Following Orange, Vodafone announces plans to sell the iPhone in the UK

Oh wait, it was yesterday, adding to my point about loads happening in the mobile world recently. But, why did Vodafone not jump straight to the gun yesterday and tell the world of its deal with the iPhone?

The answer? Strategy. I think that both companies could have had the iPhone signed to their networks for quite some time, but neither one knew about the other. Apple probably then gave the go-ahead to both companies to announce the deal, but Vodafone may have had suspicion and held back a day. By holding back a day they were able to see Orange announce their deal but more importantly the time-scale that Orange have put on it.

How does this matter though? Well it’s really, really simple – Vodafone have said their iPhone will launch later and by doing this, it gives them time to see how Orange price the device and be able to adjust their accordingly. Cunning little plan and even if they did know about Orange’s deal and vice versa, this little strategy still stands.

So what now for consumers? Well, much, much more leverage and an even bigger price war erupting. Orange will probably now be very conscious about the fact Vodafone will be basing their iPhone pricing on Orange’s, and may compensate for that by cutting costs even more so, pressuring Vodafone into either not being able to outbid, or to have to match their plans.

This is a really good thing for business customers though. Vodafone’s network already carries millions of business users. Vodafone has stated that it is using the iPhone primarily for current customers, thus the iPhone could begin being used in many more businesses – something which Apple will not be complaining about one little bit.

If you’re interested in getting the iPhone on Vodafone’s network, then visit their website and register your interest. If not, then just sit back and enjoy the scenery:

Lastly, there’s the shock news today of Orange announcing the sale of the iPhone in the UK, thus ending O2’s exclusivity deal, which, in turn feeds back into the first point I made. With Orange set to become the biggest mobile operator in the UK, Apple have seized the opportunity to finally bring the iPhone to mass market. It doesn’t stop there though. Rumours predicted that the network who wins the iPhone contract will only be able to sell the 3G model, though Orange confirmed today that they’d be selling the newer 3Gs, too.

Great news for me as I’m a current Orange customer, but what will it actually bring to consumers looking to buy the device?

• A lower entry price – I’m very hopeful of this, in fact it’s something I’m almost certain of. Considering Orange’s network coverage isn’t as good as O2’s, along with their reputation, they’re going to really have to try to reel people in from O2.
• Good deals for current Orange customers - I’m currently an Orange customer and I’m quite satisfied. I’m also pretty certain that Orange will offer very good upgrade options to their current customer base – they always do. Thing is, if they don’t offer me a good upgrade path, I’ll just threaten to switch to O2, which brings me onto my next point.
• Leverage - Because there’ll be two companies offering the iPhone it can finally be competitive. This means that both O2 and Orange are going to be fighting for your business. If you’re any good at bargaining then you can use this to your advantage, especially if you’re a business customer.

The funny thing is, I saw this coming well before the rumours of early this year. The first sign that sent alarm bells ringing in my head was the fact that O2 had signed the Palm Pre to their network.

I didn’t think that Apple would be too comfy with the operator that is exclusively selling their phone to go on to sell their phone’s biggest enemy, a so called iPhone killer.

The second set of alarm bells were rang when my local O2 store in Eldon Square, Newcastle revamped it’s shop. Instead of using the extra space they’d created to demo the new iPhone, they actually cut the amount of iPhones on the bench and replaced them with other smartphone competitors.

I think by these two actions, O2 signalled that they were getting ready to lose exclusivity on the most popular smartphone in the world. By building a bigger portfolio of other smartphones, such as Blackberrys, they began positioning themselves, ready for the change.

I think the biggest loser of this weeks news is Vodafone from one perspective and O2 from another.

The reason I think O2 have lost out is obvious, they lost the iPhone and are now going to be in a constant price war with Orange over the iPhone. Orange are at the advantage as O2 have already set their prices.

But why Vodafone? Well, in a way I feel a little sorry for Vodafone, who we’re once a massive power in the mobile market. They have a really good product portfolio and a really good network, but they’re being pushed into last place by other networks who now carry the iPhone. It’s a bit of a kick while they’re down really, being pushed into last place and being the last of the mobile giants not to offer the iPhone.

Hopefully their rebranding will serve them well and Apple may see more value in that brand an consequently contract it to sell it’s phone.

So when can we expect the iPhone to turn Orange? Well they said by the end of the year, which is another 3 months. Realistically though, they want to be releasing it in time for Christmas sales, which start at around about mid-November.

Whatever happens, I’ll be getting one asap, I’ve already registered my interest and you can too, just visit www.orange.co.uk and follow the links.

Mobile Broadband for a whole week, sponsored by Vodafone.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, get ready for the second leg of my mobile broadband experiment. If you aren’t familiar with what I’m taking about, I’ll explain once again. Last time I did this, it was to see whether an internet junkie such as myself can use mobile broadband exclusively as a primary internet connection or a week. The first leg ended a few weeks back, and this is now the second leg. If you want, you can read the posts below to find out a little bit more.

This time I’m not just doing it for one, but two whole weeks. Last time was a very big learning experience, getting to grips with what sorts of things the connection could handle, and also getting used to the things that it couldn’t. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to write up a full report, but this time I will do – promise.

Instead of reporting back daily, I’ll do it whenever I can. The thing I found about last time is there were days where nothing really interesting happened in the area of mobile broadband, it also stopped me posting my views on other areas of interest because all of my time was taken up reporting on the broadband.

There is a slight challenge this time: I go back to college, which could put some restraint on whether or not I can use it. Last time I had a teacher who wasn’t too pleased with me using it. Hopefully this time they’ll understand that it’s for a scientific reason and allow me to continue.

As with last time, it’s sponsored by Vodafone and I’d like to make the point that it’s not a biased report. I’d been asked a few times if I was giving it praise just so I could use it and the fact remains that I’m not. It’s started again today, so keep your ears peeled for more info as it comes in. As with last time, wish me luck!

Low signal? Stop. Smart management of the connection, cuts off bad connections. Image © XiXiDu

Well for the pat few days I haven’t updated, though there is a reason for it. Firstly I haven’t been on the internet very much for a few days so there wouldn’t have been very much to talk about and secondly, when I have managed to get onto the net, my broadband hasn’t been able to hold up the connection very well.

As far as I can figure there’s a reason for this, too. The signal that I’ve been exposed to for the past few days has been very limited, below 10% in most cases, because of this it’s likely that there will be a lot of data being lost in transmission and therefore the broadband, being smart, figures that there’s no point in trying to maintain a connection where pieces of data are going to be lost – no connection is better than a faulty connection.

On a technical note for people who are interested, when I was in a Skype call the other day, I brought up the technical call info. When I’m exposed to a low connection or to packet loss, Skype starts working in TCP mode, meaning it verifies that the data being sent is being sent correctly – it stays in this mode until a good, healthy connection is established, then switches to UDP. Sounds a bit funny, but it makes sense. If Skype can establish that there’s a good connection in place, there’s no need to verify that all data is being sent and received, if there’s a bad connection, it’s probably a better idea to try and make sure that the data being sent is being received – thus boost all around call quality.

Today is my last day of the experiment until the 7th September, when I’ll be trying the broadband for two weeks, instead of just one. I’ll post up a full report on the week’s experiment tomorrow.

I’m not sure whether it’s a network mechanism or not. What I mean by this is, because I’ve been a very heavy user (an hours worth of Skype calling and I’d uploaded 1GB of data) the network might have measures in place to make sure the weight of dragging me along didn’t affect other users. This could make a lot of sense, by cutting off and slowing down heavy users at peak times, you encourage them to use their home internet or not to use it at all.

Having said this, I did manage to get a few successful connections that stayed open until I myself closed them. I didn’t really perform any really heavy tasks yesterday, simply because the speed and availability wasn’t always there.

What was slightly annoying was the fact that as I was trying to translate Pokemon Platinum from Japanese to English, my connection kept dropping therefore I couldn’t access Google Translate to find out that it doesn’t know how to translate the text I was inputting. For anyone who didn’t get that, what I basically said was, “don’t use Google Translate to translate Japanese to English – especially if you’re using a slow connection, you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

On the whole, day three was a slight disappointment, both in trying to translate Pokemon and using my mobile broadband, maybe it was fate having a bit of a laugh at me for saying that it was going well a day earlier, or maybe it was just a bad day for mobile broadband, we’ll never know. Let’s hope that tomorrow gives me some better results.

As the day moved on I had to go to the Silverlink retail park in North Shields to get a bit of reading material. Silverlink is home to a Borders store, and most Borders shops have a nice little Starbucks in there – where better to do a bit of public browsing. The signal in Starbucks was low at best, but it didn’t really slow me down. I had a look on the Ofcom Sitefinder again to find out where the closest masts were and that sort of explained why the signal was low, take a look:

After my trek to Borders, I went into the centre of Newcastle. While I was in there I had a nice chat with the Store Manager, Stuart. He told me that in most Vodafone shops, they have a Vodafone Signal Booster, which takes the Vodafone signal and boosts it. They’re available to buy in the home, too. Just to check that it was true, I went and sat outside the shop and surprise, surprise I have Optimal HSDPA+ signal.

Although I noticed a massive speed increase, speed tests still said I was going at only 0.2Mbps – bull in my opinion.

So, onto the tasks that I performed in the day:

• Had a video call on Skype
• Downloaded Fedora
• Streamed Music
• Public place browsing

Skype Calling

The call quality was really good, probably the same as on a normal connection. Didn’t really disconnect much, which was also a plus.

Download Fedora
Because of the nature of mobile broadband, I had to download a download manager to accomplish this task, because if I hadn’t, then if I disconnected half way through then I’d have to start from the beginning. Took me a healthy 2 hours and 20 minutes of 690MB glory – I also disconnected once during the download – good job I could resume.

Streamed Music
The same as yesterday but using a different protocol – Spotify. This experience was seamless – hardly any buffer time.

Public Place Browsing
I used my connection in a coffee shop – took a few connection attempts, but once I was on it was quite a pleasant experience.

So what have I learned today? Well for one, bandwidth consuming tasks can be achieved if there’s a good connection and that if you do opt to buying mobile broadband, a download manager is pretty essential – the one I use is called Speed Download for Mac, which actually does provide boosted speed.

- PS, sorry this is a day late, got slightly delayed!

For a first day venturing into the land of the mobile went rather well, I could complete most tasks without fail and without really having to wait for pages to load. Speed tests indicated that I wasn’t really browsing too fast and said that my latency was quite high, but to be honest I didn’t really notice while I was browsing.

The first few connection attempts to the network lasted only a few minutes and sometimes didn’t even connect, after unplugging it and plugging it back in, it found a juicy 3G connection and remained connected for 5 hours – I was the one who ended the connection this time.

Mobile feels like 10Mb fiber at a busy time in the day

For anyone who is reading this and wants a flavour of what using mobile broadband feels like, imagine you’re on a 10Mb connection from Virgin Media and it’s 7PM, everyone has just got home from work and have gone online, while all the kids in your area have decided to play WoW. That’s honestly how it feels – just like a normal connection that is being strained a little.

If I’m honest, I did use a little bit more bandwidth hungry applications today than I usually would to see just how it would hold up. Here’s a nice little log of the things that I did:

• Internet Connection Sharing
• Streaming music from last.fm
• Watched an episode of Inu Yasha on Youtube
• Uploaded images and files to a website
• Began to download Fedora

Let’s go into each in a bit more detail, shall we?

Internet Connection Sharing
This is a really cool feature on my Mac, it lets you share a connection from one port, to another. It’s a bit like having a virtual router running on your computer. When I did this, I made my wireless card broadcast the Vodafone connection, so my iPod could use the mobile broadband internet – genius!

Streaming Music
Once I was online with my iPod, I used the last.fm app to stream some music. The app was very quick, only taking a few seconds to buffer tracks and playback was perfect. I couldn’t tell I was on mobile broadband.

Youtube Videos
This was when I really started to try and test the limits of it, while I was listening to music from last.fm I loaded up a Youtube video on my laptop. The video initially was a little bit jerky, but after pausing it for a few seconds, letting it load and playing it, they playback was perfect – no jitters.

Website Editing
Being a web consultant I have clients to attend to. One rang me up today and said he had a small problem on his website. I uploaded a few images and changed a few files directly on the server using Coda. This felt just like using normal broadband, there was hardly any waiting involved at all.

Large File Download
In need of a new home FTP server, I began to download the heavyweight 690MB file that is Fedora. Safari reckoned it was going to take 4 hours, but unfortunately I didn’t have that amount of time as I had to go and see a client. Consequently I cancelled the download 100MB in.

Something very strange happened today and it was something I was completely unaware of until I checked my usage logs. They indicate that I uploaded 1.2GB of data and downloaded 242MB. I can’t for the life of me understand where that 1.2GB has come from but I can assume that it was some background process as I had a lot of applications running at once. Any guesses anyone?

To conclude the first day was very tolerable, apart from a few slow downs at my clients house, speeds remained constant. Today is going to hold a few more wonders, such as browsing in a public place and some more heavyweight music streaming. I’ll post up the results tomorrow morning!

P.S. Unfortunately I didn’t get into the centre of Newcastle yesterday, but I’ll try to be tomorrow!

Ofcom provide a mini map of base stations in any given area.

Today is my starting day and what better to do, than to find out where I can get a good signal around my area. Most carriers provide some sort of coverage map on their website, but in my experience they’re not always accurate. So what other tools are there available on the internet to find out how strong your signal is going to be, and whether you’ll achieve 3G speeds or not?

Back in 2001, the UK Government commissioned an online site finder tool. This tool allows you to locate all of the base stations in a given area. By doing this, you can see just how far away you are from a mast and then figure out by common sense what sort of service you’ll be expecting to get. The tool is now operated by telecommunications regulator Ofcom and can be found on their website, or by searching Google for “ofcom site finder”.

I stayed up last night before the experiment began to take time to see where all the Vodafone masts are located within Newcastle City Centre and the outskirts, I then put them all on one lovely Google map and saved it for future reference. The map can be seen below, it’s public, so anyone on Vodafone who lives in Newcastle – take note!

View Vodafone Hotspot Locations in a larger map

So, now that I know where I can go around Newcastle I shall be off to investigate and I’ll post my findings up tonight.  Catch you later!

I received a package yesterday morning, I’m quite used to packages because I do order quite a bit off the net, so it wasn’t really that much of a surprise – name, address and a little blue sticker on it. I knew it was something I’d been waiting a while for, my dongle.

There’s only 5 things in the box it comes in:

1. The dongle itself
2. An extension cable, so if you’re like me and your USB ports are arranged silly you can still have two things in at once.
3. A user manual
4. A Safety Manual
5. A disc for Windows Users containing drivers.

It was quite an easy install really, pop the modem into the Mac, run an installer and then badaboom! I’m done, though I expect on Windows you need to put the CD in, instead. I did need to get used to it a bit before I start my experiment properly, so I decided that I’d have a quick play on it and see what it’s like. It wasn’t working at first, but a restart of the Mac gave it the kick it needed – looking back, the installer did say it wouldn’t work without a restart.

First impressions: the connection itself seems rather fast, zipping around the internet as if I’m on normal broadband; the connection does drop a little bit and when it clouds over I only get GPRS signal; speed tests indicate that it’s going VERY slow, but frankly, I think it’s quite the opposite with speed tests saying that I’m going at 25KBps and downloads peaked at 172KBps.

To see the images of the day, just look below, all with captions and titles – lovely. The experiment starts on Monday, so wish me luck!

P.S. Sorry for the image quality.