Why participate in OpenSignal’s crowdsourcing operations? Think of it as a symbiotic relationship – consumers get benefit out of the app’s features as well. You can use the app as a speed test tool to see if your carrier is living up to its mobile data claims, and it will keep a record of your own data, text, and minute usage.

The app also serves as a signal finder. It will point you in the direction of your carrier’s nearest cell tower and even find nearby open Wi-Fi access points if you’re looking for a faster connection. And if you happen to be shopping around for another service provider, the app will let you compare the performance of different carrier networks in your area.

Ironically, U.K.-based OpenSignal has been using its Android app data for years to extrapolate iPhone performance on U.S. networks. With the new iOS software, it will be able to track iPhone performance directly, as well as tap into a potentially huge pool of new crowdsourcers.

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Boland co-founded phone baseband chipmaker Icera in 2002, heading up the company as president and CEO for nine years. In 2011, Nvidia — anxious to add radio chips to its mobile processor portfolio — acquired it for $367 million in cash. Boland stayed on as Nvidia’s SVP of mobile communications, but according to his LinkedIn profile Boland left the company in October.

Cambridge-based Neul makes wireless chips, but not for the cellular industry. It’s focusing on the emerging white spaces broadband segment — in particular the Weightless standard gaining traction in the U.K.

White spaces use the spectrum in between TV transmissions for two-day way data communications. The Weightless Special Interest Group hopes to use those airwaves as a backbone network for the internet of things, connecting low-power devices such as smart meters and mobile sensors.

Neul’s principal founders will remain with the company. Former CEO James Collier will become CTO, while William Webb has moved from CTO to chief strategy officer and will maintain his role as CEO of the Weightless SIG. Formed in 2010, Neul has quite the pedigree in mobile silicon. Many of the company’s key executives founded CSR, the U.K. fabless semiconductor giant. Neul, however, has only 45 employees and spent its first two years developing its first radio chip.

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The final approval is largely a formality, since Weightless SIG members such as Neul, CSR, Cable & Wireless, ARM and Google have already begun working with the technology. Neul has developed its first commercial Weightless chip, and has launched an experimental smart grid network in Cambridge. Google has begun using the technology in broadband trials in South Africa.

But the approval does cement the standard, allowing the SIG’s membership to begin developing products without worrying about technical specs shifting from under them. As defined, version 1.0 of the standard is pretty flexible, allowing it to be used for any kind of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications network, whether it aggregates tiny transmissions from millions of nodes, such as in a smart grid, or utilizes a more traditional high-speed mobile data connection.

The SIG is also making some pretty astonishing claims about the technology’s capabilities: a range of up to 10 km (6.2 miles), allowing for far-flung networks; device battery life for up 10 years, which means monitoring devices could be deployed in the field for long periods of time without maintenance; and chipset costs of less $2, making the barrier of entry for including Weightless in a device extremely low.

Those three specs make up the holy trinity of wide-area M2M communications and would make the technology feasible for all but the cheapest devices in the future internet of things. But it remains to be seen whether Weightless can live up to those promises.

White spaces broadband in the U.K. is taking a different shape than in the U.S. On this side of the Atlantic, white spaces are viewed more as unlicensed broadband wireless technology — sometimes dubbed “Super Wi-Fi”. White spaces are the unused frequencies between TV transmissions, and since the TV airwaves are much more crowded in urban areas, white spaces likely will be most useful for rural broadband in the U.S.

Feature image courtesy of Cillian Storm.

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This week LSI announced its first ARM-based chip for the mobile base station. You thought Nvidia and Qualcomm’s quad-core smartphone processors were impressive, well LSI is embedding 16 ARM Cortex A15 cores, along with LSI’s networking accelerators and ARM’s low-latency CoreLink interconnect technology, onto a single 28-nanometer chip.

The chip family is designed for base stations of all sizes, scaling from the macrocell down to the picocell, making similar to the flexible and modular platforms offered by competitors Texas Instruments (TXN) and Freescale. Both Freescale and TI have begun incorporating ARM cores into their base station chips, though neither one is a complete ARM convert. Freescale leans heavily on the PowerPC architecture, while TI is pairing ARM cores with its bread-and-butter digital signal processors (DSPs). But ARM is definitely taking bigger and bigger strides into the mobile network with its increasingly powerful but energy-efficient silicon designs.

One company that’s hoping to join ARM within the guts of the mobile network is Intel, which is no stranger to skirmishes with the U.K. silicon giant in the infrastructure market. Intel is trying to establish a foothold for itself in the emerging technology cloud-RAN (RAN stands for radio access network). Cloud-RAN would separate the base station from the tower and move baseband processing into the cloud.

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The TV white spaces are the unused airwaves lying between TV channels, and governments around the world have proposed using those frequencies to develop a type of “Super Wi-Fi” – basically combining Wi-Fi’s unlicensed, free-to-access model with the much longer reach of these low-frequency TV airwaves.

In the U.S., regulators and the technology’s boosters want to use TV white spaces to expand the availability of cheap broadband, though the issue has become a political hot potato in the upcoming TV spectrum incentive auction. Microsoft is working with African regulators and ISPs to experiment with whites spaces broadband access in Kenya.

In the U.K., though, regulators are earmarking the spectrum as a means to ease the burdens of traditional cellular data networks — using unlicensed airwaves to offload 3G and 4G traffic. British entrepreneurs have interpreted that offload concept as making white spaces ideal for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, the long-range wireless grid concept for linking together the internet of things. In Cambridge, Neul has begun testing smart grids and other sensor networks in a citywide trial. Neul has drawn in other U.K. heavyweights, including ARM, CSR and Cable & Wireless, all of which joined the Weightless SIG.

Neul and Weightless said the new chipset can tap the entire range of UHF frequencies from 470 MHz to 790 MHz, which means it could be used in countries beyond the U.K. (The location of white spaces differ from country to country and even city to city, depending on which frequencies local TV stations use). However, they didn’t reveal which partners were taking possession of its samples, so we’ll have to wait to see which hardware makers are interested in the fledgling standard.

Feature image courtesy of Cillian Storm.

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O2 is using these 100 hotspot deployments as the infrastructure groundwork for a future small-cell network. Like Wi-Fi, small cells will deliver surgical capacity in high-trafficked areas, but unlike Wi-Fi, those cells will use O2’s licensed spectrum, providing a big boost of mobile broadband capacity exactly where its macro network is most congested. According to O2 Wi-Fi managing director Gavin Franks, the carrier is targeting the end of the year for the small-cell rollout.

“What we have deployed so far isn’t a full-fledged small cell network,” Franks said. “We have deployed a future-proof network that allows us to easily get to small cells. And obviously it’s our intention to do so.”

It might seem easy to task Wi-Fi nodes for double duty as small cells, but Franks said O2 had to plan its deployment carefully for the hybrid configuration. The dual radios will require more backhaul capacity than the DSL connections that usually power Wi-Fi can provide, so O2 has either run fiber or installed microwave radio links to hotspot clusters, which are then meshed together via Wi-Fi backhaul. Franks said O2’s mobile network planners determined the placement of each node beneath the macro network to ensure there would be no interference when the small cells went live. Finally O2 ordered up specialty outdoor Wi-Fi equipment from Ruckus Wireless that can easily support the installation of micro-cellular base stations in the future.

When the time comes, Franks said, O2 technicians will simply pop the chassis of the Ruckus access point, insert the 3G radio, and instantly have a live small cell. Ruckus makes its own 3G and LTE small-cell modules, but that doesn’t necessarily mean O2 will buy them. Ruckus has also partnered with Nokia Siemens Networks to provide an integrated Wi-Fi-cellular small platform, and NSN also happens to be one of O2’s primary network suppliers.

Of course, 100 small cells isn’t exactly an ambitious network. To get to a true heterogeneous network, or hetnet, O2 would need to layer thousands if not tens of thousands throughout London, providing a dense layer of high-capacity nodes under the macro network’s coverage umbrella.

But Franks said O2 is only in the first phase of its plans. This small-scale rollout will test the efficacy of small cells as well as its free Wi-Fi model. If they prove useful, O2 will look to expand the network throughout the U.K. as well as coordinate with its parent company, Telefonica, on international launches. But as of now, Franks said, O2 doesn’t envision creating small-cell networks on a grand scale. O2 is taking a more practical approach initially, using Wi-Fi and small cells to target high-demand areas rather than planning a ubiquitous network of tiny nodes.

Still, there is a lot of potential here for O2 to go big if it wants to. Unlike other carriers deploying Wi-Fi, O2 doesn’t plan to integrate hotspots with its mobile network or sell capacity to outside customers. “We don’t see any value in charging for Wi-Fi,” Franks said. “People just aren’t willing to pay for it.” Instead it wants to make its money through value-added services, such as selling multimedia or offering digital-wallet capabilities. If that model works, it could find itself putting up Wi-Fi all over the U.K. — and small cells would come along for the ride.

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One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight of them: Germany; the UK; the Netherlands, Turkey, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

That explains Humm’s sudden departure. T-Mobile USA’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is one of Vodafone’s biggest competitors. In fact, by running Vodafone Germany Humm will be going head-to-head with T-Mobile Germany, the DT subsidiary he once led.

Vodafone announced the appointment as part of a larger European reorganization. Vodafone is splitting the continent into two operating regions. Italy CEO Paolo Bertoluzzo will run the second region which encompasses southern Europe and includes Vodafone’s carriers in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania, and Malta.

The move is definitely a step up for Humm. While T-Mobile USA is a huge operator by European standards, it’s the smallest of the U.S. Big 4 by far. In several of the countries Humm will be supervising, Vodafone’s carriers are the No. 1 and No. 2 players. He no longer has to assume the role of the scrappy challenger.

Humm won’t assume his new Vodafone mantle until Oct. 1, which is the day after his contract with Deutsche Telekom officially ends. It’s now pretty clear Humm isn’t being punished for his role in the AT&T-Mo debacle. Quite the opposite, he’s being rewarded with an even more important job (albeit by a different company).

That leaves T-Mobile in a bit of turmoil. It needs to scramble to find a permanent CEO while in the process of overhauling its network, launching LTE and executing its new “challenger strategy.” As I wrote yesterday though, the last thing a new T-Mobile CEO should do is try to ‘shake up’ the company, as new chiefs are wont to do. Humm and team had put together a compelling plan to take on T-Mobile’s larger rivals, and whomever winds up running T-Mo should give it a chance to work

Image courtesy of Flickr user LGEPR

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Recently I had conversations with three such companies that all happened to be based in the U.K. It just goes to show you that while Silicon Valley may be the center of attention in the smartphone and mobile data revolution, the small companies that are innovating the nuts and bolts of wireless infrastructure and gadgets are still hailing from the mobile heartland, Europe.

Psion: a practical approach to open-source device hardware

Many of you industry old-timers will remember Psion from the early days of the smartphone. The London-based gadget maker helped pioneer the personal digital assistant and the netbook back in the 1980s and 1990s, but its most lasting legacy was Project Protea, which produced the Symbian operating system.

Nokia eventually took over the Symbian OS, selling millions upon millions of smartphones before its controversial decision to sunset the platform in favor of Windows Phone. Now Psion is making ruggedized wireless computing devices for industrial use. That may not sound that exciting, but Psion has a unique twist.

The company has designed its hardware to be modular and open-source, inviting its customers to custom-build their own devices and design their own components. For instance, one of Psion’s customers in the sports medicine space has created a temperature-gauge reader that can scan a digital thermometer embedded in a football helmet, Psion mobile business development director Gregg Anderson told me at CTIA Wireless. If the player becomes overheated, the scanner sends out an instant warning, alerting coaches and team doctors the player needs to be taken out of the game.

Psion claims customers can build custom devices like Lego sets. Many of the components — keyboards, displays, sensor arrays — can be swapped out in the field with a screwdriver. But Psion has made almost every aspect of its devices modular with a little tinkering, including the CPU and wireless radio boards. What’s more, through Psion’s developer program, partners can design, build, license and sell their own components. According to Anderson, 12,000 developers in its Ingenuity Working program have used the platform to create everything from custom bar code scanners to highly specialized scientific instruments.

Mesaplexx: Everything is better — even RF filters — in 3D

Active antennas are starting to make their way into mobile networks, promising better coverage, big boosts in capacity and the ability to support multiple bands — all in compact form factor. But on the tower side, the capacity benefits of these new antenna systems are being strangled by limitations in a component further down the radio frequency chain: the filter.

In the already not-very-glamorous world of wireless network infrastructure, you can’t get any less sexy than the filter, a component responsible for cleaning up radio frequencies and separating uplink from downlink transmissions. Mesaplexx, however, is giving the tired old airwave RF scrubber a facelift. It has devoted a bunch of engineers and advanced mathematics to developing a three-dimensional filter, called the XCube, with which any active antenna would be proud to be paired, said Mark Bole, the CEO of the Reading, U.K.–based startup.

“You make the typical filter by carving out some holes in a chunk of metal,” Bole said. “The RF is manipulated in a 2D environment. We’re working in 3D.”

That sounds a bit like Nigel Tufnel’s amp going up to 11 in This is Spinal Tap, but Bole assures us the extra spatial dimension provides real benefits. The filter is much more efficient in preserving the power the tower pumps out, while most filters turn many of those watts into heat. A loss of power means a loss of capacity, and excess heat can damage the delicate electronic components in the antenna itself. Active antennas promise boosts in LTE network capacity up to 65 percent, Bole said, and advanced filter technologies like Mesaplexx’s will allow those systems to reach their potential.

Nujira: a straightjacket for your phone’s battery

If filters are the most boring hardware component, the power amplifier has to be a close second. The amp does exactly what its name implies: It boosts the power of the wireless signal so it can bridge the gap between the device and tower or vice versa.

If you’ve been reading our LTE device coverage, though, you know that battery life in LTE smartphones sucks. One of the big reasons for 4G’s power-draining tendencies is the technology’s enormous complexity. The LTE air interface has what is known as a high peak-to-average ratio, which means the LTE waveform is replete with tall spikes and low dips in power level. Meanwhile 2G and 3G waveforms tend to be a lot less hilly.

Think of LTE as classical music and 2G or 3G as heavy metal, said Jeremy Hendy, the VP of sales and marketing at Nujira, a Cambridge, U.K.–based maker of power-modulation chips. Classical music has long moments of quiet punctuated with wild crescendos, while heavy metal music is fairly uniform in loudness. Heavy metal will sound just as good (or bad) on any old amplifier, but to truly appreciate classical music you need a high-powered amp to capture the music’s nuance and delicacy, Hendy said.

“You need a high-powered amp for LTE otherwise the signal is distorted,” Hendy said. “That’s why the power on an LTE is so bad. For every 4 watts you put in you only get 1 watt out.”

The red represents the power produced by the amplifier. With Nujira’s technology (bottom) the power produced closely tracks the power required by the waveform.

The amp constantly pumps out enough power to fuel those extreme peaks, but most of the time the device actually needs far less wattage. That means a lot of energy just goes to waste. Nujira has created a power-modulation chip that wraps up the waveform in a “latex bondage suit” of sorts, Hendy said. The power the amplifier puts out closely follows the power contours of the waveform, creating an extremely energy-efficient transmission.

How efficient? Hendy said the technology can increase the battery life of an LTE device by 25 percent, which is no small feat considering the increasing power challenges device makers face.

Bored photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Dan Bannister

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In a recent interview, CTO Mike Flanagan said Arieso is working with a major U.S. carrier to plan for on cellular optimization planning — technology that could eventually fuel the advent of small cells. (Update: Flanagan reached back out to me to clarify that Arieso’s U.S. carrier customer is using its technology to optimize its macro network today, but it isn’t currently planning a small cell rollout). He wouldn’t name the operator, saying only it was a Tier I player, but that operator was using its network analysis and optimization tools to identify areas of high-congestion in the network – both in specific locations and from specific customers, Flanagan said. Those analytics can then be used to plan the operator’s future network expansion with precision. Rather than add an expensive layer of bandwidth throughout the network, Flanagan said, carriers could target only the areas where they need the extra bandwidth, on a cell-by-cell and even a customer-by-customer basis.

“If you are living on this planet, spectrum arrives slowly,” Flanagan said. Carriers can no longer count on spectrum being readily available for new networks, as evidenced by Verizon Wireless and AT&Ts’ to sort out what airwaves remain. “The answer is not to necessarily build new networks but improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the existing ones,” Flanagan said.

By signal-to-noise ratio, Flanagan is referring to basic quandary of cellular network design: the further away a device is from the tower, the more noise is introduced into the transmission, impairing signal strength and reducing bandwidth available over the connection. Building networks that can minimize that problem is the goal of an emerging tech sector of the wireless industry called self-optimizing networks, or SON. In my recent Long View analysis in GigaOM Pro (subscription required), I explore how technologies like Arieso’s and Intucell’s aim to use SON technologies to create more consistent, more resilient and higher-capacity networks by making them multi-layered and agile.

In Arieso’s case SON means planning upgrades to the network with surgical precision. In Europe, Vodafone is already using Arieso’s platforms to pinpoint problem spots in its networks, Flanagan said.

“For instance, if I have a customer who lives right at the edge of a cell consuming enormous amounts of data, he’s messing up the network for everyone else using that cell,” Flanagan said. Rather than try to boot that customer off the network, the carrier could offer that customer a femtocell or deploy a public small cell in his vicinity, both of which would suddenly free up network resources for everyone else. “For less than a $1000 investment, I clear up a capacity problem, and assuming it’s a good customer paying a $100 monthly bill, I get a return on that investment after a year.”

Operators aren’t going to go around placing individual cells for every customer, but the level of precision Arieso’s planning tools allow can be scaled network-wide, allowing operators to deploy heterogeneous networks, or hetnets, using small cells to build high-density clusters of capacity under the macro network umbrella. Right now, Arieso’s technology isn’t true SON because there’s no “self”-actualizing component — carriers still have to install those new cells manually. But Flanagan said that Arieso’s platform could eventually become the basis for dynamically self-optimizing systems like those being deployed by Intucell today. In such a scenario, operators don’t react to congestion problems by installing new base station. Instead the network itself reconfigures itself on the fly to meet traffic demands, following congestion as it moves through the network.

Cells image courtesy of Flickr user Patrick Hoesly

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Users of The Programme List can search for TV shows by title, actors, guests and other keywords and then add their favorite shows to a list to track all future air dates.

The list also contains links to episodes available online, and shows can be tracked even when on hiatus. The whole thing utilizes a very simplified UI, looking more like the unfinished work of a startup than something that a seasoned broadcaster would launch. The BBC’s R&D department explained in a blog post that the site is part of an effort to explore “how people remember programmes and how best to help them do that.”

That’s a laudable effort, but there’s something else that’s remarkable about the site: The Programme List is specific to U.K. TV and radio programming, but it’s not limited to shows aired by the BBC. Instead, it also lists content from the ITV, Channel 4 and Five.

Does that list sound somewhat familiar? If so, that’s probably because those networks were also partnering with the BBC for its failed effort to create a British counterpart to Hulu.com. The three broadcasters joined forces in 2007 to work on what was then called Project Kangaroo. However, the project was held up by regulators, and eventually killed in early 2009.

A project like The Programme List is avoiding similar scrutiny with a much more decentralized approach: It replaces a central repository with simple lists of air times and links to online resources, thus avoiding all the regulatory and licensing nightmares. In a way, that’s again very much the TiVo approach to content aggregation: Instead of licensing it from broadcasters, it simply empowers the consumers to find and watch content with less hassle.

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