Everyone’s got their own pet theory on when and if a 3G version of the iPhone is going to be made available. But this week, one of the many Apple iPhone hackers out there claims to have found the most solid evidence yet that a 3G version of the device is imminent.

Zibri, the hacker behind the ZiPhone application, one of the original jailbreaking and unlocking tools for the iPhone, made the discovery while trawling through the code for the iPhone beta SDK.

In the code there is a line which makes reference to the Infineon SGOLD3H chipset, otherwise known as the PMB8878. The currently available iPhone uses the SGOLD-28876 as its EDGE-capable baseband processor. The SGOLD3 however is fully HSDPA 7.2Mbps capable, which suggests the next generation iPhone will pack blazing fast connectivity.

More suggestive evidence of the existence of a 3G iPhone also turned up late last month when Japan’s biggest intercom maker, Aiphone, revealed that it has been in discussions with Apple since last summer and has recently come to a friendly agreement that will allow the Californian gadget vendor to use its beloved “iPhone” brand in Japan.

It turns out Aiphone owns the trademark to the “Aiphone” brand in Japan and about 70 other countries. But while “Aiphone” and “iPhone” are spelt differently in English, the phonetic similarities apparently give Aiphone the company the rights to the “iPhone” trademark in Japan.

Regardless, it’s probably a safe assumption that Apple wouldn’t go to all this trouble if it wasn’t going to launch the iPhone in Japan, which has a technological landscape that lends itself to 3G - NTT DoCoMo and Softbank on WCDMA and KDDI on 1x EV-DO.

Aside from this, the apparent drying up of iPhone supplies in the US has set tongues wagging, as has T-Mobile Germany’s latest move to cut iPhone prices as part of a strategy to shift units. Personally, I think it’s a sure thing that a 3G iPhone is in the pipeline, and it looks like the Apple Developers Conference in June is the safest bet for an announcement. After all the final version of the 2.0 software is already penned in for release at that event, so why not have new hardware to go with it.

 
 
 
 
It was easy to predict the technology and business paths that would be taken by several winners of the US 700MHz auction, but silence from some means that major surprises may yet be in store.

Auction 73 wrapped up on March 18 grossing $19.1 billion and garnering winning bids from 101 bidders.

Late on April 3, the Federal Communications Commission’s anti-collusion gag rule on the auction’s winners was lifted, meaning they could discuss plans for their newly won spectrum for the first time. The 700MHz spectrum is slated to be cleared of analog TV transmissions during February 2009 when broadcasters are mandated to shift to digital, thus enabling the winning 700MHz bidders to start deploying and activating their networks.

Though numerous 700MHz license winners announced plans for the spectrum they won in Auction 73 as soon as they legally could, notably keeping mum about its 700MHz intentions is Dish Network. The company, the second-largest US satellite TV provider behind DirecTV, was the auction’s third-highest bidder via its affiliate Frontier Wireless. Frontier offered $711 million for a nearly nationwide footprint of unpaired E-block licenses. It did not win a handful of E-block licenses that Qualcomm acquired in order to boost in MediaFLO mobile TV service in top metro areas.

Qualcomm, the auction’s fourth-highest bidder, bid $554.6 million for eight unpaired, 6 MHz E-block licenses that will be used to enhance its MediaFLO TV service in Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The company also bid $3.5 million to acquire three B-block licenses for 12 MHz of paired 700MHz spectrum near key Qualcomm offices, which will use the spectrum for R&D purposes.

Unlike Qualcomm, Dish did not announce its 700MHz plans on April 3, leading to lots of speculation about its motives for winning the spectrum. “The two most likely Dish uses are (1) for improved internal operations for existing services, for example as a return path or to increase capability for high-definition local-into-local video service or (2) to provide a new mobile video service, a la Qualcomm’s MediaFLO operating out of the adjacent D-Block spectrum, which could be bundled with its at-home service,” said financial analysts at Stifel Nicolaus.

Dish was formerly part of EchoStar Communications before that company split into two publicly traded companies in January, The other half of the former EchoStar, still using the EchoStar moniker, runs a satellite equipment business. It owns SlingMedia, maker of the Slingbox place-shifting set-top box. It also recently invested $150 million in satellite Internet startup TerreStar, which was formerly called Motient. TerreStar is developing a hybrid satellite/terrestrial wireless network, leading to suggestions that Dish and EchoStar may be planning to develop a mobile TV service, perhaps incorporating satellite technology such as DVB-SH. If so, they would not be the first to enter that arena in the US. At the CTIA Wireless 2008 trade show in Las Vegas in early April, Craig McCaw’s ICO Global Communications satellite company announced plans for a DVB-SH network using equipment from Alcatel-Lucent.

If Dish opts to offer a mobile TV service, it might do so in conjunction with AT&T Mobility, which is slated to offer mobile TV services via Qualcomm’s MediaFLO network starting in May. However, rumors have circulated about AT&T’s interest in running its own mobile TV service, and it has strong ties to Dish. Most recently, AT&T announced that it would sell Dish’s satellite TV service through an exclusive partnership covering nine southeastern states.

AT&T and Dish have been rumored to be in merger talks for months. Though some analysts say Dish’s winning bids in the 700MHz auction decrease the chance of a takeover by AT&T, there may still be a possibility of merger talks given that overall M&A activity could pick up before year’s end. “The urgency in the markets to consummate another round of consolidation by December is motivated by an overall fear that merger approvals will come to a grinding halt if a Democrat wins [the US presidency] in November. We think the regulatory environment may not be as dire as industry stakeholders suggest, but it will certainly be more rigorous,” said a note from Medley Global Advisors.

Another big 700MHz winner was cable TV operator Cox Communications, which bid $304 million for 700MHz spectrum in the southwest and southeast US. The company might use the spectrum to enter the wireless broadband technology in markets where it already provides cable TV service.

Winning bids from TV-based interests are reminiscent of 2006’s Advanced Wireless Services auction, in which SpectrumCo, a cable TV joint venture dominated by Comcast, took a significant share of 1.7-2.1GHz licenses. Sprint Nextel was a member of that group but subsequently dropped out. The cable JV was the third-largest bidder in the AWS auction, spending nearly $2.4 billion on 137 licenses that cover some 270 million potential customers. While the recently auctioned 700MHz spectrum has stringent buildout rules, the AWS spectrum did not, meaning SpectrumCo can basically sit on its spectrum holdings as long as it wants without launching any services over it.

Meanwhile, another top 700MHz player, CenturyTel, announced that its winning bid of $148.9 million for 69 A- and B-block licenses is aimed at a wireless broadband play. “It provides CenturyTel the opportunity to deliver wireless voice and broadband data to a significant percentage of our current customer base, making CenturyTel the only on-net provider of both fixed and wireless broadband in many of our markets,” said the company.

CenturyTel noted that its new spectrum licenses will provide a wireless overlap to about 53 per cent of its local exchange areas and “creates a highly contiguous footprint that closely overlaps CenturyTel’s existing local exchange and long-haul fiber networks.” The company expects to provide additional information in late 2008 and early 2009 about its 700MHz deployment plans.

The 700MHz auction’s top two bidders also released their plans, and to no one’s great surprise, both Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility intend to deploy Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology at 700MHz. The two companies accounted for 84 per cent of the 700MHz auction’s winning bids, providing a strong base for the introduction of LTE in the US.

Verizon is reportedly already in lab trials with pre-standard LTE technology. The operator is aiming to initiate an LTE field trial during 1Q09, reportedly using non-700MHz spectrum, and launch LTE services, using 700MHz spectrum, reportedly by late 2009, with a wider rollout planned for 2010.

Verizon Wireless, which bid the most in the auction, paid $9.36 billion for 25 A-block licenses, 75 B- block licenses as well as C-block licenses that cover the entire US save for Alaska. The operator said its 700MHz spectrum gain will increase its average spectrum holdings per market to 82MHz from 52MHz.

However, Verizon’s C-block licenses are encumbered by tricky open-access conditions. Though the mobile operator has voluntarily put into motion a strategy to expose its cellular network to more devices and apps via its Open Development Initiative, the company will be required by mandated open-access provisions to open its C-block network to all compatible applications and devices. That will put Verizon under intense regulatory scrutiny, particularly if open-access advocates such as Google-which pushed for the application of open-access conditions on the C-block but did not itself win any spectrum-find fault with Verizon’s conduct in allowing third-party access to its C-block network.

Verizon has defended its C-block win. Combining its national, contiguous, same-frequency C-Block footprint with its planned transition from CDMA to LTE “will make Verizon the preferred partner for developers of a new wave of consumer electronics and applications using this next generation technology,” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon Wireless president and CEO.

AT&T, the largest US mobile operator, was the second-highest bidder in Auction 73, pledging $6.6 billion for 227 B-block licenses. AT&T is adding its new licenses to the existing cache of 700MHz licenses that it bought in 2007 for $2.5 billion from Aloha Partners. AT&T earlier paid $1.3 billion for Advanced Wireless Services licenses in the 2006 auction. AT&T says its broad holdings in the AWS and 700MHz bands cover 95 per cent of the US population. “In the future, AT&T’s 700MHz spectrum holdings will provide the foundation for deployment of next-generation wireless broadband platforms such as HSPA+ and LTE,” the operator said in a statement.

AT&T, which has long contended that its ongoing rollout of HSPA will satisfy end-users for years to come, indicated it might not deploy LTE till 2012-2013. “AT&T will use the 700MHz spectrum, as well as the AWS spectrum we acquired in the 2006 auction, for our 4G LTE transition,” said AT&T CTO John Donovan.

The controversy over internet ad-targeting platform Phorm continues to drag on, with privacy advocates claiming that the UK’s Information Commissioner has “green lighted lawbreaking”.

Phorm is a behavioural advertising system which has stuck trial agreements with UK service providers Virgin Media, BT and Talk Talk. The platform, which monitors web activity and analyses user habits to better target ads, purports to anonymise the data it collects. But a backlash from industry experts and consumers has forced the service providers rolling out Phorm to make the system opt out rather than mandatory.

It’s been in the news recently after allegations that BT trialled a prototype version of the service, without alerting its customers, throughout 2006 and 2007. And privacy advocates such as the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) are battling to persuade the UK’s personal information authority that the platform raises legal concerns.

Last week the Information Commissioner’s Office released a report which acknowledged that the use of Phorm had “provoked considerable public concern,” but said it was happy that the ,”system does not allow the retention of individual profiles of sites visited and adverts presented, and that they hold no personally identifiable information on web users.”

However, the FIPR said Sunday that the ICO has not gone far enough and Nicholas Bohm, general counsel for the organisation claims that, “the illegality stems not from breaching the Data Protection Act directly, but arises from the fact that the system intercepts Internet traffic. Interception is a serious offence, punishable by up to two years in prison. Almost incidentally, because the system is unlawful to operate, it cannot comply with Data Protection principles.”

Bohm argues that Phorm can only legalise its activity by getting express permission not just from the ISP’s customers, but also from the web hosts whose pages it intercepts, as well as from the third parties who communicate with their customers through web-based email, forums or social networking sites.

 
 
 
 
Hamid Akhavan’s claim at the CeBIT trade show in March, that there will be more subscribers to mobile broadband than to DSL within a few years will no doubt lead to a rash of reports predicting that fixed-to- mobile substitution will spread from voice to broadband.

Whether the T-Mobile CEO’s forecast is right is arguable, but fixed-to-mobile broadband substitution? It’s not going to happen, and smart mobile operators shouldn’t want it to.

There’s no doubt that mobile operators have had, and continue to have, a devastating effect on the fixed-line telecoms business. Fixed-line operators have seen their voice revenues decline as using their mobiles instead of their home phones, or have dropped their landlines altogether.

Akhavan’s claim would seem to suggest that the same fate is in store for broadband, as the first generation of mobile services that appear to match DSL and cable on speed and price emerge.

However, there are many reasons mobile broadband will prove no substitute for fixed-line broadband in any meaningful sense. For a start, the two are not comparable in even the most basic respects.

Take Akhavan’s forecast. How many of the 1.8 billion will be using services that customers would accept as an alternative to fixed-line broadband?

The size of his estimate suggests that he has set generous criteria. Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts only 1.6 billion mobile broadband subscriptions by 2012, and only then when you include 665 million subscriptions to conventional WCDMA-based 3G services. WCDMA offers only 384Kbps per user, a speed few would consider to be “broadband”.

Still, a more modest estimate is likely to be impressive when you consider that Informa forecasts only 517 million fixed-line broadband subscriptions by 2012. But it would be misleading to say that mobile broadband will have “overtaken” fixed-line broadband, except in the crudest measure of raw subscription numbers.

Today, each mobile broadband subscription probably has just one user, while a fixed-line subscription is shared among several members of a household. Thus, mobile broadband penetration (of the population) in 2012 will be only 25 per cent, even if you accept Akhavan’s optimistic forecast, compared with fixed-line broadband penetration (of households) of 26 per cent.

True, there are home routers that can turn 3G into a household technology by redistributing the signal via Wi-Fi, but low demand means they are expensive.

A 3G Wi-Fi router typically costs an operator $300 wholesale, according to some analyst estimates, while fixed-line Wi-Fi routers start in shops at about $60. Tellingly, one of the first operators to offer 3G Wi-Fi routers, Vodafone Germany, does not market them anymore, following its move into the DSL market.

Mobile operators’ networks are also poorly equipped to deal with the volumes of traffic seen on fixed-line broadband connections today.

Typically, mobile traffic is backhauled from base stations using several E1 or T1 lines - known in the fixed-line business as “legacy” leased lines. To cope with even modest increases in data traffic, mobile operators will have to make substantial investments.

Informa’s Mobile Backhaul report predicts that North America’s mobile operators will spend a total of $3.3 billion on backhaul between now and the end of 2012 as mobile broadband boosts annual traffic to more than 800,000TB from about 150,000TB last year.

Even so, mobile data traffic will remain tiny in comparison with total Internet traffic. Cisco estimates that US Internet traffic in 2007 totalled 30 exabytes (EB) - that’s 30,000,000TB - and will rise to 72EB in 2011.

The mobile operators tacitly acknowledge that diverting any more than a fraction of “real” Internet usage onto their networks would be disastrous. Dig deep within the terms and conditions of any affordable “unlimited” mobile broadband offer and you will find monthly download limits of as low as 1GB.

Nevertheless, fixed-to-mobile broadband substitution appears to be happening in at least one market; Telekom Austria partly blamed rival low-priced mobile broadband offers for a recent acceleration in its fixed-line losses. 3 UK has also claimed that some customers have taken its mobile broadband services instead of DSL or cable.

This is likely to be a blip; subscribers will soon realise that mobile broadband can’t do what fixed-line broadband can. Regardless of any improvements in value for money, speed, home networking or backhaul, mobile broadband will always be a few steps behind.

But more important, it fails one simple test. Ask yourself: would you advise any of your friends or family to go mobile-only for all their broadband needs?

When the Informer was a stripling, each day used to start with a lovely bowl of Shreddies (a lattice-shaped breakfast cereal), with warm milk and plenty of sugar. One spring morning, he bounded down the stairs - this was back when life was fun - looking forward to his day. There on the table, lovingly placed by his dear Mama, was his bowl of Shreddies. And there was the sugar.

There, also, was little-brother-Informer, all angelic smile and unruly hair. After applying liberal sprinkles of the sweet stuff, the Informer took his first spoonful and promptly gagged in disgust - for little-brother-Informer had replaced the sugar with salt. Why? Because it was April Fools’ day.

Ever since then, the Informer has had no time for April Fools’ day, and the sniggering practical jokes it involves. And he’s only got marginally more time for the little brother.

So it is with weary index finger that the Informer clicks on his inbox at this time of year, knowing as he does that some merry prankster or other will have wasted a tiny but valuable part of several peoples’ lives by punting out a spoof release. The Informer always imagines these people in such fits of self-induced hilarity that they’re spraying mouthfuls of coffee over their desks as they hit the ’send’ button.

There’s usually a story about a handset with a holographic display that renders video callers in three dimensions. Or maybe a microscopic implant that turns a human being into a fully functioning radio device. This year there was one about a brain scanning machine that can upload the entire contents of your brain onto the internet. Perhaps these people should actually invent one and try it out themselves. You’d log onto the page and it would just be a sound-loop of a klaxon horn and a swannee whistle providing an acoustic backdrop to footage of a monkey fiddling with itself.

Anyway, it was CTIA in Vegas this week and the wireless industry’s Japester-in-Chief, Sir Richard Branson, pulled off a bit of a corker. During his keynote speech, he managed to convince a good portion of the assembled delegates that Virgin and Google had founded a JV that would see a spaceship containing a cargo of human beings and animals sent to colonise Mars inside a decade. Why I oughtta…

Another CTIA keynote that had generated a good deal of anticipation turned out to be a bit of a let-down, with Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse providing precisely no information on the anticipated WiMAX joint venture between his firm, Clearwire, Google and Intel and cable players Time Warner Cable and Comcast, which we mentioned last week. Instead, Hesse simply assured delegates that Sprint would be pushing ahead with its WiMAX rollout, which would enjoy a two year advantage over LTE in the US.

In other news that ticks the WiMAX and CTIA boxes, handset supremo Nokia debuted its first WiMAX mobile device at the show this week. The N810 Tablet, with a 4.13 inch screen should be available on Sprint Nextel’s Xohm mobile WiMAX network in June, assuming the network is there for it to be available on. Second placed handset vendor Samsung, not to be outdone, announced the impending availability of two Xohm devices of its own at the show, a mobile PC called the Q1 and a PC card.

Industry seers Juniper Research this week suggested that mobile WiMAX could find a niche in DSL substitution over the next five years. The firm reckons that it could steal 12 per cent of DSL customers, which equates to 47 million subscribers. The top geographies for the trend will be the Far East and North America, said Juniper.

And if it’s LTE that floats your boat rather than WiMAX, you’ll be all hot and bothered when you hear that Ericsson has introduced what it reckons is the world’s first commercially available LTE-capable platform. It won’t actually be available until next year but, says the Swede, it will then form the basis of USB and internal laptop modems and the like.

Microsoft was cleaning Windows Mobile this week, unveiling an update to the software intended to make it more intuitive and accessible. It’s a response to customer feedback, apparently, and involves a system of information panels that scroll in all directions (within two dimensions, obviously. We don’t think this one’s an April Fool). Anyway, a lot of it looks a little like it was nicked off of Apple, which is pretty much a trend for Windows, anyway.

In other Apple News, German wireless carrier T-Mobile has slashed the price of the iPhone, fuelling further speculation that a 3G version of the device is in the works.

From Monday, April 7, German consumers will be able to able to pick up the original 8GB version of the device for as little as Eur99, if they take it with the XL size package, which comes in at Eur89 per month for 24 months. For those taking the cheapest S package, which costs Eur29 per month, the hardware costs Eur249.

Even so, that’s a good bit cheaper than the Eur399 at which it was previously pedalled. The newer 16GB version still retails for Eur499 however.

But the price cut has been enough to set tongues wagging about the impending launch of a 3G device. The word in the US is that existing iPhone supplies are drying up as AT&T looks to shift its inventory to make way for the new unit, and T-Mobile’s move seems in line with this strategy.

What could be described as harder evidence of the existence of a 3G iPhone also turned up late last month when Japan’s biggest intercom maker, Aiphone, revealed that it has been in discussions with Apple since last summer and has recently come to a friendly agreement that will allow the Californian gadget vendor to use its beloved “iPhone”brand in Japan.

It turns out Aiphone owns the trademark to the “Aiphone” brand in Japan and about 70 other countries. But while “Aiphone” and “iPhone” are spelt differently in English, the phonetic similarities apparently give Aiphone the company the rights to the “iPhone” trademark in Japan.

Regardless, it’s probably a safe assumption that Apple wouldn’t go to all this trouble if it wasn’t going to launch the iPhone in Japan. And given the technological landscape of the country - NTT DoCoMo and Softbank on WCDMA and KDDI on 1x EV-DO - it seems clear that a WCDMA iPhone is in the works.

Speaking of the Cupertino mob, The Informer was startled to discover a day or two ago that Apple is the world’s most loved brand, at least according to consultancy Interbrand, which recently held its annual brandjunkie awards. Consumer addiction is a lovely concept to celebrate in the midst of a credit crunch, isn’t it? Anyway, the Californian icon scooped no less than six awards, ranging from the impressive ‘brand that consumers cannot live without’ (surely that should have been O2! Boom Boom!, ed.) to the unusual, ‘brand that you most want to sit next to at a dinner party’.

Given that you can’t sit next to an intangible, complex mesh of abstract ideas and aspirations - which makes this a very stupid award indeed - you’d probably be asking Steve Jobs to pass the ketchup. Imagine how terrifying that would be, with all those wheatgrass shots and perfectly positioned place settings. The Informer would be too nervous to pick up his chopsticks lest he disturb the feng shui of the table. The food would probably look great, but be way overpriced and need to be taken back to the kitchen to be mended almost immediately.

Bearing in mind that Apple’s most popular product is probably the iPod, the Informer finds it difficult to believe that consumers don’t rate the brands of those other electronic devices they carry around their pockets all day. As a result, telecoms.com has been running a poll this week to find out what is the most loved mobile handset brand.

Turns out its Nokia with a clear 42 per cent of the vote (nicely tallying with its market share), trailed some way by Sony Ericsson with 17 per cent. Motorola managed to scrape together 14 per cent of the ballot, which put it on an equal footing with Apple. Mind you, given that Apple only has one phone on the market…

Motorola was still howling the blues this week, with the announcement that a further 2,600 poor folks are to have their headcounts rationalised. This brings the total number of job cuts to more than 10,000. That’s equivalent to a large village. All of the company’s business segments are impacted by the latest round of job cuts, although it is fast running out of executives to offload.

If this is another of Carl Icahn’s strategies, the Informer is beginning to wonder if he doesn’t just want the place to himself - like a parent who’s finally seen all of his kids off to college. One day he’ll wake up to peace and quiet, wander downstairs to the R&D department in the altogether and do the nudie dance, revelling in the joys of solitude. Then he’ll make a base station. Moto’s going to take a $104m hit on the redundancies.

So, what can we do to take our mind off the unsavoury image that found its way into that last paragraph? Well, we could always watch a movie - on our mobile phones. Sony Pictures Television is launching a mobile movie channel in the US, using MediaFLO. This, as you probably know, is a Qualcomm subsidiary that operates a States-wide media network that is available for lease by carriers and media owners who want to pump out the content but not the capex. The Sony Pictures channel will be available to start with on AT&T’s mobile TV service, which is scheduled for launch in June.

Users won’t exactly be getting the latest releases, though, as Sony will be using the service to try and wring a few more cents from some classics which featured heavily in the Informer’s childhood. Ghostbusters, the Karate Kid (wax on, wax off, Daniel-San), Roxanne, Stand By Me; they’re all in there. All they’d need to add is The Goonies and the Lost Boys and the Informer would sign up in a shot. Well, if he lived in America, anyway.

The only problem would arise if the service has to feature commercials. And as anyone who has watched American television knows, there is a strict mandate that no more than three words of dialogue are allowed in any kind of broadcast before another ad-break must occur.

According to Gartner, mobile advertising revenues will exceed $2.7bn this year, which is an increase of $1bn on 2007. “Innovative developments, such as minimising the number of keystrokes required to access information, using the phone’s camera to improve the overall user experience and tying content or shopping location relevancy to advertisements will move the market forward,” said Tole Hart, research director at Gartner. “To encourage users to accept advertisements, advertisers must improve the way search results are managed on the handset so that the experience is painless and rewarding to end users.”

The day that advertising is painless and rewarding, A Week in Wireless will be sponsored by Agent Provocateur.

Not even Telus knows for sure…

Rumors have been circulating for months that Canadian iDEN and CDMA network operator Telus is pondering the buildout of an overlay GSM network as well as a migration to LTE. It’s clear that the operator is giving the idea some thought, but no decisions have yet been made.

Rogers is currently the only Canadian operator using GSM, allowing it to get its hands on a lot of trendy devices that hit the GSM market before the CDMA market. That, in turn, is helping Rogers maintain its dominant market share. According to Informa Telecoms & Media, Rogers had 36.65 per cent market share at end-2007, while the Bell Wireless Affiliates had 31.05 per cent and Telus 27.81 per cent. In addition, Rogers is banking nearly US$500 million in GSM roaming fees each year.

One suggestion, which might be considered crazy by some or innovative by others, has been for Telus to get in on the roaming action by whipping up a single-event GSM network that would operate in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics, giving the operator some quick incoming roaming revenues that it could use to fund a further GSM buildout in major markets nationwide.

Telus’ management has been refreshingly candid about the choices before it. During the company’s 4Q07 earnings conference call, President and CEO Darren Entwistle addressed the speculation regarding GSM.

“Clearly, it’s always incumbent upon us, whether it’s our wireless business or wireline, to stay abreast of the developing ecosystems from a technology perspective in the telecoms world,” he said.

Entwistle discussed the philosophy behind Telus’ technology decision making. He noted that, on the one hand, a company must be wary of squandering its previous technology investments by moving prematurely toward a new technology, but, on the other hand, a company must also ensure it doesn’t become uncompetitive by waiting too long to undertake a necessary switch.

Citing Telus’ deployments of EV-DO Revision A, “I think it’s incumbent upon us right now to say we have technology leadership from a bandwidth perspective within the wireless world that’s good for consumer data applications and good for business data applications. And we need to sweat the heck out of this technology stage to get the ROI that we want on the EV-DO and EV-DO Rev. A investment in the first place,” said Entwistle. “It’s interesting to note that right now, if you compare us to alternative technologies in Canada, we do have a leadership position. From a speed perspective, we have the fastest network both on the downlink and on the uplink paths, and we should be exploiting that.”

In late February at the CIBC World Markets Institutional Investor Conference, Bob McFarlane, Telus’ CFO, also gave kudos to the operator’s CDMA network though he noted its broadband superiority will be fleeting as Rogers expands deployment of HSPA across Canada. “We certainly have been advantaged to date on CDMA in terms of capacity, efficiency, ROI, EVDO, Rev-A, data speeds, all that sort of thing. I think it’s also fair to say, through HSPA, that advantage is going to be negated or offset.”

McFarlane noted that the idea of a single operator building a new 1900MHz GSM network across 29 million Canadian POPs, many of which are in rural areas, is farfetched. However, he indicated that Telus might be open to a GSM overlay if it gets a partner to help. That partner would likely be Bell Canada, with which Telus already shares a number of cell sites. But Bell is in the midst of a leveraged buyout by private equity interests and not in a position at present to be making radical technology shifts.

If Telus opts to join the GSM camp, it, as well as any partner operator, will need to consider whether to also migrate to WCDMA/ HSPA, which in turn raises questions about potential deployments of HSPA+ and LTE.

Even if Telus doesn’t make the switch to GSM, that doesn’t rule out an eventual migration to LTE rather than the CDMA camp’s UMB technology. In fact, Telus appears to be leaning in the direction of US CDMA operator Verizon Wireless, whose parents, Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group, have committed it to LTE. “It’s no longer the case that if you’re on CDMA or on GSM, you’re going to permanently end up on a different upgrade path. OK, they’re eventually going to converge,” said McFarlane.

He noted that if LTE is not available till 2011, or more likely 2012, operators will need to consider what to do in the interim in order to stay competitive. Apparently Telus does not see WiMAX as an option. “Our view is that WiMAX in the Western countries, where you’ve got cellular deployed, etc., … is not going to be 4G in a substantive sense,” said McFarlane.

Where do you go when you find that picocells and femtocells are too big and clunky? Attocells of course.

Apparently pioneering cellular infrastructure companies have secretly been working on attocell technology for months, and the first prototypes are ready for testing. One of these companies is femto and picocell vendor ip.access, which has developed a 3G attocell attachment for the iPhone.

The beauty of this unit is that as well as creating its own cellular signal, for areas with little or no coverage, the attocell has the added advantage of making the iPhone 3G capable.

ip.access CEO, Stephen Mallinson, says: “Where I live, there’s no mobile phone signal for miles around, except for a tiny patch at the corner of my bed. With the attocell, I am no longer tethered to the bed, and can use my mobile phone anywhere in the house, the garden, or the entire village.”

Attocell users could potentially open up their attocell to nearby mobile phone users who don’t have their own signal. Any calls made by these subscribers will be charged at slightly above the normal rate, and a credit will be generated automatically on the attocell owner’s phone bill.

But industry sceptic and Disruptive analyst Bean Dubley believes that there are still issues that need to be overcome before attocells can hit the market. “People will be confused about their bills,” he points out. “What if I make a call on the attocell and then the attachment falls off the phone and my call continues on the macro network? Will I still be billed at attocell rates?”

And if an attocell is still too big, rumour has it that a zeptocell, which can be swallowed with a glass of water and is powered by the body’s metabolic reactions, is also in the works.