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Monday, February 20, 2012

How far does it go, mate?

Geoff Varrall of RTT writes:

About 15,000 years ago some indigenous Northern Australians decided that they needed a more efficient way of talking to each other than just shouting a lot.

And blowing into a long cylindrical tube proved to be just what was needed and seriously useful fun – the dawn of the didgeridoo.

Trumpets and bagpipes were invented at about the same time. The ancient Greeks used the trumpet in battlefield communication to devastating effect.

The way you can tell that your didgeridoo is better than everyone else’s didgeridoo is to blow into it and see how far the sound goes.

So naturally when an Australian goes in to buy a mobile phone from a Telstra shop the first question is “how far does it go mate?”

And the answer is on the box.

Telstra tests phones in the laboratory and, if they perform well, they go off for a drive in the outback for some comparative testing.

If the phone works beyond the edge of the operator’s coverage map it gets a blue tick – it really is that simple – and we might well ask why other operators don’t do the same.

We have all got used to our phones working more or less anywhere at least for voice and text but getting decent data rates anywhere other than close in to a cell site is much more problematic.

Very few of us would even think about checking whether the phone we were buying had good radio performance – and actually we have no way of finding out until we start using the device and then we blame the network not the phone.

This would not matter if all phones worked equally well but they don’t. They all meet a basic conformance standard but the conformance tests don’t recreate real life conditions.

Most new phones including LTE phones are what are called ‘uplink limited’.

This means that the data rates and data reach (the distance from a base station where you can still get a data link) are constrained by the ability of the device to get useful RF energy out of the antenna.

If your phone gets hot it’s a pretty good indication that it’s working harder than it should be. That’s probably because it’s been crammed into an outer casing that looks great but is too small to allow the antenna to work efficiently.

In engineering terms the amount of efficiency or rather inefficiency can be described by measuring how much energy gets reflected back into the device rather than out of the device.

That’s not the sort of test you want to do in a shop but that’s not a reason to ask the right question, not ‘how fast does it go’ but ‘how far does it go’.

Britain is not Australia and we don’t have those big wide-open spaces but data reach, the distance from a base station where we can still get a data connection, is every bit as important as data rate.

The moral of the story is don’t buy a dud didgeridoo.

Geoff Varrall has just written a new book Making Telecoms Work - from technical innovation to commercial success published by John Wiley.

Given that we have 15000 years of telecoms history to draw upon, it’s amazing how many stupid decisions we still manage to make.

The book uses prior case study examples of technical and commercial success and failure to qualify present policy making in the industry.

The book is available from Amazon and can be ordered via the RTT book shop.

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Opinion Articles

Last week at The Fonecast: 17th October 2011

Mark Bridge writes:

Apple and Blackberry crumble. There, I’ve said it. Twitter’s favourite joke from the past seven days. The reality wasn’t so funny.

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Samsung Galaxy WiFi is the phone-less smartphone

Mark Bridge writes:

Samsung Electronics has announced the availability of the Galaxy WiFi multimedia device, with the 5-inch version available now and the 3.6-inch version due to arrive next month. Pricing is expected to start from £149.

Author: The Fonecast
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Handset manufacturer seeks mobile developer for mutually-rewarding relationship

Mark Bridge writes:

Call me naive or call me cynical - in either case you won’t be the first - but I was a little surprised to see a strong manufacturer presence at Droidcon UK last week. I’d assumed that manufacturers might be inclined to pick a popular operating system and then just start making devices.

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App developers can still make money from mobile advertising

Mark Bridge writes:

When I was a youngster, evangelists preached the gospel. Not the gospel according to Steve Jobs, Bart Simpson or Oprah Winfrey. The gospel of Jesus the Christ. That was all. That’s what the word meant.

In recent years, the word ‘evangelist’ has evolved to gain a wider meaning. We have Product evangelists. Customer evangelists. Developer evangelists. Technology evangelists. Even Word of Mouth evangelists (which sounds rather like being an ‘evangelism evangelist’, I reckon). Anyway, I’m sure you get the picture.

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iPhone 4S dismantled and photographed

Mark Bridge writes:

The Apple iPhone 4S launches in the UK today - but the self-repair chaps at iFixit.com have already acquired one and have disassembled it. Everything seems to be very much as expected, despite suggestions that Siri might provide distractions along the lines of “Number five is alive - no disassemble me!”

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