Orange Mobile Data Forum
This week I attended the Orange Mobile Data Forum in London. It’s a popular event with over 1300 registrations across the six UK locations in October. Orange gave a compelling presentation on why enterprises should consider Orange as their sole network operator. There was also a very interesting technical presentation.
Some snippets…
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2005 is seen by Accenture and Orange as the key year for significant uptake of wireless in the enterprise.
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A recent study of 200 CEOs revealed that they saw wireless as the most important technology.
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In 2005, Orange will be introducing a wireless convergence product called ‘Business Anywhere’ that will greatly simplify connection to 3G, Wi-Fi, lan and dial up based on enterprise defined rules. The worker will just select ‘Connect’ and the appropriate service will be used based on availability. Furthermore, Orange is partnering with some Wi-Fi hotspot providers so that there will only be one bill. (This won’t exclude use of others which would obviously be billed separately).
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In time, it will be possible to perform transparent handover between Wi-Fi, lan, 3G and dial up based on availability.
Some technicals:
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The Orange 2G network currently has about 13000 sites and covers 99% of the population (88% of the landmass). GPRS supports up to 30kbits/sec down and 10kbits/sec up with typically 750ms latency.
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The 3G network currently has about 4000 sites and covers 70% of the population (80% by end of 2005). It supports up to 384kbits/sec down and 128kbits/sec up. The latency is typically 250ms. [Note that these are theoretical values based on no contention (sharing). A recent AirCom study of indoor 3G access access showed Orange and Vodafone to be more typical 178kbits/sec-198kbits/sec down and 43kbits/sec-44 kbits/sec up]. These speeds will increase to 384kbits/sec up and down in 2008. 3G coverage should reach population saturation in 2008.
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HSDPA, in trials from H1 2006 should support 1 to 2 Mbit/sec and 120ms latency.
Obviously, Orange sees a lot of added value in providing services as well as connectivity. However, unlike the consumer space, they are being more sensible and not trying to own everything. They realise partnerships are the key. Orange can’t provide everything. This includes partnerships with 3rd party service providers and partnerships with service companies as evidenced by the presence and presentation by Louise Lackenby, a partner at Accenture.
It was interesting that Orange was selling it’s ‘Business Anywhere’ service as a liberating service. Some people might see full time voice and data connectivity as an intrusive and oppressive thing. Orange argues that it allows greater use to be made of dead time, for example on trains and in airports, freeing up personal time later in the day when you don’t otherwise have to catch up.
VOIP currently isn’t feasible over GPRS and 3G due to high latency (round trip times). VOIP will become more and more possible as the mobile networks improve and latency decreases. In fact, large companies sometimes use a leased line connected direct to mobile networks for increased security (data not going over internet) and reliability. In time, these may be used for voice as well as data traffic.
As an aside, at the conference I also came across an interesting WML and JAVA client side wireless caching system by Lan2Lan for the BlackBerry.
Update: 13 October 2005: Orange now have the presentations for this event online. Unfortunately, they have excluded the interesting technical session.
