McGinnis said that it will soon offer a similar wallet to customers of its other prepaid brand — Virgin Mobile — and it is considering bringing it to the main Sprint brand as well. Sprint also plans to build on Wallet’s initial batch of services, to create what McGinnis calls “a virtual bank” for its customers.

Today, Boost’s Mobile Wallet can transfer funds between accounts, pay e-bills, wire money to physical locations and, with the help of prepaid Visa card, you can make purchases and withdraw money from ATMs anywhere Visa is accepted. Soon Boost’s wallet will let you scan physical checks, depositing funds directly into your wallet account.

But McGinnis said there are other services in the works. He didn’t provide specific deals, but it’s not hard to imagine features like virtual checking accounts or peer-to-peer payments such as those offered by PayPal, Venmo and now Google and Square.

Sprint doesn’t want to become bank itself — that would put it under the regulatory scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Treasury, which Sprint wants to avoid, McGinnis said. Instead, Sprint is working with Wipit, a mobile payments provider focusing on people without bank accounts and credit cards, to provide the financial services infrastructure.

“From the customer’s point of view, it’s kind of a bank in the sky that is Boost backed,” McGinnis said.

Sprint’s wallet is unique because it focuses on what the financial industry calls the unbanked – households that deal almost entirely in cash. Most other wallet and financial services apps are linked to bank accounts, credit and debit cards. This approach to financial services has had a huge impact in other parts of the world and has made Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom the biggest bank in East Africa.

The U.S. isn’t Kenya, of course, but according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study (pdf), 8.2 percent of U.S. households have no bank account whatsoever, while an additional 20.1 percent of U.S. households have a bank account but also make use of alternative financial services such as check cashing and payday loan companies.

Of the major providers, Sprint is in an ideal position to serve those customers. People who rely primarily on cash naturally gravitate towards prepaid mobile phones, and Sprint is one of the most aggressive carriers when it comes to prepaid. It runs three prepaid brands (Boost, Virgin and Assurance Wireless) and offers pay-as-you-go options on its primary Sprint brand as well. At the end of the first quarter it had 16 million customers on prepaid plans.

While Mobile Wallet’s initial focus will be on those unbanked customers, McGinnis said there is a lot of potential for the app for customers who have traditional bank accounts, especially as Sprint and Wipit add new features to the app. That’s one of the reasons McGinnis thinks Mobile Wallet will be a good fit for Sprint’s contract customers.

Sprint already is working with Google on mobile payments, but McGinnis pointed out that Google Wallet is really a point-of-sale transaction technology linking to credit cards or bank accounts. Meanwhile, Sprint’s Wallet is intended to be a replacement for or a supplement to those accounts and payments cards — just without the actual bank.

“There’s nothing broken with plastic in retail today,” McGinnis said. Sprint, he added, just wants to make that plastic available to more people.

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Acme is the world-leader in a specialized bit of gear known as the session border controller (SBC), which – as its name implies – sits on the borders of where networks meet, managing the VoIP and multimedia signaling traffic that pass between them.  Originally, the SBC controlled the voice sessions between operators, but Acme expanded its role in the enterprise, playing traffic cop between business and carrier networks.

Acme now has SBCs installed on the edges of 1900 carrier and enterprise networks and claims 89 of the world’s largest communications service providers as customers. Though Oracle is most certainly keen on Acme’s enterprise business, one of the biggest growth opportunities for the SBC is in the mobile operator 4G networks. As carriers gradually roll switch over from old 2G voice systems to 4G VoIP (using a technology called voice over LTE), they will deploy SBCs to move billions of VoIP sessions between networks.

But Oracle may be planning to take advantage of Acme’s relationships just as much as its products. Oracle already sells business and operational support system software to carriers. With Acme at its side it might be able to upsell them on its computing portfolio as well. Here’s LightReading’s take on the deal:

Oracle clearly sees Acme as a way to develop deeper ties with the [carrier/service provider] community and leverage Acme’s installed base to introduce its range of software and IT products, especially as cloud service architectures and Big Data analytics strategies take hold in the telecom sector.

It will be interesting to see if Oracle’s investment will now spark a run on other SBC makers like Sonus Network or Edgewater Networks.

Oracle HQ photo courtesy of Flickruser Peter Kaminski

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Tel Aviv-based eVolution Networks revealed its first customer this week, announcing that pan-Caribbean mobile operator Digicel is adopting its Smart Energy Solution (SES), a set of technologies that allows a carrier to power down its towers when not in use.

It sounds like a simple idea, but it’s not an easy one to implement. Mobile networks are designed to deliver their full capacity at a moment’s notice in order to handle the unpredictable patterns of the cellphone-wielding public. Consequently most base stations remain at full power whether it’s rush hour or the wee hours of the morning.

eVolution’s technology constantly monitors, analyzing its radio coverage characteristics as well as daily traffic patterns. Based on that information it decides which base stations in which places can safely be powered down at night or during other off-peak hours without sacrificing coverage. As traffic patterns change, SES changes the mix of cells staying online and off.

Though Digicel runs networks throughout the Caribbean, Central America and in the Pacific Rim, its Jamaica network was the first to get the upgrade. Digicel began testing the platform in early 2012, and fully activated network-wide in October. After three months of operations, Digicel estimated eVolution cut its radio network energy consumption by 23 percent (though eVolution said it can boost savings up to 35 percent in some cases). Digicel believes it can save up to $1.4 million annually in electricity costs, by reducing its power consumption by 2.8 GWh while keeping 1.5 kilotons of CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.

In the last few years, all of the radio vendors have been prioritizing energy consumption. They’ve drastically lowered the wattage of their base stations, and have introduced “sleep mode” features that allow them to power down when traffic is low. But it’s going to take decades for that newer infrastructure to replace the old 2G and 3G networks – some of which are over a decade old – that populate the world today. eVolution certainly isn’t going to lack for business if carriers start seriously prioritizing their energy footprints.

eVolution, now two years old, has raised $4 million from Breslau Capital Partners. While Digicel is the first carrier to commercially implement its technology, the startup said it is in talks with several other large Tier carriers worldwide, all of whom are suffering from high energy bills.

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“Adding a 4G mobile broadband product with Clearwire gives our customers new connectivity options and allows Kajeet to expand our mobile service offerings so that we continue to lead in the creation and delivery of mobile solutions that are great for kids, families and educators,” CEO and founder Daniel Neal said in Kajeet’s announcement.

Kajeet is already selling mobile broadband dongles and hotspots through its education arm, which provides schools with devices and connectivity for learning purposes. It may now be planning to bring those devices over to its consumer-facing carrier business, which for now is focused on selling feature phones, smartphones and tablets.

Backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kajeet differentiates itself from the competition by offering parental control and management software with every device. Parents can define the phone numbers allowed to call the device, restrict usage by time and track their kinds using GPS. Modems are typically open connections to the internet, but Kajeet has developed similar management software for schools called Sentinel.

While putting a 4G hotspot into a child’s hands might seem extreme, it makes more sense if you think of the device as an internet nanny rather than a modem. Children are increasingly connecting to the internet with devices through Wi-Fi: tablets, e-readers, PCc, etc. By placing its protection software on a hotspot, Kajeet can expand its parental control services to devices it doesn’t sell or directly connect.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Hasloo Group Production Studio

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So far, carriers’ confidence is well founded. Mobile operators are using their 2G and mobile broadband networks to connect everything from jukeboxes to ice machines, and as mobile phone penetration nears 100 percent, a good deal of carrier growth is dependent on these new machine-to-machine (M2M) subscriptions.

But a French startup named Sigfox is challenging that accepted wisdom. Sigfox business development chief and internet of things of evangelist Thomas Nicholls said that cellular networks were meant to connect humans, not objects. Sigfox is proposing to build an alternate wireless network dedicated solely to linking together the internet of things.

Our mobile phones are always on and ready to receive and make phone calls, update our Facebook and Twitter feeds or download new email, but the majority of objects linked to the network will connect rarely. A GPS tracker in a vehicle or shipping container may send out its coordinates just once a day. A smart meter may link back to its utility company’s servers once a week. Many of the sensors being embedded in devices from vending machines to security cameras only transmit when something goes wrong, meaning a M2M module may wait months if not years between connections to the network.

To host these devices over power-hungry and expensive cellular radios makes little sense, Nicholls said. The better course is to attach these devices to a network optimized for their use cases — one that can support billions of devices each sending relatively little data at distinct intervals, Nicholls said.

“Our network is structured in a radically different way,” Nicholls said. “There is really no notion of a network. You only connect when you have a payload to deliver.”

Sigfox has developed a wireless architecture using ultra narrow-band modulation techniques that can theoretically support millions of devices with only a handful of network transmitters. Using the unlicensed frequencies commonly used for baby monitors and cordless phones (868 MHz in Europe and 915 MHz in the US), Sigfox SAYS IT can provide the same coverage with a single tower that a cellular network could provide with 50 to 100 cell sites. Sigfox is building a network covering all of France with 1,000 transmission sites, and Nicholls estimates that the company could do the same in the US with 10,000 transmitters.

The radio modules embedded in objects are about the size of two thumbnails, and they transmit at power levels 50 times lower than their cellular M2M counterparts. Such low consumption levels mean that objects that normally have no external power supply could remain connected for as a long as 20 years before their module batteries would require recharging, Nicholls said.

Not an internet for all things

Sigfox’s ultra narrow-band technology can only support bandwidths of 100 bps — which makes it far slower than even the poorest 2G data connection. Devices that ship large quantities of data or maintain constant connections to the network aren’t the “things” that Sigfox intends to connect.

The internet jukebox, which downloads any song from any artist on request, would require a 3G or 4G connection to handle the demand for media streaming. But the vending machines or the arcade game sitting right next that jukebox would be ideal candidates, using their connections only when they’re malfunctioning or need a refill of refreshments. Connected home appliances like LG’s new Smart Thinq refrigerator, GPS tracking devices, smart meters and medical alert sensors are all the types of devices that Sigfox hopes to target.

Nicholls added that Sigfox thinks there’s a huge opportunity in the growing business-to-consumer connected device space. The assortment of gadgets and wearable devices making their way into the connected home and onto our bodies are typically connected by local area networking technologies like Bluetooth, Zigbee and Wi-Fi. But Nicholls thinks there’s a big case to be made for replacing those technologies with Sigfox.

As Sigfox achieves economies of scale, its radio will not only shrink, their costs will fall to just a few dollars per module. Due to the huge efficiencies in running its network, Sigfox can maintain a device connection for little more than a dollar a year, Nicholls said. At those prices, gadget manufacturers can factor connectivity costs into the device costs without requiring customers to sign up for a subscription.

Not only would using Sigfox give these devices range far beyond local networks, they would be “on” right out of the box, Nicholls said. By virtue of Sigfox’s dedicated network there is no gateway to buy, no settings to configure, no devices to pair. That’s a concept other internet of things pioneers have pursued. For instance, Ambient Devices runs its own dedicated datacasting network to connect its assortment of lifestyle gadgets.

Becoming a carrier for objects, not people

Sigfox isn’t just developing M2M technology. It has ambitions of becoming a global facilities-based carrier specializing in the internet of things. It’s built its own network in France, where it has one publicly announced customer in Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, which uses Sigfox to connect its digital billboards and signs. It’s planning to expand to other countries in Europe, and it’s in discussions with potential partners in the US, Nicholls said. “In the U.S., it won’t be long before we have something to announce,” Nicholls said.

But Sigfox isn’t fooling itself into thinking it will hold a monopoly on the internet to things. Nicholls said Sigfox hopes to partner with operators rather than compete with them, deploying its ultra narrowband networks alongside their cellular networks. Sigfox has also submitted the technology to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) with the aim of turning its proprietary technology into a standard.

The Toulouse-based startup also has at least one big fan in the U.S. In September, Intel Ventures led a €10 million (US $12.8 million) investment in the fledgling company as part of Series B round that included Sigfox’s existing investors laia Partners, Partech Ventures International and iXO Private Equity. The company has now raised €12.1 million in total funding.

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In short, Sprint thinks that hotels, rental car agencies, airlines, supermarkets and big box retail stores – pretty much any business with a loyalty card – would make excellent resellers of its 3G and WiMAX data service. Hotels could rent or lend 4G data modems to their out-of-town guests; grocery stores could sell prepaid 3G hotspots right next to the batteries and the international dialing cards. Those data services could be linked directly to any loyalty program – for instance, for every megabyte you consume earn a frequent flyer mile or get 10 cents off your next purchase of frogurt.

Sprint is inviting these companies to become mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) on its data networks, offering a compelling proposition to companies that normally wouldn’t have a clue how to run a wireless business:  Sprint will deploy all of the infrastructure and manage the service, while its partners focus on their customers.

Photo by Tomás Fano

Such MVNOs could work much the way the hotel, airport and airline Wi-Fi services function: access to a key set of company Website functions might be free, but customers would buy access to the Internet at large by the hour, day, week or bucket. Companies would also have the opportunity to toy with those business models, for instance subsidizing access fees with advertising and sponsorship revenues or allowing customers who accrue a certain number of flight miles, hotel stays or grocery to tap into free buckets of megabytes.

The new program is part of the “MVNO in a box” platform Sprint launched in July. Traditionally MVNOs have pretty much supplied all of the components necessary to run a mobile operator – devices, back office and billing, customer service, etc. – save the actually mobile network. That means MVNOs have commonly been the purview of companies with the experience and infrastructure necessary to run a carrier or companies like Best Buy willing to invest in those resources.

Sprint’s new single source platform, however, is geared at anyone with a customer base and a Website. Sprint is contracting with Telespree to handle the activation and management of potentially millions of subscriptions spread over dozens of different brands through its cloud-based wireless data enablement platform.

So far Sprint is making its WiMAX and CDMA networks available through the program, so its biggest impact may be regional. Sprint is an MVNO of sorts itself, reselling Clearwire’s WiMAX service, which is available in about one-third of the US. Its CDMA EV-DO network, however, probably doesn’t have the oomph to stand in as a primary mobile broadband service. Once Sprint completes the rollout of its LTE network, though, it will probably start offering it up to its MVNO partners. Many operators are keeping their newest networks close to their vests, but Sprint has already allowed MVNOs like Ting to tap into its nascent LTE systems.

 Hotel sign image courtesy of Flickr user Tomas Fano 

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On Tuesday Ofcom gave permission for the UK’s biggest mobile operator, Everything Everywhere, to re-use some of its old spectrum for a limited amount of 4G services instead of waiting for the official 4G spectrum auction early next year. From next month, it said, the company would have the ability to use part of its 1800 MHz range for high speed data services as a prelude to providing more services in the future.

That move — the result of a consultation — will get a limited amount of 4G to customers who are craving it. But it has caused angry reaction from rival operator Vodafone, which launched a vociferous attack on the decision.

In a statement saying that it was “frankly shocked” by the regulator’s decision, Vodafone said the fact that the biggest player was being given the nod to start ahead of its rivals would distort the market.

It continued:

“The regulator has shown a careless disregard for the best interests of consumers, businesses and the wider economy through its refusal to properly regard the competitive distortion created by allowing one operator to run services before the ground has been laid for a fully competitive 4G market.

“Ofcom’s timing is particularly bizarre given the reports that Everything Everywhere is currently in discussions to sell some of its spectrum to 3, which Ofcom has previously been at such pains to protect with its over-engineering of the 4G auction.

“This means the balance in the auction will fundamentally change.”

Vodafone has been working with another network, O2, to try and achieve 4G speeds ahead of the official auction, but said that it expected Everything Everywhere to now be encouraged to delay and block the official auction from taking place in order to gain an extra competitive advantage.

It’s particularly painful for Vodafone because one reason that Everything Everywhere has redundant spectrum is because it was formed by the merger of the British operations of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and France Telecom’s Orange back in 2010. When that was given the green light by regulators, Vodafone had been arguing that redundant spectrum should be released to new bids: instead, it looks like EE is getting to use it for its own benefit.

“The regulator has spent several years refusing to carry out a fair and open auction” added Vodafone in its statement. “Now its decision today has granted the two most vociferous complainants during that entire process a massive incentive to further delay it.”

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Vodafone is the world’s biggest multi-national operator with 384 million subscribers at the end of 211, while Verizon boasted 109 million connections. But there is a critical difference in the kinds of subscribers they each serve:

• Verizon focuses on the upper tiers of the U.S. wireless market, targeting high-dollar contract customers while generally eschewing lower-revenue wholesale deals (though it is starting to target that segment more).
• Vodafone’s networks are spread all over the world, including in developing markets where revenues per subscriber are much leaner, and its services run the gamut of prepaid and postpaid.

Verizon is also growing while Vodafone is shrinking. Verizon’s fourth quarter revenues grew 6.4 percent to $15.1 billion, while Vodafone’s shrank 3.1 percent to 14.7 billion (€11.5 billion), which is ultimately the reason why the two carriers swapped the second and third spots late last year.

Of course, Vodafone probably isn’t complaining. It owns 45 percent of Verizon Wireless, so it benefits from Verizon’s success. Wireless Intelligence, however, only counts subscribers and revenues in a multinational operator’s totals if it has more than 50 percent stake in a carrier.

Not much else has changed since Wireless Intelligence released the same rankings last year:

• AT&T and Telefonica rounded out the top five.
• Sprint, despite its struggles, remains revenue-wise the tenth largest mobile operator in the world.
• Japan’s SoftBank Mobile jumped over Telecom Italia to claim the No. 12 slot.
• China Unicom moved up a notch.
• Russia’s VimpelCom and China Telecom also debuted in the top 20, grabbing the Nos. 14 and 19 respectively.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user superwebdeveloper.

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The reality, though, is that Cambridge is a city that takes a lot of technological risks — a fact that was underlined today when it was announced that it was now home to the world’s first city-wide white space network.

Just in case you’ve been a dark place rather than a white space, here’s a primer on what this actually means:

White space is about doing something with those parts of the radio spectrum that aren’t really being used — largely those left behind as TV switches from analogue to digital signals, and the old parts of the spectrum end up going fallow. Often called “Super Wi-Fi”, it’s seen as territory for all kinds of applications.

But although it’s clear that this spectrum should be deployed in new ways, how best to use these gaps has been a hotly-debated topic on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the U.S., rules for white space use were approved a year or two back, and after proposals from Google and others the idea has been that white space can be used largely for providing broadband-level connectivity to rural areas.

But progress has not been fast. As my colleague Stacey wrote recently, Congress has worked to ensure U.S. white spaces get used for innovative purposes — and are not just gobbled up by the likes of AT&T and Verizon — but it’s not moving forward very quickly.

In Britain, meanwhile, regulators decided last year that white spaces could sometimes be used to offload mobile traffic, effectively making data services more reliable. That’s a big deal for a nation where 4G has yet to make into the world, although just over the Channel in France, mobile operator Free is breaking some new ground by using Wi-Fi itself for offloading.

Internet of things

However, the Cambridge pilot is none of these things. Instead, it’s being seen as the potential for a “smart city” service — a network of connected devices that can talk to each other, and to service providers, without having to use any of the traditional communications channels.

At the vanguard here is Neul, the exciting young startup behind the Cambridge pilot that was formed by a team of technology veterans from the likes of CSR and Motorola.

Neul has already tested the network with smart electricity meters that send messages over Cambridge’s white space, and will eventually feed back to energy companies and allow them to match supply and demand better across the grid. Beyond that, they see a range of other uses for white spaces.

As the announcement says:

In addition to the smart grid, Neul’s network opens up several fascinating possibilities for the Smart City of the future, enabling smarter transport and traffic management, city lighting and other municipal services.

“In a world of Smart Phones and mobile broadband it is easy to imagine that wireless connectivity has now been solved,” commented Glenn Collinson, co-founder and Board Member at Neul. “It hasn’t. Mobile broadband is too expensive for ‘things’ in the Smart City. Also mobile broadband means battery powered devices would need changing far too often. And all those sensors would load the cellular networks to such a level that there would be little network capacity left.

Collinson listed a number of objects which could piggyback on the network, including not just utility meters but also air quality sensors, street lights and parking spaces.

And here’s a particularly interesting thing: this is all currently provided by a relatively small amount of infrastructure — just six base stations scattered around the city (population 125,000). Here’s a map Nuel provided to show what their coverage is like.

Roll on rollout!

Photograph of Cambridge used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user aribakker

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Bloomberg is reporting that the business, which has 62 million subscribers, is planning to bring in banks and will try to raise around $4 billion from the IPO.

Meanwhile local newspaper Vedomosti added more detail, saying that the flotation will take place in the U.K. in July.

It’s a significant move for the company, which is owned mainly by Swedish telecom firm TeliaSonera and billionaire Alisher Usmanov — and for the Russian tech and communications market.

But there’s another question: why is London so popular for Russian IPOs?

Not every European startup chooses to float in London — in fact, many go to New York. And nor does every Russian business go there, either: Yandex, the Moscow-based search engine and rival to Google, chose to hit the Nasdaq.

But there are dozens of Russian companies on the London exchange — far more than on the other side of the Atlantic, and the biggest example in tech is probably Mail.ru, which hit the market a year and a half ago and indirectly helped drive Silicon Valley on again through its links to Facebook, Twitter and others.

So what are some of the reasons for Russian businesses to go to London?

Geography: The British capital is one of the world’s leading financial centers, and really the closest one to Moscow. The cultural ties are also strong, as Russian oligarchs have long coveted assets in London, including real estate, businesses and the occasional sports club.

Peer group: Many Russian companies have chosen to list in London over the years because that’s where their peers — gas or oil companies, for example — are. That, in turn, has built up a corpus of Russian businesses on the London exchange that makes it more appealing to newcomers (and increases the amount of expertise in making those floats work). As industries gain gravity, they draw the next generation in their wake.

Foreign rules: Although foreign companies can list on NASDAQ, it is not a popular place for businesses based outside the U.S — and the Dow Jones index doesn’t include foreign-headquartered companies at all. The rules in London are less strict than elsewhere, with many companies using a loophole that allows them to set up an office in London to list a minimal amount of shares, while retaining control in their home countries. All this makes London a much more internationally-minded market.

Access to capital: That international mindset plays makes London more sympathetic to Russian companies than perhaps other places. Combined with the high oil price that has helped Moscow’s economy, and privatization of state-owned assets being pushed by the government, that makes things pretty lucrative.

Not all good news

But the love affair could be coming to an end. Over the past year there have been several significant pullouts by firms heading from Moscow to the U.K., and the London markets now seem to have less patience with Russian businesses than they once did.

We’ve been here before, when the chatter was all about Russian companies ditching London for Asia. But it does mean that MegaFon’s mooted listing will be interesting, because it could be an important move to glue two major European capitals together — or, if the company ends up going elsewhere, could rend them asunder.

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