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January 20, 2012

Mobile carriers and their partners in the wireless industry who've been long arguing that current 4G networks aren't really fourth-generation technology at all will be happy to hear that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has finally agreed on what constitutes true 4G service, and it's a lot faster than what's on the market today.

At a meeting in Geneva yesterday, the ITU agreed on the technical specifications for IMT-Advanced-– commonly known as true fourth generation technology, and decided that LTE-Advanced and Wireless MAN-Advanced qualified for IMT-Advanced status as well.

So just how fast are IMT-Advanced technologies? ITU secretary general Hamadoun Toure said in a statement that IMT-Advanced technology will make the present day smartphone feel like an old dial-up Internet connection.

The feeling was also echoed by Francois Rancy, the director of the ITU's Radiocommunication Office, who said that "IMT-Advanced would be like putting a fiber optic broadband connection on your mobile phone, making your device at least 500 times faster than today's 3G smartphones."

Like LTE technology, the new 4G standard uses wireless spectrum more efficiently than older technologies, allowing higher amounts of data and voice to be sent over smaller amounts of mobile bandwidth. This efficiency will be even more critical as wireless operators from all around the globe struggle to cope with an avalanche of mobile data traffic.

The argument over what qualifies as real fourth-generation wireless technology and what is merely an upgraded 3G service hit a boiling point in December 2010 amid widespread marketing of WiMAX, LTE and HSPA+ as 4G services. The issue prompted the ITU to release a statement that seemed to concede that 4G had become more of a marketing term instead of a technical specification.

"As the most advanced wireless technologies today currently defined mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as 4G, although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMAX, and to other 'evolved' 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance, spped and overall capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed," the ITU said.

AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint have all voiced their intentions to deploy LTE-Advanced, and Clearwire says the TD-LTE overlay for its WiMAX network will be "LTE-Advanced-ready." They're all currently marketing their respective LTE and WiMAX services as 4G, and T-Mobile USA advertises its HSPA+ service as 4G.

Sprint added last fall that its LTE-Advanced network would be considerably faster than the LTE service it's currently building. It will be interesting to see what term Sprint will call it in its marketing brochures.

In other mobile news

In an auditorium full of people, Apple today presented its vision for the future of education and the modern classroom appears to rely heavily on the company's iPad device.

Apple launched iBooks 2, iBooks Author and a revamped iTunes app for the iPad, all free applications that Apple hopes will revolutionize how students learn in today's schools as well as when they are at home.

To be sure, iBooks 2, a free application for the iPad, is Apple's outlet for digital textbooks that integrate a variety of multi-media content, such as videos, 3D models and widgets. Users can also take notes, highlight passages, create flashcards from glossary terms and a whole lot more.

Perhaps the star of today's show, however, was iBooks Author, a piece of OS X desktop software available for free through Apple's App Store, which allows just about anyone to make an interactive book or textbook on a Mac. The Authoring software allows users to drag and drop documents created in Microsoft's Word to create the text of an iBook. Video clips, widgets, photos and more content can also be easily inserted into the digital books.

Users can expand on Apple's existing templates and widgets by using HTML and Javascript. At launch, Apple says iBooks 2 will focus on high school textbooks, which sell for $14.99 or less. Apple has partnered with major textbook publishing houses, including McGraw Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

For its part, Pearson has Algebra 1, Biology, Environmental Science and Geometry-- books used by more than 4 million high school students in the U.S.

McGraw Hill has Algebra 1, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry and Physics, all of which are available today.

Additionally, Apple expanded on iTunes U, which aims to facilitate collaboration between student and teachers at various educational institutions. iTunes U is currently home to more than 350,000 free lectures, videos, books and podcasts from learning institutions all over the world.

Universities such as Yale, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Beijing Open University and the University of Tokyo, as well as broadcasters such as PBS, offer free content on iTunes U.

Apple said that iTunes U will act as the main hub for faculty and students, where users can check and submit assignments, view syllabi, communicate with instructors, sign up for classes and view teacher-posted videos and notes.

Six universities-– Duke, Yale, HACC, MIT and The Open University, have had early access to the iTunes U, and the app is available today for K-12 schools as well.

The impact of today's announcements on the educational materials market likely will be mulled for months going forward. And one thing is for sure-- Apple is once again aiming to corner a content market in order to sell more of its iconic hardware, in this particular case, the iPad, and, in the case of the book writer/editor, the Mac.

In other mobile news

According to Nielsen Market Research, overall demand for the iPhone has increased by 19.8 percent in December alone, compared to three months earlier. But Android still managed to steal some of the spotlight, nevertheless.

Prior to the launch of the iPhone 4S, Apple's marketshare among recent smartphone buyers had been 36 percentage points behind Android's. Apple had about a 25.1 percent market share compared to Android's 61.6 percent.

But by November 2011, that gap had narrowed to less than 10 percent. In December, it closed to a mere 2.5 percent.

The bottom line: the iPhone and iOS are rapidly catching up to Android. And to no one's surprise, RIM's BlackBerry platform came in a very distant third, with less than a 14 percent of the market, followed by Windows Mobile, which held just 4.6 percent.

Platforms such as Palm, Symbian and Windows Phone 7 each claimed less than 1.5 percent market share. But when it comes to platforms, having a few hundred thousand apps isn't as important as having the right apps, Nielsen notes.

"The most surprising element about this report is that the bulk of time spent on smartphones is on a relatively small number of apps," said Don Kellogg, a Nielsen thought leader in the mobile segment.

"We frequently hear about the hundreds of thousands of apps available on different platforms, but in reality it's far more important for a platform to support the right 50 to 100 apps as opposed to hundreds of thousands," he insisted.

Additionally, some of the iPhone's fourth quarter sales came from delayed purchasing. The surge in iPhone sales in the fourth quarter was balanced by some weakness in the third quarter as consumers waited for a new iPhone.

"We expected to see a massive bump in iPhone sales in that quarter," said Michael Morgan, senior analyst for mobile devices at ABI Research. "The size of the hit was impressive but not out of reality."

There was a lot of pent-up demand, Morgan noted, which created a bad third-quarter for Apple. Also, some users were attracted to the iPhone by new features offered on the 4S model.

The iPhone 4S hit at an opportune time for buyers. "The incremental iPhone 4S refresh was just good enough to justify an upgrade for many Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Microsoft smartphone users as they came to the end of their contracts or started looking for an attractive Christmas present in the fourth quarter," said Neil Mawston, director of global wireless practice at Strategy Analytics.

"A combination of upgraders, switchers and gift-givers drove the iPhone to higher volumes in the holiday season," he added.

"But make no mistake, Android will come back in time," said Morgan. "This is part of the pattern for Apple. A new product and a really big bump-- it happens all the time."

Overall, iPhone sales will taper off when the device gets to the end of its normal cycle, he noted. Unlike Apple, Android sales are not dependent on annual upgrades or new product introductions by one single phone manufacturer.

Two phases will send Apple to a more-distant second place-- months between new iPhones coming out, and the inevitable drop in late summer as users wait for the next iPhone.

"We expect Android to lose market share to Apple in the near-term but then recover a bit of its market share around the middle of 2012 as iPhone buyers hold off and wait for the next iPhone upgrade in the second half of the year," said Mawston.

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Source: Apple.

    This article was featured on Business 5.0 and on Tech Blog.