. All of whom have been able to look at the details of the bill and see that there are some technical irregularities that need further clarification.

What is really interesting in all of this, is the repeated attempts from the telco and the service provider whom we have a contract with, to bully us into paying the account. For 8 months, we have repeatedly sent information proving the technical impossibilities of the case. Yet, they seem to come back with the same generic responses without actually responding to our main concerns…. One such example is the possible manipulation of dates in emails chains to make the responses seem more relevant… which was quite shocking.

In July our service provider called up and insisted that the telco had verified the charges are correct and as such payment needs to be made, as the case has been pending for 8 months. When we asked our service provider to send us the official response from the network in July, she forwarded us an email with the telco’s reponse. The forwarded email was the same response we received back in March, to which we had responded with a list of questions for clarification (no response was received).

The email chain had three parts:
1) Her opening statement saying “please see the response below from the network representitive” (this was dated July 16th)
2) The middle part of the mail was the response from the network, which did not have any date, but was a copy and paste from an email that was sent through to us previously on March 5th.
3) The bottom bit of the email chain was a request from her manager to network to “provide clarification on our dispute” this was request was dated July 15th

It is quite alarming that service providers can resort to such tactics in order to force payment from unsuspecting clients. I do wonder how many people have been forced into making payments that were incorrect.

Here are the details of the actual dispute….

In December ’08 – I was roaming with a South African sim card in the UAE. On December 23rd we received an itimised bill for an amount around R4,000 – this was alright as the data roaming charges are ridiculously priced… around R175 per MB.

On January 16th, we were sent an updated bill…. with one additional line item, for the value of around R61,000 (crazy, I know). Which stated that the one line item had +-430 megabytes of data downloaded during that session (on a mobile phone).

After sending through the calculations numerous times, the reply we received from the network was that:

The calculations were made by Mr. Minty and he does not have any knowledge or training on how the telco rates or bills data”

I had no idea we needed to present our credentials through to a telco in order to dispute a case. Thats some great customer services for you. After checking the calculations with various experts, they all do agree, that the calculations are valid.

The funny thing, the contact at the telco who is dealing with us, has his profile up on linkedin. He is hardly qualified to talk about data roaming and calculations, he lists his strengths as Call Centre Management, CRM Management, Vendor Management and few others. None of which are related to any technical analysis of data…. You have to love social media 😉

I know that no download happened, as I was asleep at the time. The call data logs on my device (which I had for a 6 months before the event) show a total data usage of only 138MB. The itimised bill does not have any time stamp on the actual duration of the session, if I was to look at the next line item in the bill, the time duration between the two incidents is around 6 hours. I also serioulsy doubt that the battery of the device would have lasted for 6 hours with an active GPRS connection.

Essentially, I would have needed to download 430 megabytes on a Nokia N82 devices in 6 hours. After doing some research, it turns out, the network I was roaming on, only has a GPRS roaming agreement with the foreign network in the UAE. Call centres from both networks have confirmed that the roaming agreement means that the maximum data speed I could receive at any time would be a GPRS connection. The foreign network confirmed that the speed of their GPRS network is 48kilobits/second

So, if I was to assume that I was able to receive the maximum possible bandwidth (48kbps) it would have taken me around 21 hours to download 441 megabytes.

The calulation I used was as follows:
48 kilobits per second = 0.005859375 megabytes per second
0.005859375 * 60 seconds (one minute) = 0.352 megabytes per minute
0.352 megabytes per minute * 60 (one hour) = 21 megabytes per hour

So in 6 hours I would have been able to download 126 megabytes (6*21)
And in 21 hours I will be able to download 441 megabytes

The response from the network to the calculations was:

Perhaps this example can explain better; you open your email and you establish a connection with your email ISP or server. Your inbox starts to update and every bit of information has a data size and gets downloaded to your device in packets of varying size as and when a timeslot is available. So, whilst your email is updating, you decide to check out the news and you open your browser. As soon as this happens, whatever you see is updated which again is data sent.

The key point that they have missed, is that the total maximum bandwidth thats available is 48kbps. So, the data rates will be split in order to suit the amount of web applications that are running. So I could be downloading a file, opening email and browsing 5 different websites, the bottom line is that everything will take very long to load as I only have 48kbps available.

I also looked at the average data speed for the 3 data sessions that happened prior to the event happening.

Here are the calculations for the average speeds:
Session One (Line Item 75 and 76):
Between 23:23:59 and 23:33:33
Total Possible Time between items in Seconds: 574 seconds
Total Data used: 113,483 bytes

Average Data Speed: 197.7 bytes per second

Session Two (Line Item 74 and 75)
Between: 23:33:33 and 00:04:51
Total Possible Time between items in Seconds: 1,878 seconds
Total Data used: 311,989 bytes

Average Data Speed: 166.13 bytes per second

Session Three (Line Item 73 and 74)
Between: 00:04:51 and 00:12:58 (under dispute)
Total Possible Time between items in Seconds: 487seconds
Total Data used: 338,578 bytes

Average Data Speed: 695.23 bytes per second

Total Average Data Speed = 353.02 bytes per second

Based on the average speed, it would have taken me around 350 hours to download 430 megabytes of data.

According to the network:

You can not calculate average data speeds, as there are numerous factors that effect the data speeds. As such the calculation is not valid

As far as I know, if I download 10MB of data in 10seconds, I can assume that my average speed was 1MB/s

The main arguement from the South African network is that the CDRs are correct. When we requested them to provide us with more detail, to look at the actual time duration of the event (EDR, VLR etc.) they were unable to do so, as the foreign network has not supplied them with the information to date. They also do not have any record of the IMEI number for the device that was supposedly used.

When asked regarding the technical possibility of downloading the content, the response is that in theory on 3G/HSDPA it is possible to download that much data, in the specified time frame, as the minimum guarantee of speeds is GPRS. The telco conveniently ignores the confirmed email correspondence from the foreign network that clearly states it is a GPRS connection.

The final statement from the network is that our claim is against the foreign network, we should get the info ourselves.

Either way, the lesson learnt: Do not roam with data and if you do need to roam and you receive a big bill, be sure to go through all the line items to make sure you’re not been charged for an event that did not happen. I must warn you though, dont expect to receive any sort of concern or love from your network (especially certain ones in South Africa).

We even had a face to face meeting with the telco, I was out of the country so could not attend. The telco threw out technical terms, trying to catch my dad off guard. When my dad offered to call me to discuss technical issues, they refused to speak to me over the phone because as they put “he is the one who caused all of these problems.” The meeting eventually ended with the telco saying there is nothing more to discuss, and getting up and walking out.

The case has been put forward to ICASA, the governing body in South Africa. We’ve also consulted our lawyers, all of whom were equally as shocked at the way in which the service provider and telco have responded to our concerns. I’ll keep you posted on the final outcome of this.

Al Jazeera New Media….

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Following on from my last post- I was asked to go on air again to talk about our new interactive map (second appearence on AlJazeera)… Incase you’ve missed it, our new services are proving to be a fantastic tool in covering the war on Gaza. If you don’t believe me check out what WIRED and NPR had to say….

Getting tweets from the war zone is so 2008. The latest social media advance combines tools like Twitter, text messaging, and online mapping to gather up first-hand reports, straight from Gaza.

Oh and the CEO of twitter, EV,  sent out a message referring to our Gaza Twitter Stream….

picture-141

Getting reviews online is always comforting- however the circumstances under which we rolled out these services aren’t. Lets hope and pray that the killing comes to an end and crisis reporting will no longer be needed…

Here is my interview on AJ:

Al Jazeera – Mapping out the Gaza conflict

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After a few late nights at the office we have finally launched our interactive map for the situation in Gaza. The folks over at Ushahidi have been fantastic in allowing us to use their crowd sourcing platform for this project…. Our SMS system was set up and is powered by the guys at souktel (thanks to @Katrinskaya from MobileActive for putting us in touch with souktel)

The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Our goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.

War on Gaza

As updates come in on the situation in Gaza, we update the map with the incident. People can have a look at the timeline and map to get a idea of how the entire event has played out from the beginning. The great thing about this platform is the “crowd sourcing” part… People in Gaza and around the world can submit reports through to the site in 4 ways:

1) Report an incident directly at: http://labs.aljazeera.net/warongaza

2) via SMS (text message) – If you’re in Palestine and on the Jawwal network, you can text in your report to the number: 37191

or if you’re anywhere else in the world you can send a text to: +45609910303

All messages need to start with the word GAZA so that we can track it… (eg: GAZA 5 aid trucks just arrived at the Rafa crossing)

3) If you’re on twitter*, you can submit a report by simply replying to our official AlJazeera account with your report @AJGaza (eg: @AJGaza airstrike just resumed in Khan Yunus)…

*If you still dont know what twitter is head over to CommonCraft and watch the great video that explains it

4) If you have images or video, you can email them through to us at yourviews@aljazeera.net or upload them here.

I do wish the war ends soon so we dont have to actually test the platform out…. With the way its currently looking the end is not in sight, so lets just hope we can provide a great resource of information for the war.

Big ups to the other guys in our New Media team who worked through the nights to get this up…. Its amazing what one tweet can do (got in touch with @whiteafrican via twitter for this)

You can read more about the deployment on the Ushahidi Blog

BlackBerry Storm….

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I’ve been talking about the BlackBerry Storm to my colleagues ever since I first heard about it. After using my iPhone for quite a while- the thought of having a touch UI with a “clickable” interface seemed to hold some promise…. Could this finally be a device that would provide the best of both worlds? Well… After reading this review on TIME – “BlackBerry Storm: The Novelty Wears Off Fast”, I guess not. I’m still keen to get my hands on one to play around with, however I dont think i’ll be purchasing a new device this month *sigh*

“The trouble with having to push down on the entire 3.2-inch screen every time you type a letter or confirm a menu choice is that it slows you down. The idea behind the clickable screen is that it will minimize errors by getting you to think before you press. Instead, it took much of the fun out of using the device.”

I guess the name says it all…. its fantastic to watch a storm….sooner or later you’ll be wanting the sun to come out so that you can get on with your life.

Who Will Rule the New Internet?

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Came across this article on the TIME website, its about “Who Will Rule the New Internet?”

Its def. worth a read….

According to Josh Quittner, Apple, Google & Facebook are the technology standard-bearers of todays age. Google- with its “open” web, Facebook- with its huge user base and “walled” off approach & Apple- with the highly controlled “experience.”

The article goes on to explain the success & strategies of three companies, one of the interesting points he raises with regards to Googles “Open” Web strategy VS Facebook is:

Social networks are a threat to that business; users tend to stay within their network and communicate among themselves or simply fool around with apps. When Facebook’s users are playing Scrabulous or tagging photos, for example, they’re not using Google. Indeed, they’re more likely to discover new things via friends or in-network applications such as iLike, a service that matches your friends’ musical tastes to your own.

The flaw in this theory is, facebook may be the biggest thing today, what happens when users get bored and start moving on to the next big site? It was MySpace yesterday, today its Facebook, tomorrow its going to be twitter? Or a microblogging site similar to it? The life cycle on a specific social networking site is still to be decided. Users are like sheep, and who is to say next year we wont see a mass migration to something completely new that has not even been developed yet?

According to Josh, Apple doesnt really care who wins the online war- as long as we use an Apple device to access the content. He quotes Matt Murphy (a venture capitalist) as saying:

He claims that the iPhone will “absolutely be the driver of the post-PC world.” Murphy points out that the kit needed by developers to build iPhone apps has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, and he estimates that about 1,000 applications will be available to consumers when the iPhone-apps store launches with the phone. “If you look at so many of the constraints that have held back the mobile ecosystem, Apple basically takes all of those away and provides an open platform, a great device and a user base that’s rabid for these new kinds of applications,” he says.

The best part of this article, is that Josh did not forget to mention Android. Googles open mobile platform that is due to hit the market place later this year. Andy Rubin, Googles Director of mobile platforms says:

Developers have so far written more than 1,800 applications, which could be distributed on a Google site arranged according to popularity, as YouTube is. “There’s some pretty innovative stuff there,” Rubin explains. “This is merging the handset and the Web and coming up with something completely new.

We’re in for an exciting second half of the year, with the iPhone 2 coming out in a couple of days & Android later in the year, its going to be very interesting to see which company will take the market by storm. Two companies, with very different go-to-market strategies. The problem Google may have, will be the actual device Android is running on… They have already signed deals with many companies (Moto, LG, HTC etc.), but if these companies are not able to provide a compelling UI like the iPhone, this would most likely see users moving towards the iPhone.

Nokia are also due to launch the N96 later this year, i’m sure Nokia will sell the most handsets, but their market share will be sure to take a bit of a knock with some serious competition from Android & Apple. For myself, this is the first year that is a seriously tough decision on which handset to buy? Will Nokia be able to come up with a device that provides a compelling user experience like what we have seen so far from Android and Apple? I doubt it. Regardless of who wins, its great to finally have some quality devices coming to market.

I suppose Google still has a 1 up on Apple & everyone else in the market- anyone who lands up buying an iPhone/Nokia will in the end, still be using Google/Youtube on their handset.

As for the battle of the internet, if Google actually own the platform on which you’re accessing facebook or the next big thing on your mobile, they dont have much to be worried out. At least in the short term…

Lets wait and see how this plays out in the coming months….

Opera Mobile 9.5- the new look mobile web….

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Opera have just announced the latest version in their mobile browser, Opera Mobile 9.5. They have a host of new features in this release.

The one that stands out most for me is the ability to incorporate Flash Lite 3- (see previous post here)….the sad thing from their press release is that “OEM, Operators will have the capability to incorporate Flash Lite 3…” which means that the telco/handset guys still have control over your functionality, if they chose not to include this feature then it just really your bad luck…

If only they had it as a standard feature in their free browsers it could really provide a big shift and opportunity for media companies/content owners to develop compelling products for their browser….

Other neat features are: the ability to SMS bookmarks to friends, MMS/Email images directly from sites that you like by just selecting the image, and the widgets.

Features such these do have the potential to provide a good enough web experience on mobile. Personally I think Opera need to get out of the OEM/Telco mindsets and start opening up their offering directly to consumers. Give the browser away for free- build an ad supported model and work on a rev share with advertisers/media companies. I am sure they will see much greater usage by end-users of the product and it could then really be a big move to providing a true “Web” experience on mobile….

(As much as it pains to me say this- the Safari experience on my iPhone still seems to be much smoother. From the Video Demo- Opera seems to have a “clunky” UI)

Mobile Video Search – vTap

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Earlier this year I met a company called Veveo at the 3GSM in Barcelona. They had what was one of the most interesting applications on show. A search engine, for your mobile device, that crawls the Internet for videos (in any format) and converts them to a format that your handset can view. Sounds simple enough….

However what made this really fantastic was that they were able to cut down the key strokes needed on a handset to search for content… They did this by coming up with a system that searchers based on letters instead of words… so from the second you start typing the search begins, which means you should be able to find your video much quicker!

What takes it to the next level is that you don’t have to actually type the full word to find your video, you can search via your normal numeric keypad.

The best way to explain this is for example: If I wanted to find a videos on a “cats”, to type the word “cats” on my Nokia n95 handset would involve 10 keytrokes (three strokes on the number “2″, five strokes on the number “7″ etc.) With vTap, instead of having to type the full word, I can simple just put in the numbers: “2287″ (which is where I would find the letters). The system will automatically associate the numbers with the word “cats” and then start searching the web for all the videos that are tagged “cats”

That’s why we at Veveo™ created vTap—the quick and easy Web video solution that lets you search, browse and pinpoint the exact Web video you’re looking for—from sources all over the Internet—and play it on any supported device! With vTap’s unique character-based incremental search—where results are returned with every character entered—you can perform searches using just a few characters instead of whole keywords. It’s so easy, you’ll think it’s reading your mind.

don’t believe me? try it out for yourself!

You can test out vTap here:

http://vtap.com/

Flash Video on Mobile… now thats awesome!

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Adobe’s Flash Lite 3 will have video support on mobile devices. This is another great move towards a converged experience of web and mobile.

Imagine the possibilities with this! Almost all the major social network sites these days have some sort of flash video running on it. YouTube will be easily accessible on handsets, which is fantastic. The YouTube mobile version is currently streaming video through to you in RealMedia [on my N95]. Due to YouTube having to convert the videos to a compatible format they have only made a selection of their content available on http://m.youtube.com site [at least for now]. With flash support for video, this would in theory mean that we could now browse and access all the content on YouTube, as you would on your desktop! Very sweet indeed!

Al Ramadan, senior VP for mobile at Adobe, said: “With Flash Lite 3 and its support for video, we’ve passed a major milestone in bringing a desktop experience to mobile and transforming the wireless industry.”

What is quite interesting about this, is that the mobile industry have always been saying that one of the key factors that will drive mobile tv usage would be the access of short form content. With flash now serving video to mobile devices this opens up the entire market to short form content.

NTT DoCoMo & Nokia have both commited to to embedding Flash 3 Lite on their devices & Adobe expect to have a billion handsets with flash-enabled devices by 2010.

Now I just need to get myself a version of the software so I can play around with it!

Googles Mobile Ambitions

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Last week we saw an announcement from Google that they had purchased the mobile social networking platform Zingku. Everyone seems to be guessing as to what exactly it is that Google has up its sleeve in the mobile space. One thing is for sure though, they are serious about getting into mobile. If the news coming out over the past few months is anything to go by, i’m sure the Google mobile offering will be one to revolutionalise the mobile world (no, not like how the iPhone promised to do so).

Why do I say this? Well as Steve Jobs said in his speech at Standford “You can not connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward”. So lets start connecting the dots….

First things first, lets look at all the things that people in the industry seem to complain about as to what is holding the mobile revolution back:

1. Operators – cant live with them, cant live without them. They control your access to information. “Walled Gardens”, Data charges and the like are really holding people back from utilising all the cool things that can be done on your mobile phone.

2. Discovery- We have heard this many times, if people can not find your content in an easy way- you’re not going to be successful. Remember the 3 click rule? Anything more than 3 clicks to get to what you’re looking for on a mobile device and you have lost your consumer. Its all about top of the deck status

3. Data Charges- linked to point 1. but this is pretty annoying. I for one do not use my GPRS/3G connection in Qatar for serious mobile browsing because its way too expensive. Back in South Africa though, where I was paying much less I was quite an active user.

4. Not enough compelling content out there- Many companies have entered the market, made their money and left. We saw content aggregators doing well for a while, but it seems that power is now shifting to a branded mobile strategy. Where brands are controlling their own mobile portals and going direct to consumers.

5. Cost of content- Users are very willing to use content if its free of charge. Having to to pay both for content & data is just not on.

6. Lack of successful integration of a Web 2.0 type strategy extended to mobile-With the new wave of web 2.0, I have not seen any successful integration of web 2.0 type service on mobile. We have seen MySpace announcing a new application under development, this could be interesting.

Alright those are all the limitations that I can think of now of the top of my head, if I think of anything else I’ll update the list or feel free to add to the list.

Now lets start connecting the dots and see how Google are dealing with the above limitations…

1. Rumours are going around about Google looking into getting the 700mhz spectrum both in the US & UK. Fantastic idea- If the telco’s are going to be a barrier to market, who needs them? We will just create our own network. Assuming the stories are true- this is a great move. Don’t forget Wifi, however to rely only on Wifi (like the iPhone in the UK) is not the best of strategies.

2. Google are developing something. Is it a new mobile platform to be loaded on existing devices or is it the gPhone? Either way, this is a great way to deal with discovery of your services. With a brand as big as Google, this makes sense. Google have also been working on their mobile search service, to help with the content discovery.

3. Again, linked back to point number 1. Needless to say if Google have their own network and own handset the sky is the limit as to the possibilities. Another interesting thing is the launch of AdSense for mobile recently by google and the filing of a patent for mobile advertising. This could lead to subsidised costs for end user.

4. Google have been working hard at getting their mobile search functionality going. This added to the mobile version of YouTube that will be coming out. Will really help users in getting & finding some compelling content.

5. With the launch of AdSense for mobile & Google filing a patent for mobile advertising. This could pave the way for free content in exchange for advertising. Maybe or maybe not?

6. Lastly we have just seen Google acquiring Zingku, the new mobile social network platform. Zingku is supposed to allow users to “zing” content between their handsets and PC’s. Built around community this could be a good extension of the web 2.0 model of community to a mobile device. Google after all to have a pretty big community to build on.

That all said and done, if you connect all of these dots together its pretty clear that Google are looking at coming to market with something that should shake up the entire industry. I’m sure in the coming weeks and months we will see many more announcements coming out of Google. Now all we have to do is wait in anticipation to see the final image these dots will reveal once completely joined and coloured in.

Blyk Mobile Launches!

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Blyk Mobile have just launched their new MVNO in the UK. You can only join the network by invite only and its promising its subscribers free airtime and text services in exchange for them receiving adverts on their handsets. Blyk was founded by the former Nokia President, Ala-Pietila.

“We have spent the last year developing a unique, robust advertising content engine and whilst the technology we are using is incredibly advanced, the main premise of Blyk is driven by three basic principles–ease of use, interaction and relevance of the communications,” said former Nokia President, Ala-Pietila

This is quite an interesting move, to launch a telco that will be ad funded. Blyk has spent a few months on group studies and live user trials. Subscribers must agree to to answer profile questions and agree to ongoing SMS polling during their membership. This should provide very valuable data for potential advertisers to allow them to really reach their target audience.

In the past two weeks we have seen Google announcing Ad Sense for mobile and Nokia buying out Enpocket, a mobile advertising company. Yahoo and AOL Timewarner have also created some made for mobile advertising products.

“We believe that mobile advertising will be an important element in monetizing [consumer Internet] services for our customers and partners. Enpocket’s mature leading edge platform and people expertise are a strong fit with Nokia existing capabilities in the mobile advertising market,” said Tero Ojanperä, Nokia CTO

Personaly I think this could really be a defining moment in the mobile industry. People have been talking about mobile advertising and the potential it has, now for the first time we are seeing serious players entering the market with some very compelling products. If this could see users receiving free data usage, it would really be paving the way towards a true “convergence” of web 2.0 on mobile. Blyk seem to be going the right way with their MVNO, by building their users around “community” & “interaction”. Definitely a Web 2.0 sounding strategy.

Lets wait and see how this plays out in the market place.