Negroponte

The 4th International Conference on Broadband took place in Athens the 20 and 21 May 2009. Among the speakers was Nicholas Negroponte,who is the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit association. But what I would like more to emphasize on, is his speech that was so playful and wise, multicasting millions of bits to the audience. All of his netbooks that are sent and operate in the 3rd world countries are adjusted into the local dialects, each containing a capacity of 100 e-books, making even Microsoft to blush. In that way a small online library is created in the class, supporting different books exchange, ending up into an online innovative source of knowledge. But the most impressive, was his comment on Gb/sec broadaband speed compared to a book. 'A whole book transfers 10 million bits per hour, where the HD TV 10 million bits/sec'. Now, imagine, those two different scales and how much we can handle and where are we heading to in the future. Ofcourse there is no correlation, but how about being blown to 1 billion bits per sec in the near future which is the Gb speed? Its called the Ultrabroadband evolution. The online evolution is a fact, and we are at the point of no return, vast amount of information; more storage rooms, data centers and server farms will be demanded in the future, as the traditional books and newspapers will soon disappear. Anyways, I really enjoyed his speech, very active and intelligent speaker, with a high-tech attitude and philosophy. Definetely, one of the best speakers, I ever shaked hand and I recommend all of you to follow his project and the important humanitarian work he is accomplishing during the last years.

Speed

Cosmote, the leading mobile telephony Greek operator, announced first yesterday, the availability of the new mobile broadband technology, HSPA+ (High Speed Packet Access). It supports up to 21Mbps downlink and up to 5.8Mbps uplink. In the live company's network, the measurements showed a range of 'real' 15Mbps downlink.

I am just really wondering whether there is a real need, when other markets are still examining the 'go ahead', and some other developing markets are skipping it, simply visioning and experimenting LTE instead that will go beyond 100Mbps.

It seems like they are knocking on their competitor's doors, Vodafone and Wind that is time for a change, new investment and faster mobile Internet. Can they afford it?My personal opinion is that due to the geographic difficulties, when other markets will evolute to LTE in 5 years or so, HSPA+ will remain the king in Greece.

Cosmote is heavily promoting the new fast mobile service, as it is offering an extra free 2Gbps download capacity in any new business package. In that case the user enjoys in a monthly basis a download capacity of about 2,5Gbps in the same price or cheaper to Vodafone's Blackberry Storm 1,5Gbps program. Strategically, we are moving forward, satisfying a short term user's need, but with no significant plans for any further evolution to 100Mbps range mobile broadband speed. Market roomers and dicussions are giving HSPA+ a 10 years viability! The bottom line is that besides Web surfing and email, there arent to my knowledge any bandwidth-hungry mobile services developed or offered from Cosmote network/cloud. But perhaps again the previous common services would be more than enough for the user right now, as he is new in this mobile broadband experience.

The Greek Internet user likes speed, as he is getting used to a fast ADSL home connection and demands similar speeds on his mobile phone. But speed with no services adds only a small value to the operator's network, unless there is a short-term new services plan.

Well, lets wait and see the other player's reaction. Greece is a saturated market, with mobile diffusion of over 90%, thus speed could definetely differantiate an operator, but not that much if it happens to be the leading operator, that is already 10% ahead of second operator.

Yesterday, I attended the Greek Telecom regulator's -EETT - conference and Νicholas Negroponte's speech really stood out. A blog entry on the matter will be posted soon.

ExelixisNet news

ExelixisNet and Rockamedia LLC are forming a joint venture bringing new media services in the European market and developing countries, with active presence in the Greek market. We serve the content needs of different clients such as ISPs, Telecom operators, TV stations and other similar media players that are looking for high quality content to explore new sources of revenues into multiple screens. Rockamedia LLC, has over 25 years of experience licensing content with a specialty in music ans related entertainment and a strong network of content suppliers, complemented by ExelixisNet that specialized in client's needs analysis, new platforms and internet distribution solutions. Our main services are summarized in the following list:

• Accommodate the purchase of the selected programs for different sites
• Work with the client for the final delivery and content’s quality assurance
• Arrange the agreement/contract
• Help facilitate the client’s needs
• Support the client any time for issues with the current and future needs, ensuring that the most complex solutions will work flawlessly
• Applying deep industry expertise and relationships with licensing, rights management, to ensure smooth integration over a trust customer relationship
• Advising and helping the client optimizing the content’s usage


Currently, we are working with some clients in Greece, and we are planning for more, since we are gaining popularity and trust due to our high end services and marketing activities.

-E

webtv

The future of WebTV is still unknown, altough there are tons of ideas and imagination all over the market. The investors are lacking confidence, since they cannot inspire the advertisers and the business model is really poor so far, especially for small markets like Greece. On the other hand we shouldnt forget that the number of the surfers is increasing challenging the TV numbers, but perhaps the WebTV as an interent service needs some time to mature.


If you check the traffic patterns between entertainment and news sites, you will be surprised. A site like CNN is dominating the entertainment such as Joost and Hulu, where hulu that has high quality content is not available to Europe.

I have been already part of some lobbying around WebTV and the DTV evolution in Greece, but it needs some more time to see results or even some serious attempts. Due to the economic crisis, things are more difficult, since the investors are not willing to risk a cent, especially in uncertain bz planning that includes in most of the cases unknown WebTV advertising revenues.

-E

4G

After a few year of intensive research on my PhD thesis and the paper on the ITS conference, I managed with my advisor's assistance and feedback to submit a good portion of my research on 4G business scenarios with title "POTENTIAL SCENARIOS AND DRIVERS OF THE 4G EVOLUTION", as a full chapter to the book:
Fourth-Generation (4G) Wireless Networks: Applications and Innovations


Therefore, I am very excited for the result and the feedback.


Whoever wants to join me, from February 16 to February 21, I will attend the 3G Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

stay tuned
-E