A few weeks ago NASCAR teams held their Daytona pre-season thunder to fine tune their new cars. But what does NASCAR evaluate and how do the race car teams get the race car performance data to and from the track to their headquarters?

Car racing today is about outperforming your competitors on very small details. Chassis and engines are similar and 1/100 and 1/1000 of seconds are chased in the detailed tuning of tire pressures, angles, suspension and aerodynamic details. This year, NASCAR is introducing a completely new generation of a car. Understanding how the new car will behave on the track will be critical for success.

As a complement to regular measurements, teams this time used action cameras placed in strategic locations on the cars for filming during testing. Cameras were placed by the side pods, close to the ground, under the floor to capture the rear suspensions, and in the wheel houses to watch tires in action. The films provide high resolution views and details on how the car performs. (Filming is only allowed during testing. During practices and the real race, data is collected from various sensors.)

All data generated from the filming is analyzed after each session. Some data can be analyzed at the track, some needs to be sent to team headquarters for analysis. Most teams use laptops with wireless data cards and rely on the mobile network for transmitting the data. Ericsson sees large spikes in upstream data traffic from the teams immediately after a filming session has been completed. This raises the bar on network performance, its reliability and throughput, so no time is wasted in order for the teams to get their data analyzed.

My predictions for the future:
* Telemetry data from race cars will continue to grow quickly and is a good example of how the Big Data movement is affecting racing.

* High Capacity Network access at race tracks will grow in importance, the faster the results can be delivered from the track, the better the teams can prepare their cars.

* With more and more applications moving from PCs into the Cloud the Network becomes ever so critical.

…and just because I like it, here’s the film again!

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The solution is to make the mobile network itself mobile!

A Cell on Wheels, a “COW” is a complete mobile base station including radio antennas and backhaul placed on a truck. They are used to support major events requiring a temporary mobile solution. Multiple COWs can be deployed to boost network capacity extensively. COW’s are today primarily deployed in the events of natural disasters and at premium sports events, both of which require quick and temporary high network capacity.

NASCAR is one example of a sporting event requiring COW’s. In order to support the 39 annual NASCAR events, 10 COWs are on tour with the race teams. Without these COWs and crews, the mobile screens of fans would be dark for both tailgating and possibly the race event itself. Check out this NASCAR video to get a hint of the benefits.

Another alternative solution to COW’s are the installation of a permanent antenna solution at the venue, known as a Distributed Antenna System (DAS). DOW’s or “DAS on Wheels” systems are marvels as they eliminate the engineering needs for antenna design and deployment – the solution complexity is now reduced to radio and transmission equipment.

There is an emerging third tier for even smaller configurations. These are COLT’s or “Cell on Light Trucks” which enable even faster capacity augmentation at sporting venues and disaster recovery support. Because they can be deployed in larger volumes and much closer to potential disaster zones, they are extremely economical as well.

My predictions of the future are:
* Mobile units are becoming an integrated part of the densification strategy for a mobile network.
* The evolution and diversification of the original COW into DOWs and COLTs make it possible to support a variety of deployment scenarios.
* As Sandy recently proved, Mobile units play a key role in disaster recovery situations given the primary need to bring up mobile communications first.
* Future concert and sports venues without voice and data coverage will struggle to attract fans as the future of live events is about the integration and access of live and multimedia coverage.

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Here is my suggested three-step guide to get you online, exchanging ideas and making contacts:

Networked Man 1.0 – During your first month, create a platform

• Define the topics that concern you, or that you want to have influence over in the future.
• Gain an understanding of the basic mechanisms for influencing people in the social-media world; for example, read Digital Leader – 5 Simple Keys to Success and Influence by Erik Qualman.
• Establish Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and start to “listen” to a handful of people you trust.
• Start measuring your influence score with Klout, Kred and PeerIndex to see where you start from, and you will be delighted to see progress soon.

Networked Man 2.0 – Follow your influencers, 15 minutes a day for the first three months

• Start reading a few blogs on a regular basis, and pay attention to how they are written, and take inspiration from Heidi Cohen’s blogs on blogging.
• Get a deeper understanding of how digital influencing really works; for example, read Return on Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing by Mark Shaefer.
• Start retweeting tweets/links/pictures that you like on Twitter and/or LinkedIn
• Play around with possible tools – for example, WordPress, tumblr, Blogger, Pinterest, Gentlemint and foursquare – that could help you convey your thoughts.

Networked Man 3.0 – Start influencing for two focused hours a week

• Find a storytelling format that suits you, and stick to it. The art of writing is like cooking using basic skills and tweaking each dish from the base.
• Identify a young woman interested in becoming your digital mentor. Daughter, co-worker or friend – it does not matter. Be open to their ideas on how you can best convey your points.
• Start blogging or sharing pictures about a topic you like; we are all experts on something. Spread the links to your blog through your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts.
• Start making your own comments to the links you retweet, and do it daily.

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Mobility has improved many aspects of our lives, especially how we communicate, and through new and existing services, it continues to do so. As users, we now demand connectivity anywhere and anytime.

Nowhere is this demand more evident than in the results of the report, which found that 85 percent of the world’s population will have internet coverage via 3G by 2017 – with close to 9 billion mobile subscriptions, compared to 6 billion at the end of 2011.

More astonishing is the tremendous growth in smartphones. Today we have some 700 million smartphones in the world. This is expected to quadruple to around 3 billion in five years as smartphones become more and more affordable around the globe. Think about that; 3 billion users able to access cloud services, use apps and be connected 24/7. With all of these factors taken in to consideration, we expect global mobile data traffic to grow 15 times by the end of 2017. This will surely impact the way we communicate and interact with the world.

But subscriptions, devices and traffic are not the only things growing. The networks themselves are evolving rapidly. Apart from the astonishing build out of 3G networks, which allow high-speed internet access to most of the worlds population, we also see a massive expansion in 4G. By 2017, 50 percent of the world’s population will have 4G coverage. Just think about the new innovations and applications that could be possible.

The only thing we can be sure of today is that the world is changing rapidly. Read the Traffic and Market report to get a glimpse of these changes.

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Second, networks need to be smart. Smartphones do not work well together with dumb pipes; and neither do other devices or services. Being smart allows networks to have differentiated connectivity options – and provides application programming interfaces with enhanced applications that have vital service attributes. A smart network is the foundation for delivering higher value to users and service providers. And business model innovation requires smart networks.

Third, networks need to deliver superior performance. As applications and services become more and more similar, superior network performance will be the key differentiator between operators, from a coverage and capacity perspective.

Finally, networks can be significantly simpler than they are today. In IP networks a lot of products are built with a single purpose. Tomorrow, a collection of single-purpose products will be consolidated into a more powerful, more capable multi-purpose product platform.

I believe that future networks  can be predicted as follows:
* Mobile applications will set the network evolution/architecture agenda.
* Triple-network integration will gain traction; in other words, 3G/4G/Wi-Fi will all become part of the same wireless access.
* Network transformation will take over from network transpiration as a primary network strategy. Sweating too many old network assets could be risky if and when the competition transforms its networks.
* With stronger network visions and business models, investment appetite will increase globally.

The post Scalable, smart, superior and simple: the standards of the future appeared first on The Networked Society Blog.

Hetnets use a mix of large and small radio cells to provide optimal coverage and performance. They bring a lot of benefits, but also a few challenges. That’s where the new 4 Ps come in.

With PETABYTES, it’s all about understanding the traffic patterns. The expected evolution over time, and the price/performance considerations between available access technologies, are all factors to consider. This becomes increasingly delicate as device and service types grow exponentially. In addition, there is a lack of correlation between traffic volumes and revenues in the future.

The physical PLACEMENT of a cell is critical. A small cell has one optimal location from a performance perspective, and the shorter radio reach limits the ability to deviate from that optimal location. Indoor and outdoor placements impose different constraints on the deployment of small cells.

The POWER challenge is twofold, involving both primary and secondary (back-up) power. There are different options for a primary power source, AC or DC. If there is no existing power supply, one has to be designed and deployed. Back-up power could be more complex, with restrictions, for example, on how and where batteries can be placed.

The existing PLANT – such as fiber, copper and coax wires – determines the backhaul options. The simplest scenario is to reuse the existing wiring. A radio scenario is attractive when no wiring exists and can’t be installed easily. Extending fiber, and power, to optimal cell locations can make business sense for specific applications.

I predict that we will see four trends emerge as hetnets become more popular:
* Deployment strategies will be built on a clear view of the Petabytes, Placement, Power and Plant scenario for each specific site and situation
* Many operators will want to get their cells into the same optimal locations, and may have to share cells in order to avoid inferior placements
* Property owners are interested in preparing their buildings with power and backhaul wiring suitable for optimal small-cell deployment locations, to make them attractive for potential tenants
* There will be many urban deployment use cases developed, with very different traffic scenarios during the time of the year (temporary needs) and day (permanent needs).

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In my daily life, I use three applications with widely differing price and traffic patterns:

• a smartphone with a data limit of USD 10/month per 2GB of traffic 
• a Netflix subscription costing USD 1/month and generating 30GB of traffic
• a work environment (mobile, desktop and associated data services) costing USD 100/month for 10-50GB of traffic.

All three of these services can be provided with mobile access. It’s hard to see how dollar values spanning from tens of dollars per GB to only a few cents per GB can and should be supported using a single billing base, namely the number of bits and bytes that are transported. Since the value delivered is becoming more and more decoupled from the amounts of bits and bytes transported, and in many cases correlates negatively with traffic volumes, new business models are inevitable.

Imagine what would happen if a hamburger restaurant adopted a unit price per calorie of food. If this were applied to the standard menu, the prices would be very high for burgers and fries – and very low for salads. As a direct result, burger sales could be expected to fall sharply, and sales of salad would shoot up. It would be hard to run a sustainable restaurant business using this kind of business model.

We now have the potential to deliver exceptional added value on mobile broadband. Business-model innovation is essential if we are to capture this generated value. Otherwise, it will be difficult to continue funding the required investments for 3G/4G/Wi-Fi network infrastructure expansion and modernization.

My forecasts for the future of networked business models are:

• business-model innovations will focus on the 5 to 15 percent of mobile broadband traffic that is the most valuable
• the billing base for these services will be linked to new kinds of service-level agreements involving one or several new connectivity attributes such as latency, latency variation, availability, reliability, security, integrity and coverage
• the factor determining how platinum or gold services and users are defined will shift from “who uses the most network resources?” to “which services or users generate the most revenue or the best margins?”
• most business-model innovations will involve higher charges for service providers, to be bundled into the overall price per service.

Mobile networks are among the most advanced infrastructures in business today, and there’s no reason that the value captured in these networks should decline as the value added to adjacent industries increases substantially over time.

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I recently posted a blog on our smartphone use throughout the day. Today, I thought I’d write about our relationship to apps, and how those apps are changing the way we use and access the internet.

Apps are simple. Consumers are finding new apps to address the challenges and chores that everyday life brings; they do this spontaneously as new situations arise, and think little of it.

Consumers are demanding apps for almost everything. They encompass public transport systems, schools, hospitals, recreational facilities, shops and restaurants, and cultural facilities such as libraries, concert halls and museums.

It seems only natural that there should be an app for local-weather reports, another for accessing information about a particular product while in the store, and further apps for getting medical advice or for paying bills.

And so, without even noticing it, consumers have internalized the cloud in their most basic behavioral patterns. Their daily routine of communicating, commuting, working and exercising now depends on intermittent access to their favorite apps from various locations and through a range of devices.

Just look at your own habits: what kind of apps do you rely on most on a daily basis?

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Many of us wake up to the sound of an alarm clock. That alarm clock is embedded in a phone. For a lot of us, that phone is now a smartphone. This habit of having our phone close to us at all times continues throughout the day – we use it to interact with our friends, map our route, develop our interests and catch up with work.

According to ConsumerLab research, more than 40 percent of smartphone owners worldwide log on to the internet before getting out of bed. In the US, one-fifth of smartphone users log on to Facebook while still in bed. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, smartphone use before rising is more varied, with 15 percent browsing the internet, 10 percent reading e-mail, 9 percent chatting and 14 percent logging on to social-networking services.

During rush hour and at lunch time, usage levels reach their peak.

Lunchtime use is focused on communication globally, but we see local variations in the apps that are favored. In the US, Facebook is very big at lunchtime, Southern Europeans rely heavily on text messaging and Northern Europeans enjoy a combination of the two. East Asians have a greater appetite for chat and instant messaging.

When commuting, smartphone use varies depending on transport. GPS and maps are used more intensively in the US, where many commute by car. But Facebook and online games are more popular in Sweden – the country with the highest proportion of public transport commuters in the Western World.

The only point in the day at which usage levels dip is at dinner time, which is considered to be ‘family’ time for many.

Around 50 percent of smartphone users worldwide access the internet in bed at night. And they go on surfing until their eyelids get heavy and it’s time to sleep.

At dawn, the smartphone is there to wake us up again, becoming an intrinsic part of our everyday lives.

The post How close are you and your phone? appeared first on The Networked Society Blog.

According to Ericsson, these figures, which are to be released as part of Akamai’s The State of the Internet report, show that mobile data growth has doubled in just twelve months.  Users with modern, capable devices, without spending limitations are accessing the internet – and the quality of the smartphone has a lot to do with the applications they use and how long they surf. Online video accounts for most of the data traffic for the top five to 10 percent of smartphone users, higher than for e-mail or web browsing.

Location seems to matter too. In North America, high-end smartphones generate twice the traffic than comparable smartphones analyzed in Asia and Europe. Also, the top 5 to 10 percent of smartphone users are willing to spend up to 40 minutes a day watching online video. The average users, however, spends about 30 seconds.

These high-end smartphone users are driving traffic, and demanding prioritized services. By doing so, they are challenging current business models and networks. Heading towards the Networked Society, how will the industry adapt?

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