UK cable provider Virgin Media has started rolling out Wi-Fi access points in the stations of the London Underground subway system. It says it will open up this network to other operators on a wholesale basis later in the year. According to the Financial Times newspaper, Virgin has approached Vodafone and O2, plus ISPs BT and TalkTalk. ‘We expect capacity to exceed the infrastructure capabilities,’ Andrew Barron, Virgin’s COO, told the paper. ‘There will be substantial funding implications.’
India’s Bharti Airtel is continuing its African expansion, revealing plans to spend $25m in Malawi on a 3G network and on deploying mobile money service Airtel Money. Malawi has a population of around 13.9m but mobile penetration of only 29%. Bharti first entered Africa through the $10.7bn acquisition of Zain’s African assets in 16 countries. Airtel Africa now operates GSM networks in 20 countries. In September, it set aside $100m to set up a subsidiary in Rwanda.
A senior US House member conducting a probe into potential national security threats from equipment sourced from Huawei and ZTE suggested that the Chinese government may subsidize their gear. Representative Mike Rogers suggested that China may be subsidizing network equipment ‘so it can be multiple times cheaper than any local competitor’. The enquiry is looking into whether the gear can be used to steal information or ‘establish the ability to do cyber-attacks’.
Malaysia’s regulator, the MCMC, is close to finalizing the detail for its forthcoming 2.6GHz spectrum allocation. It wants to ensure ‘sufficient cooperation among service providers’ in terms of network sharing, MCMC chairman Datuk Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi told local reporters. He wants no more than two or three shared 4G networks, although spectrum will still be allocated to individual cellcos directly. The spectrum will be made available from the beginning of next year, although test licences have already been allocated.
Touchscreen technology developer FlatFrog Laboratories has closed a €20m funding round led by Intel Capital. By using algorithms to track light travelling inside the cover glass of a screen, FlatFrog’s Planar Scatter Detection (PSD) technology can detect hundreds of simultaneous touches and drags on the screen. The PSD technology is based on optics instead of traditional capacitive electronic fields and can take input from bare or gloved fingers, passive styluses and many other objects such as pencil erasers. Flatfrog was founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneurs Ola Wassvik and Christer Fahraeus. The company holds more than 60 patent families in optical wave-guide touch technology.
Mobile operators are critical to achieving the broadband coverage goals of the European Union’s Digital Agenda, according to a report from Analysys Mason. The Agenda targets universal broadband of at least 30Mbps by 2010 for the region. ‘We believe that the 30Mbps coverage target is attainable, since mobile operators are expected to deliver 90% population coverage in a commercially viable basis in every member state,’ the report states. The remainder of the coverage in remote areas will need to be supplied by satellite, and the report calls on supporting the European Space Agency to develop and launch such capacity. Wired access will remain the best option to hit the target of 50% coverage with 100Mbps services by 2020, says the report. That target is likely to be hit by only six states by 2010, the analysts believe – Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Portugal.
Samsung has increased its commitment to Marvell’s turnkey silicon, adopting the PXA968 and PXA920H solutions. The Samsung Galaxy Xcover, a rugged device, will use the PXA968, a single-chip W-CDMA offering. ‘Pre-certified silicon platforms give mobile device makers confidence that their products will operate with ease on critical carrier networks, ultimately enabling them to bring new devices to market more efficiently,’ commented Tim Bajarin, president of analyst firm Creative Strategies. The PXA968 includes an 800MHz/1GHz chipset, which supports HSPA, GSM/EDGE, applications processing and 720p encode/decode of multimedia content. The platform also includes Marvell’s PM8607 integrated audio and power management and RF830 W-CDMA RF transceiver. Additionally, it incorporates the Avastar 88W8787 Wi-Fi system-on-chip (SoC), with 802.11n, Bluetooth 3.0 and FM. The PXA968 runs Android Gingerbread, with availability of the Ice Cream Sandwich and Dual SIM Dual Standby (DSDS) by the second half of 2012.
Greek OTE wants to sell its Bulgaian subsidiaries, Globul and Germanos Telecom, to help pay down debts that will be maturing over the next couple of years. Globul is Bulgaria’s second largest mobile network by subscribers, while Germanos Telecom is a local retail chain. OTE is itself 40% owned by Deutsche Telecom.
Vodafone Hutchison Australia is nearing completion of its HSPA+ network roll-out and plans to launch LTE next year. The mobile operator said that it is on schedule to complete its Au$1bn investment and two-year roll-out of its new mobile network by the end of this year. This includes the introduction of dual-carrier HSPA+ in the 850MHz band. The network roll-out is complete in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania and Canberra. Work in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne started recently, and Vodafone will complete the upgrades to all sites on the Eastern Seaboard later this year. The HSPA+ service should be available from September, and Vodafone plans to start a LTE roll-out next year. The new network agreement with Optus should also expand network coverage to 96% of the Australian population from April 2013.
Nokia is to close its branded retail chain in Russia and will sell devices online and through partners. The firm has operated 57 branded shops in Russia, of which 44 belong to Nosimo and 13 to Store Retail Group.
Uzbekistan’s regulator, UsACI, has warned Russian-owned cellco MTS Uzbekistan that it may revoke its operating licence ‘ it cites poor quality of service, though the operator is also currently under investigation for fraud and does not have authorization for its 48 base stations.
Engineers from Duke University and the University of Arizona have developed a camera with the potential to capture up to 50-gigapixels of data with a resolution over a 120 degree horizontal field that is five times better than 20/20 human vision. This was achieved by synchronizing 98 lower resolution cameras in a single device and although the camera is desktop unit much of this is processing electronics with scope for integration. The research team reckons handheld gigapixel cameras could be in use by consumers within five years.
A minimum set of requirements for roaming between public safety networks and commercial cellular services has been outlined in the US. Roaming onto 2G, 3G, LTE and trusted Wi-Fi systems is addressed in a plan for an LTE-based nationwide public safety network. The document was drawn up by the Technical Advisory Board for First Responder Interoperability and will be submitted to the new body overseeing the project, FirstNet. The latter’s board will not sit until August, so in the meantime, the FCC has issued an ‘order of transmittal’ for the federal technology agency, the NTIA. The minimum technical requirements are an input to the RFPs that will eventually be issued by FirstNet for vendor bids and contracts. The interoperability board said it aimed to create equal levels to those available in commercial networks, and added that the new system must fully embrace the technologies, standards and best practices used by commercial service providers. To support roaming, a device for the public safety band (700MHz Band 14) will have to support at least one additional 3GPP or 3GPP2 frequency band. One interesting point in the recommendations is that there should be different grades of service in different parts of the country due to budgetary constraints, a shortage of base station sites in remote areas, and other factors that ‘may make it difficult to provide a uniform grade of service, especially in the early years’.
T-Mobile USA’s proposed sale of its wireless towers has attracted interest from major tower operators American Tower and Crown Castle, according to Bloomberg, as well as unnamed private equity firms. Analysts have said such a sale could net $2bn to $3bn for TMo’s parent Deutsche Telekom.
ZTE has unveiled its first single-chip LTE smartphone, the Grand X LTE (T82), which it plans to launch in Asia and Europe during the third quarter. The handset uses Qualcomm’s single-chip MSM8960, with a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU. It runs Android 4.0 and is Wi-Fi capable.