iOnRoad

This small Israeli startup is taking an emerging mobile technology — augmented reality — and applying it to an established mobile service: vehicle navigation.  iOnRoad doesn’t just want drivers to look at their smartphones while driving; it wants them to look through the lens of their devices, seeing an enhanced view of the road ahead of them.

Its Android app (soon to be available for the iPhone) calculates the speed and direction the user’s vehicle is moving, using the phone’s accelerometer and digital compass, and then uses visual cues from the imaging data collected through phone’s camera to determine which lane the vehicle is in and its distance from other vehicles. For example, if you get too close to the car in front of you, of if the app detects brake lights beaming in the distance, or if you start veering out of your lane, the app emits a visual and audio warning.

CEO and founder Alon Atsmon said iOnRoad hopes to integrate the software with other vehicle navigation apps, which would take augmented driving to the next level. Rather than only know what lane you’re in, iOnRoad could then know what lane you’re supposed to be in.

P2i

Dunking ‘waterproof’ phones in buckets of water takes the cake when it comes to cheesy demos, but nano-coating company P2i isn’t messing about with phones. In Barcelona, it submerged paper napkins treated with its polymer; they emerged from the water without a spec of moisture, as dry as when they first left their packaging.

P2i CTO Stephen Coulson developed the technology under contract with the U.S. Department of  Defense U.K. Government’s Defence Science & Technology Laboratory as a means of creating water-resistant military fatigues. Coulson has since expanded its uses to consumer and industrial electronics, applying a molecule-thick coating to every internal and external component of the device within the controlled confines of a plasma chamber. The result is a device that you can accidentally drop in the toilet, sink or in a puddle of water. Motorola is already using the technology, calling it SplashGuard, in its newer smartphones and tablets.

So why doesn’t P2i dunk phones at its demo? P2i is upfront about the fact that the phones it treats aren’t waterproof – you can’t take them scuba diving. There are truly waterproof phones on the market, but they have pressure seals and gaskets that add a lot of cost to the device. P2i’s goal is protect against one of the most common accidents afflicting consumer electronics while adding only incremental cost to the device.

Nokia’s PureView

Nokia took a bit of a beating in Barcelona for making its news a Symbian device, not one using the Windows Phone platform to which Nokia’s star is now tied. But the PureView camera technology embedded within the modest 4-inch-screened, Belle OS-driven Nokia 808 was mind-blowing stuff.

The PureView sensor embedded in the Nokia 808

We always talk here of how the camera phone is replacing the digital camera, but I think that talk is overblown. Yes, it’s true that more people are reaching for their phones rather than a point-and-shoot, but we’re also winding up with a lot of really crappy photos. PureView may bridge that disconnect between hardware and convenience.

The 41-megapixel camera produced poster-sized pictures of incredible color and depth with no visible distortion or artifacts whatsoever. Impressive, but most people don’t want to shoot posters — they want 3x5s. That’s exactly where the over-the-top pixel depth comes in handy, Nokia officials claimed. The standard picture setting is just a mere 5 MP, but PureView oversamples every shot, selects the best image information available and then discards the extra pixels. The result is incredibly detailed and rich photos at standard resolutions.

Like many people, I’m a bit leery of buying a Symbian device, considering its limited life span, but once this technology makes it into other devices, it will be a huge selling point for anyone who wants to discard stand-alone digital cameras entirely.

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Ericsson and AT&T both tried to answer the question of how our future connected devices will communicate with each other as well as humans. If we build a world where 50 billion devices are connected, those devices will generate a lot of chatter, and that chatter could get very annoying, said Mikael Anneroth, manager of user experience at Ericsson Labs.

When our lamps are constantly telling us they’ve been left on and doors incessantly update us when they’ve been unlocked, we will get bombarded with information. While that info at times is quite useful, it has the potential to become just a stream of noise. By telling us everything about our homes, cars and appliances the Internet of things may wind up telling nothing at all.

“I still want to be in control, but I don’t need every piece of information,” Anneroth said. “The Internet of things needs to keep me in the loop but not all of the time.”

Ericsson is working on methods for connected device information curation and management.  Part of that effort is the development of a social media platform for things that aren’t people. At the Connected House exhibit, Anneroth was demoing a social network interface that linked all of the different connected nodes in a home as well as trusted points in the public sphere. Through that network, a user can interact directly with his devices, but the devices spend much of their time interacting with one another.

If for instance a home owner accesses his home social network and discovers he’s left the lights on while away on business, he can shut them off remotely. The lights can then tell the thermostat to power down and then check to make sure all doors and windows are locked. Outside information sources could be hooked into the network as well. For instance inclement weather reports could set off a chain reaction of device adjustments. New navigation data recommending alternate routes to avoid storm-related traffic would automatically loaded into vehicle navigation systems. Personal and office calendars could automatically be updated to allow more time to drive the appointments. The house itself could turn itself into storm mode, shutting off sprinklers, closing windows and turning up the heat. All of this happens in the background on the social network of things. The homeowner might just get a message recommending he leave 10 minutes earlier for work.

There will be cases in which a user wants to take more active control of his network of devices. If a car owner wakes up in the morning to discover his vehicle is missing, he uses the interface to ask the car where it is. If the car informs him it’s heading to the nearest state line, its owner can instruct the car to call the local police, report itself stolen and provide police officers with constant updates on its location.

While Ericsson’s social device network is still in the labs, AT&T is trying to tackle the problem today. It’s working to bring multiple connected appliances into a single mobile management platform. AT&T chose MWC in Barcelona to launch its new Digital Life business. That may seem like an odd decision, until you learn that AT&T doesn’t plan to sell the connected home service in the U.S. Instead it’s looking to license it to international service providers and energy and security companies. Apparently it plans to keep the technology in house on its home turf.

AT&T is bringing dozens of different applications under a single control interface, all of which can be accessed from a console on an iPad or iPhone. While the individual devices don’t talk to one another like Ericsson’s social appliances, AT&T is combining application functions together into profiles and then applying specific rules. For instance, when the front door is unlocked, the platform could open all of the blinds if it’s daytime or turn on the main lights if it’s dark outside. A home monitoring app could send an alert to the homeowner if the oven has been on for more than two hours, embedding that message with a live video feed of the kitchen. The homeowner could then see if a family member is actually baking a cake before he reflexively shuts down the oven remotely.

Ericsson and AT&T’s concepts really aren’t that far off from one another. Ericsson’s just adds an extra level intelligence. In the world of Ericsson Labs, not only can devices communicate with one another, they can make decisions based on the information they receive. AT&T’s system is based on pre-defined rules, but perhaps for now that’s the safer approach. As I wrote on Tuesday about the connected car, giving power to our machines to make critical decisions could have some nasty side effects if they aren’t implemented perfectly or if their security is somehow compromised.

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Last week, the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Broadband Alliance announced significant progress in their shared goal of making your phone connect seamlessly with Wi-Fi networks. Now at Mobile World Congress, Cisco Systems is proffering up the first equipment that supports those Next Generation Hotspot(NGH) and Hotspot 2.0 standards.

Cisco said on Tuesday that it has developed all of the necessary software to support the joint standard and will not only be embedding it in its future carrier-grade Wi-Fi equipment, but also offer it up to the mobile, wireline and hotspot operators that have already deployed its gear. According to Murali Nemani, Cisco senior director of marketing for service provider mobility, some of Cisco’s older gear won’t support the upgrade, but millions of hotspot access points can easily take the software.

 NGH and Hotspot 2.0 respectively tackle the carrier network and Wi-Fi part of the equation. The Wi-Fi Alliance is making it easier for a handset to login to any authorized access point without having to mess with passwords, splash screens – transferring all of the necessary credentials in the background. The NGH portion links the access point, as well as the devices connecting to it, back to the operator’s network, allowing them to treat Wi-Fi users like any other customer on their cellular networks. They can maintain their services and pass off data connections — and eventually voice calls – between cell and hotspot and vice versa.

Cisco has been a big backer of the two alliances’ efforts and has is already engaged in trials with AT&T, BT and several other operators. Since they have all Cisco Wi-Fi networking gear in their networks we could start seeing seamless hand-off between Wi-Fi and cellular very soon. Or given the whole point of the standard is seamless connectivity, maybe we won’t see it all.

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Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Broadcom is unveiling the silicon component of that low-cost equation. The chipmaker announced three new Android 4.0-optimized integrated chipsets, combining one or multiple ARM (a armh) Cortex A9 processors with 3G radios. At the low-end is a package with a single 1 GHz processor and 7.5 Mbps HSPA modem, which Broadcom said is priced at feature phone levels. Robert Rango, Broadcom EVP and GM of its mobile and wireless group, said the pricing on mobile computing power are scaling so low, that anybody with a feature phone budget can soon afford a smartphone.

At the higher end are two 1.3 GHz dual-core chips with HSPA+ radios  — the key difference is one supports 1080p video while the other runs on 720p. The higher-resolution multimedia package is priced for devices in the $200 to $300 unsubsidized range, while the lower-resolution chip can scale all the way down to the $100 phone, Rango said.

The bottom line, Rango said, is that a handset vendor could replicate the specs and performance of the European Nexus in a phone priced $300 or less. In the U.S. where operators heavily subsidize devices, it’s easy to see the cost to the consumer dropping below $100. What’s even more compelling is the idea that carriers could soon start giving dual-core smartphones away for free with their standard two-year contracts.

All three chips are sampling today and will begin shipping in volumes to vendors in the second half of the year. That means we might see that $300 Nexus knock-off before the end of the year. Of course, by that point the industry will have scaled its next performance peak launching the first quad-core smartphones. Still, it’s amazing to see how quickly the top-line technologies of today are dropping down to the mass market.

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That’s not only an impressive feat of miniaturization and integration, it could kick off the next-generation of LTE deployments, lower the costs of building mobile networks and reduce the energy required to run them. When all those factors are taken into account, base station SoCs could cut the cost of delivering a bit of data, which ultimately could lead to cheaper mobile data plans for the consumer.

The brains of a base station typically reside in a channel card, a sort of hopped-up motherboard designed to perform the extremely complex task of encoding and decoding radio signals. Usually wireless infrastructure vendors like Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent design those channel cards as a bunch of discrete components: digital signal processors, applications processors, and a variety of hardware accelerators. The new QorIQ Qonverge design stamps all of those discrete components onto a single piece of silicon.

So why is this significant? SoCs are much cheaper to manufacture than the sum cost of all of those separate components, and also drain far less power. According to Scott Aylor, director and GM of Freescale’s wireless access division, a single QorIQ chip can support the capacity of a three-sector 20 MHz LTE cell site – the same configurations Verizon and AT&T are using in their new 4G networks – for one quarter of the cost. Aylor also said the highly integrated platform also drains three times less power, which will help operators design more energy-efficient networks. If operators can build cheaper networks and cut their operating costs, they could theoretically offer mobile broadband at cheaper prices.

That performance and power efficiency will make QorIQ a building block for future network technologies such as LTE-Advanced, Aylor said. LTE-Advanced will require enormous processing resources as the bandwidth pumped out by each cell grows well beyond 100 Mbps. “We’re well ahead of the LTE-Advanced curve,” Aylor said.

Furthermore, Freescale customers like Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks are already exploring a radical shift in network design. Known as cloud radio access network, or cloud-RAN, it seeks to divorce the base station from the cell site. Instead, operators could build signal-processing farms in a private cloud, in essence virtualizing their base stations. Whenever capacity is needed, cell sites – which are little more than radio heads at this point – would reach into the cloud and grab it. Again, Aylor said SoCs would be ideal for such a scenario.

“We can build farms of 64 of these things on a single card, then daisy-chain them together,” Aylor said. “There’s not a significant limitation on our side as to how far we can scale.”

Aylor said the key to developing the SoC was Freescale’s utilizing new 28-nanometer process technology, allowing it to condense a lot more performance in much less space. That means Freescale’s competitors can’t be far behind as most of them are already going down the 28-nm path.

Digital signal processing giant Texas Instruments has already developed powerful SoCs for use in Cloud-RAN platforms and is using them to power smaller-sized cells. Aylor, however, said Freescale believes it has significant advantage over its competitors as it can supply a single-chip solution across the board, from the lowliest femtocell to the most powerful macrocell.

Not all network vendors subscribe to the SoC approach, Aylor admits, but Fujitsu and Alcatel-Lucent are already converts. The Franco-American networking giant is already using QorIQ chips in its new lightRadio architecture, initially in its Cube small cells, but it plans to begin designing its macro base stations around the new SoCs as well.

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Mobile World Congress just became Intel’s mobile coming out party. On Monday Orange will debut the first smartphone powered by Intel’s Atom processor at the show, giving Intel a key foothold in the European market as well as a critical endorsement from a major carrier.

The Android Gingerbread device, which will be built by Orange manufacturing partner Gigabyte, uses both Intel’s Medfield apps processor and its HSPA radio chipset. That indicates that Intel’s strategic decision to buy baseband chipmaker Infineon is paying off: it can now provide a complete silicon package for the mobile phone, which is key to getting in mid-tier and low-tier mass-market devices. And that mass market is clearly where the new phone, code named Santa Clara, is headed when it launches over the Orange networks in the U.K. and France this summer.

“It is not targeted at the 1 percent,” said Yves Maitre, Orange SVP of mobile multimedia and devices. But the phone also doesn’t skimp on performance, Maitre claimed. “We are providing a Ferrari experience to the mass market,” he said.

The Santa Clara has 4.03-in. screen, an 8 megapixel camera that can capture 1080p video, supports HD voice and even sports an NFC chip, which until now have been reserved for the more high-end phones. The Intel radio supports HSPA+ up 21 Mbps, and for those U.S. gadget lovers who like to import their phones from overseas, it runs over both European and North American GSM and HSPA bands (cellular and PCS).

Intel has won some smaller deals with Motorola and Lenovo, but being tapped by Orange is a major milestone. Handset vendors follow the lead of their operator customers, so if Orange wants to make a big push toward Atom-powered phones, they’re sure to fall in line. Maitre said Orange decided to run with Atom for two reasons: 1) Its ability to deliver a lot of performance for a lower price than comparable ARM architectures, and 2) Orange wanted to challenge ARM’s dominance, in hopes of creating competition in the processor market that could drive down chip prices.

Orange certainly has the clout to create that competing market. It’s a multi-national operator with networks all over Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Matire said the Santa Clara wasn’t a one-off deal. While he didn’t reveal any specific plans for other devices, he said Intel and Orange would continue to work closely together.

Intel still has a long road in front of it if it wants its X86-based Atom to become a true challenger to ARM. The ARM architecture resides in every Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Apple, Samsung, Broadcom and ST-Ericsson mobile apps processor. Intel still has plenty of critics, who question whether Android apps will run properly on an X86 platform and point to the X86’s notorious power drain problems, but Intel claims that both those problems have been eliminated in its latest Atom hardware and software releases.

At CES, my colleague Kevin Tofel got some hands-on time with an Android 4.0 tablet powered by Atom and was impressed with performance of the apps he saw running on it – this is from a guy who has been very skeptical of Intel’s mobile overtures in the past. Maybe 2012 really will be the year that Intel builds its bridge to mobile computing.

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Let’s face it: SMS is a dinosaur. Except for the addition of basic multimedia through MMS, it’s hardly evolved in a decade. A rash of new mobile IP services have emerged to profit from SMS’s shortcomings: iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, Google Chat and countless other IM and social networking apps. Not only do they offer more features and functions than SMS, they have the ultimate benefit of being free. Ovum estimated that, globally, operators missed out on $22.6 billion in SMS revenues in 2010 and 2011 as IP social messaging apps took over their traditional texting traffic.

The ironic thing is that operators could have lost much, much more. SMS traffic is still increasing despite the move to smartphones, and the reason is SMS has one ace in the hole: it works. I can send a text message to almost any mobile phone number in the world, and I’m virtually assured my intended recipient will receive it. Platforms like iMessage and Messenger require you to have an iOS or BlackBerry device. IM and social messaging services require you and your friends to have an account and their apps installed on your phones.

SMS has the added benefit of using the signaling channel of an operator’s network to transmit its payload, ensuring the message will go through no matter what network and what network conditions it traverses. IP services depend on having a decent data connection, which is hardly a given, no matter how far we’ve come with 3G and 4G.

Bridging the IP and SMS worlds

What Mavenir proposes is to combine the universality of SMS with the IP messaging features that SMS technology can’t support: live chat, group messaging, multimedia sharing, and network storage for shared files. But rather than tie the service to a particular device ecosystem like Apple or a particular account like Google, Mavenir’s Mobile Cloud Messenging (MCM) is tied to a phone number, just like SMS.

Mavenir’s platform isn’t standards based, which would normally be a big problem. It depends on operators running Mavenir’s network equipment and pre-installing Mavenir’s client on all devices. If your operator isn’t a Mavenir customer, then those richer features won’t work for you. At first glance, it seems Mavenir is asking us to substitute Apple’s proprietary solution for its own. But the beauty of Mavenir’s implementation is that it simply defaults to SMS and MMS if it doesn’t find its client or server at the other end of the message.

“We have enabled this whole interoperability with MMS and SMS on the backend,” VP of marketing Shubh Agarwal said. “You’re not restricted to talking to other customers on the carrier’s networks or phones with the MCM client. … It will simply use the SMS channel rather than the IP channel.”

Of course, all of those extra features go away if the message is forced onto the SMS channel, but the point is that MCM acts as a bridge between today’s new richer IP services and old reliable text messaging. Except for SMS forwarding and other gimmicky approaches to the technology, the two camps have always been isolated. MCM probably won’t stop the flood of users to free IM platforms, but by offering more features, operators could at least try to justify the SMS rates they’re charging.

Ideally, a platform like MCM becomes part of a standard, not a proprietary and closed system, and Shubh claimed that Mavenir has the exact same aim. The problem is the standards process is slow and unwieldy. The GSMA and many of the operators have backed a technology called Rich Communications Suite, which promises all of the features of MCM plus video chat and instant file sharing. RCS, however, requires a lot of network ingredients that will take operators years to find: LTE, moving voice and SMS over to LTE (or VoLTE), an overhaul of their core service delivery architectures (know as IMS), and the replacement of billions of phones’ SMS clients with RCS clients.

Shubh said Mavenir plans to integrate MCM with RCS standards as they emerge, and is already working heavily within the VoLTE standards space. But operators need to start moving SMS forward while waiting for those standard to become commercially viable, Shubh said. Otherwise, they’ll watch all of their SMS traffic disappear into the IP ether.

Disclosure: Mavenir Systems is backed by Alloy Ventures, which also backs GigaOmni Media, the parent company of GigaOM. Alloy’s Ammar Hanafi is on the board of both companies.

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Let’s take them one by one.

I like the plaid, but do these PJs come in 4G?

Yes, we have all heard the myth of the connected refrigerator, but O’Hara promises we’ll see the world’s first pair of connected pajamas, embedded with sensors to monitor a child’s heart rate, breathing and other vitals. In fact, the GSMA’s Connected House exhibit this year will be full of mysterious wireless-embedded items including a singing robot from Korea Telecom and something called a “social media vending machine” from Vodafone.

The GSMA estimates there will be 24 billion connected devices by 2020, making embedded wireless – or machine-to-machine communications – a $1.2 trillion global industry. They won’t all be pajamas and robots, though. More likely they’ll be tablets and computing devices, TVs and other entertainment products, health and medical devices, and of course, cars.

This year, O’Hara and Warren predicted that the connected car would be a big source of conference chatter. MWC has whole tracks devoted to the topic, and Bill Ford, his namesake company’s executive chairman, will be delivering one of the keynote addresses. This year, the connected car discussion will move beyond the infotainment system and into the drive train. According to Warren, technologies are emerging that will allow cars to communicate with each other and the Internet to help make us better drivers, not just more entertained ones.

In addition, the technology we’ll see out of the newest concept vehicles is sure to impress even the most spec-obsessed gadget lover.

“The things we’re seeing today are what we’ll see in cars five years from now,” Warren said. “It’s not because the technology isn’t available today, but it’s because those are the design timelines of the automakers.” These aren’t cellphones that we change out every year.

Open up that mobile wallet

Near field communications is another sector with growth projections that boggle the mind. The GSMA projects that 1.5 billion handsets with NFC chips will be in the market by 2016, processing some $50 billion in transactions. The wireless industry is about to become a financial powerhouse, O’Hara said.

NFC payments also could become one of their more controversial topics at the show. The GSMA and many of its carrier members are promoting payment solutions that verify user identity via the phone’s SIM card. Meanwhile Google is promoting its own NFC solution Wallet, which bypasses the SIM and thus the operator. That conflict has already emerged in miniature in the U.S. as Verizon Wireless and Google have already banged heads over Wallet on the LTE version of the Galaxy Nexus. Google’s Eric Schmidt is delivering one of the major speeches at Mobile World Congress, so there’s potential for that conflict to escalate.

NFC won’t just be confined to payments. O’Hara said a lot of technologies will emerge at MWC that show how identity fused with ultra-short-range radio can be used in everything from electronic subway passes to concert ticketing. My colleague Ryan Kim has already written about the myriad of other uses for NFC, and we’ll likely see many of those alternatives emerge at MWC. NXP is hosting an NFC lounge where it will demo a motorcycle that can be started with your smartphone, peer-to-peer gaming through the NFC link, and even an app that allows you to summon your waiter and order food from your device while at a restaurant.

LTE is king, but Wi-Fi is getting all the attention

For the last several Congresses, operator after operator has taken the stage to announce their LTE rollout plans. At this year’s Congress many of those networks will finally have been built, making this year the show for the devices.

“It’s fair to say we have a feel for these things, and we’re expecting a slew of LTE announcements at the Congress,” O’Hara said.

But don’t expect LTE in absolutely everything, O’Hara cautioned. Many European operators are behind the LTE deployment, after the U.S. got to an early start, so they’re very much still focused on their HSPA networks. O’Hara said we’re likely to see a plethora of LTE dongles and Wi-Fi hotspots, but there will definitely be some high-end LTE smartphones.

While not every device will have the raw connection speed of LTE, we’ll see plenty of phones that skew toward raw processing power. LG has already revealed it will launch its first quad-core smartphone at MWC, using Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chip. Quad-core will still be a rarity, but dual-core devices are becoming almost the norm. Qualcomm expects that there will be several smartphones unveiled at MWC that utilize its integrated Snapdragon dual core processor and LTE modem, which has the additional “dual” benefits of driving down both cost and battery drain.

The GSMA and Wireless Intelligence now estimates there are 12.28 million LTE subscriptions in the world, though a disproportionate number, 7.69, are still in North America, primarily on Verizon’s network. The Asia-Pacific region comes in second with 3.71 million subs, while Europe is just starting to ramp up with 745,000 total LTE connections. In comparison there are 750 million HSPA connections globally. LTE may have a long way to go, but it’s getting there quickly. Wireless Intelligence says LTE subscribers are being added globally at a rate of 2 million a month.

At MWC we’ll likely see many European operators announce or detail already revealed LTE launch plans, but also expect the U.S. operators to be on hand to talk up their LTE plans, including T-Mobile USA, which just announced an ambitious plan to shut down most of its GSM networks to make room for LTE.

The dark horse candidate for show stealer is Wi-Fi. MWC is a cellular networking event , but so far much of the network technology buzz has been about unlicensed local area network technology and how it can be incorporated into operators’ 3G and 4G services. The jokes are already emerging about how MWC should be renamed the Mobile Wi-Fi Congress. The GSMA’s Warren, however, welcomes the development, saying Wi-Fi isn’t being positioned as a competitive technology to cellular, but rather one that is complimentary to HSPA and LTE.

If you’re attending the Congress you’ll have a lot of company. Last year, MWC attracted 60,000 delegates, and O’Hara said the GSMA’s registration logs show it is well on its way to breaking that record this year. There will be plenty for those delegates to see as well: 1,400 companies and organizations are exhibiting.

The conference outgrew the venerable Fira de Barcelona long ago, forcing exhibitors to spill out into the surrounding courtyards and streets. This year, many exhibitors are dealing with the lack of space by building up, not out, O’Hara said. So that’s one last thing to expect at MWC: we might see the first three-story booth.

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The Wi-Fi Alliance on Wednesday revealed its plans to begin certifying devices under its new Passport Passpoint initiative, which ensures mobile phones – among other things – can log into Wi-Fi networks seamlessly. Now it’s the Wireless Broadband Alliance’s turn to pick up where its partner left off, integrating those devices and the access points into the mobile operator’s network.

The WBA has closed out trials of its Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) standard with some of the world’s biggest operators, including AT&T, China Mobile, BT, NTT DoCoMo and Orange. Encouraged by the results, the WBA on Thursday said that the technology is now ready for commercial launch and expects the first NGH deployments over the next 12 months.

The Wi-Fi Alliance aims to negotiate the tricky connection between phone and access point without messing around with log-ins and registration pages as part of its Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint initiatives. If a device is authorized to use a particular hotspot operator’s network, it simply connects.

From there NGH takes over, extending that handshake between phone and hotspot to the operator’s back-end systems where the connection can be treated like a regular cellular link. A Wi-Fi access point becomes just another cell on the operator’s network: data sessions and even voice calls can be passed from cellular to Wi-Fi, operator services like mobile wallet or media-streaming subscriptions can be maintained and the carrier can track data usage and even bill for Wi-Fi consumption (though many wouldn’t consider that positive).

Here’s what WBA Chair Chris Bruce had to say about the trial’s recent completion in the WBA’s statement:

The complementary relationship between Wi-Fi and mobile networks is finally becoming a reality. Next Generation Hotspots allow smartphones and tablets to automatically roam from the cellular network on to Wi-Fi hotspots thereby augmenting the coverage and capacity of both. Fixed and mobile operators alike are leading a Wi-Fi hotspot renaissance in a renewed effort to sate the seemingly unquenchable desire for ubiquitous broadband connectivity. What has made this trial so unique is that the key players from both the mobile operator community and the Wi-Fi ecosystem have actively come together and supported each other for this industry-wide program. The future is a great broadband experience that operates over all sorts of different technologies.

One of the biggest benefits of NGH will be its support for complex roaming arrangements. No operator is going to build Wi-Fi hotspots in every cranny of the world, so they will need to partner heavily to either share capacity or buy it from third parties. NGH will be able to negotiate those multi-leveled agreements, allowing devices to not only connect to multiple networks seamlessly but also prioritize which networks they connect to.

Expect to hear much more about Hotspot 2.0 and NGH next week when Mobile World Congress ramps up. As I wrote last week, Wi-Fi has become a huge theme at the show and threatens to overshadow LTE and HSPA as its dominant network technology discussed. All of the key operator players will be in Barcelona as will its major industry backers, Cisco System, Ericsson (which just became an NGH fan by virtue of its BelAir Networks acquisition), Google, Intel, Ruckus Wireless, Aruba Networks and Accuris Networks.

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• New solutions for the evolving mobile network

Such architectures speak to the growing complexity in cellular networks as more people use more devices on them. Plus, the very mobility of such devices makes building out a network even more of a challenge. Base stations are fixed devices with fixed characteristics. Turning them into something that can scale to deliver capacity on command isn’t easy. But NSN thinks it has found a way.

Called Flexi Zone, the network looks a bit like the distributed antenna systems (DAS) operators have deployed at sporting venues and in office buildings to spread the normally circular cell into indoor nooks and crannies. But Flexi Zone goes far beyond the mere redistribution of coverage. Instead it allows an operator to densely pack 100 cells’ worth of capacity into a confined area, while shaping the network’s coverage to the exact contours of the shopping mall or stadium it inhabits.

Flexi Zone’s many, many pieces

Flexi Zone is actually an amalgamation of several technologies, all of which have yet to be implemented in any mobile network on a large scale. Let’s tick them off one by one:

• Small Cells. Imagine femtocells and Wi-Fi access points having a big party where everyone is hopped up on speed, and you get the idea. Hetnet aims to create a multi-layered network, in which traditional macro-cellular towers provide a blanket of coverage, while underneath that umbrella hundreds of thousands of small cells in high-traffic areas do the heavy bandwidth lifting. NSN’s Flexi Zone, however, uses small cells for both coverage and capacity. Macro cells often can’t reach the indoor environments Flexi Zone is designed for, so the small cells pull double duty.
• Cloud RAN. Perhaps the most far-out concept in Flexi Zone’s architecture, NSN’s Liquid Radio concept would decouple the base station from the radio. We have written before about Intel and other vendors’ attempt to move the radio access network (RAN) into the cloud, where the processing resources and intelligence of the network can be pooled and then applied wherever they’re needed at any given moment. Flexi Zone would leave a limited amount of baseband capacity at each small cell to support normal capacity conditions. But when things get hairy, the cloud kicks in, taking over much of the computational load of a congested cell. This allows operators to scale their networks more efficiently by not having to overbuild each cell for peak traffic conditions.
• Mesh Networking. One of the biggest limitations of small cells is backhaul. A high-capacity LTE radio can’t be backhauled with string and twine, but connecting hundreds of thousands with fiber links is a daunting if not impossible task. So NSN is taking a page from the metro Wi-Fi’s book, using radios to backhaul other radios. High-capacity 802.11n links and even LTE will connect the closely spaced nodes together. To deploy a small cell, the operator just needs to find a wall power outlet.
• Self-Organizing Networks. When you have a hundred densely packed cells all running on the same frequencies, you have the potential for an interference mess, and operators can’t do the careful testing and tuning they perform on the macro network at the scale small cells require. NSN is using self-organizing network, or SON, technology to give each cell enough self-awareness to identify its neighbors and keep its own transmission power in check, thus avoiding chaos over the airwaves. This kind of network self-management is pretty nifty, but things get really exciting when the equation includes dynamic SON, which allows individual cells to grow and shrink as traffic patterns change.

Sounds neat, but why does this matter?

NSN said the benefits of the technology would be multi-fold. Flexi Zone not only provides a solution for indoor coverage – where most mobile data traffic is moving these days; it can also supply orders-of-magnitude more capacity than a macro cell over the same square footage. And because of the Cloud-RAN and mesh techniques, infrastructure costs drop. NSN concluded that operators can use Flexi Zone to cut in half the cost of delivering a bit of traffic.

Whether operators would pass those savings on to their customers in the form of cheaper data plans is another question, but more efficient network technologies are definitely key to propelling the mobile data revolution forward and offsetting the need for operators to secure more spectrum in the future. Because Flexi Zone makes extensive use of Wi-Fi, operators can also tap into free unlicensed spectrum and cheap Wi-Fi networking gear, adding gobs of capacity to their networks for little cash.

NSN’s Flexi Zone is definitely the most ambitious hetnet proposal we’ve seen coming out of Mobile World Congress so far, but it’s not the only one. Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio architecture already uses many of the same Cloud-RAN and small cell techniques as Flexi Zone and Liquid Radio, and at MWC the Franco-American vendor is adding Wi-Fi to the mix. At the event, InterDigital plans to show how Wi-Fi can be wedged into the white-spaces spectrum between TV broadcasts to add more oomph to mobile network connections.

Ericsson is buying its way into Wi-Fi. We broke the story of its purchase of metro Wi-Fi vendor BelAir last month, and on Tuesday Ericsson confirmed the deal. Next week in Barcelona we’ll probably hear the first details on how Ericsson will incorporate BelAir’s hybrid Wi-Fi/cellular technology into its portfolio. BelAir competitor Ruckus Wireless plans to unveil its first hybrid Wi-Fi/LTE small cell at show, using the same mesh-networking techniques as Flexi Zone to create dense capacity clusters for outdoor environments.

As I wrote last week, for a show focused on cellular networking, MWC is taking on a strong Wi-Fi tone this year. Not all operators have gotten Wi-Fi religion yet, but their vendors certainly have. By weaving Wi-Fi more intimately into the network fabric, NSN may gain some converts.

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