LTE's being designed to support deployment in both frequency division (FD-LTE) and time division (TD-LTE) modes depending on bandwidth allocation and the legacy network that's being upgraded, and in China Mobile's case, they're looking at possibly rolling out a mix -- TD-LTE makes for an elegant and inexpensive upgrade path when you're starting with another tech with "TD" in its name, TD-SCDMA. Carriers around the world are looking to lean heavily on femtocells to boost LTE footprint out of the gate, and to that end, China Mobile has teamed up with Nokia Siemens -- a company that's been pushing a number of "world's firsts" lately -- to show off the first functional TD-LTE femtocell demo by streaming video over a base station in the carrier's labs. It's still a ways off yet before customers will actually have these tucked away in the corners of their homes, but it's a step in the right direction.

Look, EDGE Evolution trials are pretty cool, but we all know that's not where the action's really at -- the people want to know what's up with LTE, and by golly, Nokia Siemens' gonna tell 'em. The infrastructure-focused joint venture has recently completed what it's billing as the first LTE call on commercial software using base stations fully compliant with 3GPP Release 8's LTE specifications, which means that trial and commercial 4G deployments toward the end of this year into next should have an easier time going live. Sadly, no details were available on the nature of the call or the end-user equipment being used, but we suspect the term "call" is being used loosely here -- in all likelihood, it was pure data using modems that you'll never buy.

Hey, look at you, Nokia Siemens -- first to complete an EDGE Evolution Downlink Dual Carrier call, and now you're the first to set up a whole trial, too. With China's 3G push finally starting to really take root on all three major carriers, legacy GSM networks are still destined to be mega-important for a long time to come -- the country's huge, after all -- and so it makes good sense that the infrastructure firm teamed up with "one of China's leading operators" to deploy what it's calling a "successful" trial during which live streaming from YouTube and Sina were demonstrated in a live environment. EDGE Evolution ultimately promises downlink speeds of up to 600kbps with seamless transitions to and from 3G coverage, which should serve to significantly extend the life of GSM networks in areas where dropping the dough to go full 3G doesn't necessarily make sense. With 100 percent 3G saturation on AT&T and T-Mobile still many years away in the US, we wouldn't mind seeing some of this action in these parts, either.

For mobile enthusiasts, the GSMA's Mobile World Congress is basically the focal point of the entire year -- a CES- or CeBIT-caliber event where manufacturers, carriers, software firms, and everyone in between gather to show off their latest goods in a setting where mobile is all that matters. In general, tradeshows have been showing signs of weakness; at many events, exhibitors and attendees have both withdrawn slightly in recent years as companies look to make announcements on their own schedule and their own terms (and a soft economy certainly doesn't help, either). This isn't any old company pulling out of MWC, though -- we've been able to independently confirm that Nokia, the world's largest phone manufacturer, is dramatically shifting its focus at the show next year by moving from a consumer-centric exhibition to an infrastructure-focused one led by its Nokia Siemens joint venture, using the existence of Nokia World as one of the justifications for the move. As far as we can tell, the industry's commitment to MWC remains very strong, but this isn't exactly a fly-by-night shop pulling its two-man stand out of the show -- it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

If you've never heard of CSoHSPA, we can't say we blame you, but the concept is surprisingly simple, the benefits are pretty clear, and odds are good the technology's coming to a network near you. Short for Circuit Switched over HSPA, the standard -- part of 3GPP Release 7 which covers HSPA+ -- seeks to improve handset battery life and significantly boost network capacity (something many carriers desperately need) by moving voice from the traditional circuit switched voice channel found on legacy GSM networks to packet data. This means that all forms of connectivity your phone exchanges with the network get treated as the same payloads of bytes -- the same concept employed by any VoIP system and the strategy employed by LTE, WiMAX, and some EV-DO networks -- so the old-school voice channel can be repurposed for pure data. Long story short, phones end up running longer on a charge, networks end up with more capacity, and everyone sleeps a little easier. Nokia Siemens and Finnish carrier Elisa have just completed the world's first CSoHSPA call, which is a nice landmark on the road to wide-scale HSPA+ deployment; the technology is essentially a software upgrade for a lot of existing infrastructure, so we'd expect this to get rolled out all over the place as long as handsets support it in kind.

3G's awesome, but for huge swaths of the GSM world, 2G is still -- and will continue to be -- a hugely important way to get data moved around the mobile interwebs. To help bridge the gap and keep the 2G folks from falling hopelessly behind, EDGE Evolution is the knight in shining armor, and Nokia Siemens is keeping the ball rolling by successfully testing Downlink Dual Carrier for the first time, a technology that doubles legacy EDGE speeds to a max of 592kbps on the downlink. Unlike UMTS and HSPA solutions, Downlink Dual Carrier promises to be a software-only solution, which means it should theoretically be quick, easy, and cheap for carriers to deploy en masse. And hey, as long as AT&T and T-Mobile have less than 100 percent 3G coverage -- which as far as we can tell is still years away -- we'll take whatever little boost we can get.

[Via MobileTechNews]

We've been hearing whispers about Nokia's touchscreen "Tube" phone for what seems like ages, and now it appears that the wait is almost over... with potentially less than inspiring results. In a statement released today from the company's head of devices, Kai Oistamo, the phone-maker says it will be launching a series of touchscreen devices in the second half the year, with the first model -- likely the Tube -- aimed at the "volume market." Oistamo claims that the mid-range market (not the high-end sector that devices like the iPhone 3G occupy) account for 50 percent of the total value of the touchscreen phone game. Essentially, it looks like Nokia's strategy will be business as usual, likely flooding the field with unspectacular mid-range phones, rather than taking on pricier competition like recent Apple and Samsung devices head-to-head, at least initially. Of course, who can argue with the company that shipped 122 million units in Q2 2008?

Swisscom's DVB-H-based mobile TV service, Bluewin TV, is now ripe and ready for public consumption, offering up a full 20 channels of portable entertainment to subscribers who pony up the 16 Swiss francs (about $15.40) per month. Coverage is said to reach about 44 percent of the Swiss population, while anyone roaming beyond those airwaves can still enjoy the service via Vodafone's live! portal over UMTS and EDGE networks. The only phone available at the moment appears to be the rather dusty Nokia N77, so we wouldn't be surprised if these lucky gals and dudes become some of the first in the world to enjoy all the benefits of the upcoming N96.

[Via mocoNews and MobileTechNews]

While we first got wind of a EDGE Evolution rollout from Ericsson, Nokia Siemens isn't about to let one of those young upstart carrier equipment manufacturers steal its top-of-the-heap EDGE thunder, and has just announced the "launch" of its Dual Carrier EDGE software solution, marking the first steps of rolling out EDGE Evolution to the company's radio portfolio. The software upgrade doubles current EDGE speeds to 592kbps, and will be available from Q3 2008 onwards. Nokia Siemens won't stop there, though, EDGE is going to get another bump not too long after that to EGPRS 2, with download speeds of 1.2Mbps and uplink speeds up to 473kpbs. What's unclear at the moment is what existing phones (iPhone, we're looking at you) will be able to manage this with a firmware update, and which ones are going to be stuck in the past, but we're hoping for a good bit of the former.

[Via GigaOM]

Because the mobile industry isn't nearly monetized enough as it is (we jest, we jest), big players have come out of the woodwork at Mobile World Congress this year to announce some pretty heavy initiatives with the goal of revolutionizing the way we're hit up with advertising on our phones. Nokia has actually come forward with two mobile ad headliners: first, the Nokia Media Network is now official, bringing together ads on Nokia's own sites as well as 70-plus publishers' and carriers' properties under a single umbrella, all made possible by the company's 2007 acquisition of Enpocket; second, Nokia Siemens Networks has announced a turnkey solution for folks wishing to bite the targeted mobile ad bullet, spanning from consulting to infrastructure and ad delivery. Meanwhile, the big five carriers in the UK -- Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, O2, and 3 -- have announced that they're working with the GSM Association to develop a common standard for measuring mobile ad reach, a marked change in some of the carriers' typical policies of keeping customer metrics well out of reach of potential advertisers and therefore limiting interest. One of those carriers, O2, has separately revealed that it has launched its own mobile advertising service (take that, Nokia Media Network) following a 2007 trial that will allow advertisers to get really, really down and dirty with their target demos -- age, location, browsing behavior, and so on -- through a system that generated a 6 percent click-through rate in testing. As long as the average phone display stays QVGA or lower, we're pretty sure we're not down with teeny, tiny banner ads all up in our business, but it's the wave of the future, it seems.

[Via mocoNews]

Read - Nokia Media Network
Read - Nokia Siemens Networks
Read - UK mobile companies to develop advertising standards
Read - O2 sets sights on mobile advertising market

So-called Long Term Evolution -- GSM's chosen warpath for the next generation of data networks -- has been getting its groove on in labs for some time now, so Nokia Siemens decided it was high time to kick things up a notch by taking it out into the wild. The wireless infrastructure joint venture deployed an LTE base station in Berlin on the nascent 2.6GHz band and sent cars equipped with test equipment as far as one kilometer away to check performance, and put simply, the results were good: 173Mbps good, in the best cases. Of course, commercial deployment of LTE is still years away -- Nokia Siemens makes a point of listing 2010 as the target right in its press release -- but it's good to hear that things are coming along swimmingly, and we're sure Verizon would agree.

[Via PhoneMag and Ubergizmo]

After some recent testing, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) is on the verge making Virtual Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) the transmission protocol for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks. Translation: the wireless networking company is going to be squeezing more data bits into existing allocated spectrum -- which is sure to please heavy-use data customers (and moreso to carriers). The NSN team used SDMA (Space Division Multiple Access) techniques to link two separate mobile devices with a base station simultaneously -- and on the same radio channel. Technically, that is quite a feat since radio communication becomes directional and quite efficient, unlike traditional cellular networks. Using current GSM or CDMA systems, wireless customers and towers broadcast in a 360-degree pattern -- but not so with SDMA technology. NSN's results included data uplinking at 108 megabits per second. That is a data rate we can get excited about -- and so should carriers needing to use existing spectrum more efficiently. Seeing as NSN just opened its doors a month ago, this is quite an impressive announcement, no?

While this doesn't come as a huge surprise -- this layoff was predicted last year -- it still hurts to see such massive cutbacks in an industry held so near and dear to our hearts. Apparently 2,900 jobs in Germany and 1,700 in Finland will be cut on the road to finding savings to the tune of $2 billion by 2010. The final cut will be about 9,000 employees which is roughly 15 percent of the joint venture's workforce of 60,000. The joint venture was founded to help both companies compete with the likes of Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent with 5 major business units focusing on Radio Access, Broadband Access, Service Core and Applications, IP / Transport, and Operations Support Systems. Of course, the verdict is still out on how successful this venture will ultimately be, but Nokia's track record in the mobile space has been strong for as many years as we care to remember.

Everyone stay calm -- we're just talking boring back-end equipment here, not handsets. Nokia Siemens Networks -- formerly Nokia Networks -- will officially open its doors for business here in a few weeks on April 1, 2007. It's no joke (we think) that the new company chose that particular date in light of Siemens having a horrible run of luck in the wireless biz lately, even indirectly assisting with bankruptcy issues with certain benefactors of its old handset division. Nokia's strong presence in the GSM network infrastructure market will be bolstered by having Siemens' lengthy customer call caddy nearby as well as being able to more fully compete with wireless telecom heavyweights Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson.