WiFi phones: look, will you just forget about hotspots?

Dean Bubley writes: "Look, all of you, will you just forget about hotspots for WiFi phones? It's irrelevant, a niche of a niche of a niche. Dual-mode phones are about using VoWLAN in the home and at work. Period. Everything else VoWLAN-related - hotspot, hotzone, plane, donkey, whatever - is noise. Secondary or tertiary - remind me again in 2009, and I might be persuaded to care. Sorry FON, T-Mobile, The Cloud, city WiFi evangelists, but unless I'm a top-1% prosumer enthusiast user, or a street-cleaner spending all day outdoors, it's an irrelevance."

Merrill Lynch: Time to pull plug on Mobile ESPN.

"Cohen and Kopelman estimated that 'ESPN Mobile will lure a mere 30,000 subscribers over the course of this financial year, well below their original estimate of 240,000. Along with the losses generated by a second Disney-branded phone service, ML expects that the Mouse will lose $135 million on its experiment in FY06.'"

Mobile business MVNOs trickling into the EM ecosystem.

"However, enterprise offerings from the carriers themselves tend to be relatively undifferentiated, focusing on reliable, 'high-speed' bandwidth, and PDA/smartphone and laptop connectivity sprinkled in with a few core integrated services such as mobile email and some business process applications such as field force and sales force automation. So there remains the potential for some innovative offerings to business customers, segmented into key niches by vertical industry, geography, company size, application type, or offering bundled (or in the future, truly converged) fixed/mobile solutions, device management, billing and security services, and business-focused content... We also expect to see more managed services offered by MVNOs for device management, security, and application management. While companies like Fiberlink do some of this today, they are mostly concerned with secure remote access and do not get involved with ongoing management of particular applications, let alone with device management for handhelds."

Nortel + Microsoft = Unified Communications.

"Microsoft is teaming up with Nortel, to integrate voice, e-mail and video, reports the Seattle Times. Last month Microsoft unveiled a roadmap for new unified communications with software such as Microsoft Office... Nortel's IMS system is likely to be a key piece of the Microsoft deal. It enables a subscriber to launch a video conference during a voice conversation, or access a personalized Video-on-Demand service subscription not just from their home TV, but online from a laptop, a hotel room or from a mobile phone, for example... Microsoft and Nortel will be competing with the likes of IBM and Cisco in the unified communications arena. Nokia and Siemens entered a carrier infrastructure joint venture last month."

Red Bend Software signs agreement with NEC.

"Red Bend Software... has concluded an agreement with NEC Corporation of Japan to install Red Bend's vCurrent Mobile FOTA updating technology on NEC's mobile phones. NEC will begin shipping mobile devices with the Red Bend update client in the fall of 2006... This new agreement between Red Bend and NEC follows an earlier agreement between Red Bend and Sharp Corporation, announced in October 2005... Red Bend provides firmware update technology to most of the world's largest mobile phone manufacturers including BenQ Mobile, LG Electronics, Sony Ericsson and others."

NetCom licenses Synchronica's SyncML Gateway to provide back-up and restore.

"Synchronica... has licensed its SyncML Gateway mobile synchronization software to Norwegian mobile operator NetCom ASA. The agreement allows NetCom, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the TeliaSonera group with over 1.4 million GSM subscribers, to offer customers a robust back-up and restore facility for personal data stored on mobile devices."

Embarq selects Visage Mobile as MVNO enabler.

"Embarq today announced it has chosen Visage Mobile, the leading enabler of private-label wireless services, to provide the wireless operations platform for EMBARQ's wireless product offer that launched in June. Key elements of Visage's support include order provisioning, billing, carrier interfaces and customer care systems."

HP unveils revolutionary wireless chip.

"HP just developed a Grain-sized chip that could be attached to almost any object and contain almost limitless amounts of information... The experimental chip, developed by the 'Memory Spot' research team at HP Labs, is a memory device based on CMOS (a widely used, low-power integrated circuit design) and about the size of a grain of rice or smaller (2 mm to 4 mm square), with a built-in antenna. The chips could be embedded in a sheet of paper or stuck to any surface, and could eventually be available in a booklet as self-adhesive dots."

The Tyranny of the SIM Card.

Dean Bubley writes "I've regularly been using the term 'Tyranny of the SIM Card' in meetings and at conferences for the past few months. I'm fast being converted to the idea that the SIM is a relic of the 1990s, and deserves to play little (if any) role in the future of mobile telephony, except for the most basic prepay low-ARPU mobile-only unconverged services."

Mobile users face knotty security issues.

"'Wireless seems easier than it is,' says Vinnie Greaves or Resurgen. 'If you look [closely] into wireless, it’s the scariest thing in the world.'"

Cingular joins OMTP.

"The Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) makes recommendations for handset and interface design based on the needs of carriers. The recommendations tend to focus on creating a friendlier and more secure experience for users, but also include technological requirements as well... T-Mobile, Sprint and Cingular now participate in the OMTP as do Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson."

What a waste.

"The only explanation I can think of is that a high proportion of the non-responders have been unable to get their phone to connect - possibly as their phone has the wrong settings. This failure of the mobile industry to make phones work 'out of the box' has been a constant refrain of mine since I started blogging and indeed, in many of the occasional articles I wrote before that. I thought that the situation had improved of late, but maybe it hasn’t at all." [read the post and related comments for more insight]

related: Never Underestimate the Ingenuity of Fools

"Cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) communications" coming your way.

"Cingular, Sprint, Verizon and Orange are increasingly interested in offering 'cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.' It turns virtually any object into a networked object, via mobile telephony... M2M involves the use of cellular communications to connect remote sensing and monitoring devices to central networks wirelessly. It is often used for industrial process monitoring, usage metering and security applications... In essence, this would give the cellular carriers more enterprise data traffic to go along with their voice traffic -- and with less churn."

related: Strong Growth Forecast for Cellular Machine-to-Machine Communications
"How does this kind of M2M work? Consider utility meters that communicate their measurements to the power or gas company via cellular calls. Think of temperature and pressure monitoring of industrial equipment, particularly in the field. Think of pipeline flow monitoring. Some sensors can help optimize performance of equipment on the factory floor."

High profile virtual operators floundering.

"Mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) don't own a physical cellular network. Rather, they rent and resell spectrum from 'real' wireless operators as voice and data services. The most high-profile recent MVNO appeared when The Walt Disney Company launched the family-friendly Disney Mobile service - with tight parental controls - over the Sprint PCS network during the middle of last month. Some other, slightly older - but also high-profile MVNOs - could be in trouble, however... As of April, MVNOs accounted for around 5 percent of the total U.S. mobile market, but that number could rise to as high as 10 to 20 percent in the next few years, according to Gartner analysts."

ZTE and Bitfone partner.

"Bitfone Corporation... today announced that ZTE Corporation, China's largest listed domestic telecom equipment supplier and the fastest growing global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, has selected Bitfone's Device Management Client Suite to fulfill its device requirements from domestic operators, such as China Mobile, and operators worldwide."

MVNO: Easy come, easy go.

"Chalk another on the board for the MVNO fallout. EasyMobile ... is closing its service in the Netherlands after just 9 months. Well, as they say–easy come, easy go ... It’s an indictator of how crowded the MVNO market in certain markets has become, and could be a warning sign for the U.S., with its current MVNO gold rush mentality."

And the wireless walled garden comes tumbling down.

Sharon Armbrust of Jupiter Research writes: "The easier it gets for customers to replicate their internet experience on their mobiles, the sooner they will be clamoring to get out from under the not too green thumbs of their gardener carriers."

Earthlink's WiFi phone service.

"Earthlink plans to start selling WiFi-only phones starting in the fourth quarter of this year... In related news, Motorola has won a contract with TeliaSonera in Denmark to deploy its UMA solution (Unlicensed Mobile Access), for the operator's planned UMA service launch in the second half of 2006. UMA provides cellular mobility as well as better, cheaper coverage inside the home using a Wi-Fi connection. In addition, users will have a seamless mobility using a single device, a single number, contacts book, voicemail and billing."