Category: General

As you might know, I have switched from using a global data plan for my mobile phone to buying local prepaid cards to use in my smartphones. This is also the reason why I don’t use the BlackBerry anymore and over time, I’ve colleced a stash of them. Not many, but the collection is growing:

(Russia, Belarus, Austria, United Kingdom, United Arabic Emirates)

I also wanted to apply this now familiar pattern and acquire a prepaid data SIM when traveling to the US, which I have planned (and already booked flights and the like) for early March. I checked some of the local carriers and the confusion on my side is massive. I’ll however try and give you a summary of my findings:

a) prepaid data plans in the US pretty much don’t exist. There are a few (especially the major) carriers who offer them, but they charge hugely in comparison to every other place in the world. Data usage in Great Britain is around 10 GBP / GB, here in Germany about 10 EUR per GB and pretty much the same all over Europe, even including Russia (and yes, this is all prepaid packs I’m talking about). The US seems to only offer very small prepaid plans (100 MB, 300MB) for a rather high price. AT&T charges 20 USD for 100 MB (http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phone-plans/pyg-cell-phone-plans.jsp), T-Mobile 10 USD for 100 and 30 USD for 300 MB (http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/prepaid-plans.aspx#MobileBroadbandpasses) and Sprint doesn’t really offer one (at least I couldn’t find one).

I am willing to spend 20, maybe even 50 or 70 USD for my mobile internet during my stay. I like being able to access Google Maps while walking around foreign cities, I like using Google Navigation on my phone, I just love to google something while being in a pub discussion e.g. about which year Kurt Cobain died.  But there is a second, even more significant problem:

b) Unbeknown to be up to recently (when I looked into it while preparing my trip) there are different kinds of “3G” and “4G” in the US. While here in Europe the normal definiton of 3G is UMTS + HSDPA + HSPA  and our definition of 4G is either WiMax or LTE and all mobile network operators use pretty much the same frequency band, this is completely different in the US. First of all, 3G can either stand for UMTS or other techologies (probably CDMA) and 4G can be anything from LTE to HSPA+. So the underlying technologies are completely different. Even worse, if you have a UMTS phone that works in Europe (such as I have with the HTC Desire), this does not mean that it’ll work in the US. The reason for this is

c) Even if it says “UMTS”, this does not necessarily mean that your phone will work. Take the Desire as an example. It’s a quad-band phone, so it’ll operate on pretty much any GSM network around the world. However it’s UMTS frequencies are limited to 2100 Mhz and 900 Mhz, which are common in Europe. The US however uses different freqencies. So you will most likely not be able to use UMTS in the US – unless you are on the AT&T network and own an iPhone; or a Telia branded HTC Desire for that matter.

This is due to the different frequencies and bands used. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UMTS_networks and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMTS_frequency_bands for a thorough explanation of this.

Even worse, you cannot even keep your phone in the US and switch carriers. The iPhone 3, 3S and 4 all work perfectly with the AT&T UMTS network, however if you try to operate them in the T-Mobile US network, they will find a signal, but only GSM / GPRS / EDGE, because not even the iPhone supports the UMTS frequencies used by T-Mobile.

This of course explains their ridiculous pricing policy and why buying your phone without being bound to a contract is not so common in the US alltogether.

So, I’ll have to choose between either having a GPRS network connection only or ditching the plan of buying a prepaid SIM alltogether. Yay. Not. And yes, you can guess for what I’m going…

This topic might feel a bit “off topic”, as it is not very personal to me, but it resulted from a posting I made at gutefrage.net, a Q&A platform where you can answer random questions, hopefully in your own field of expertise. And since I love feeling superior (and miss answering questions in my holidays a bit 😉 ), I started posting there.

Simyo – a German prepaid discounter –  has started offering 39 EUR all calls/messages/data transfer “flatrates”. Sounds cheap, eh? But why would they do that and where’s the catch?

The German mobile telephone market is again changing. When I had my first mobile phone back in 1998, there were only three network operators on the market and prepaid offers were virtually not available. You signed up for a 24 month contract with a base charge and got a subsidized mobile phone. Over the years, things evolved and in the last couple of years, a few trends emerged on the market:

• Subsidized mobile phones linked to long term contracts with a base charge are not that popular anymore. Instead mobile phones tend to be bought with a one-off payment or through installments.
• Having no long-term contracts to get a mobile phone and the general avaliability of (older) mobile phones in the market empowered pre-paid contract-free SIM only deals. There are many discount providers with a “no frills” policy on the market, offering significantly cheaper rates than the well established mobile network operators with their post-paid contracts.

Of course lowering the price lead to an ever-falling average revenue per user (ARPU). While the ARPU used to be roughly 25 EUR per month in 2003 (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/O2-steigert-Kundenzahl-und-Umsatz-pro-Nutzer-81037.html) it dropped down to around 14 EUR per month in the last couple of years. (see http://www.de.o2.com/ext/o2/wizard/index?page_id=16705;tree_id=1576;message_id=3121). Interestingly enough, while the post-paid ARPU stayed at roughly 25 EUR per month, the average pre-paid ARPU dropped to below 7 EUR per month.

To gain back revenue, providers started offering flatrates to higher the ARPU. When they started with the all net flatrate, it was about 80-100 EUR per month. Now they’re down to 35-39 EUR per month for data, text messaging and phone calls all around Germany, and this is not a fixed fee, but rather a cost cap when the 39 EUR are reached.

Of course it is interesting to analyze why and how they do that. 39 EUR is cheap. But if you take a closer look at this offer (e.g. the one from Simyo) you’ll find out that you end up paying 0.24 EUR per MB data traffic. This equals 160 MB of traffic and is easily reached if you use a smartphone. So the providers’ intention is most likely not to give you a cheap service, but to make you spend as much of the 39 EUR as possible per month and hence increasing their ARPU.

No, this blog post is not about a diet based on apples, it’s rather about which financial diet to take after buying an Apple; the technical product that is.

As most of you are well aware of, part of my job is to travel a lot. And traveling most of the time means spending an awfull lot of time being transported from A to B or waiting for this to happen. Hence I want to use this time wisely by catching up with E-Mail, blog posts and the latest MKV files that have found their way to me.

It’s about Video MKV playback, reading eBooks, dealing with the occasional E-Mail, maybe being able to show a PowerPoint (converted) presentation every now and then), surf the web and maybe having a Skype call with Inka.

Of course I can do that with my notebook right now, but this device has some disadvantages; mainly size and weight. The 15″ display is too large to fit in every Enconomy class seat, especially when the plane is fully booked and the device is quite heavy, weighting more than 2kg. It has an okay battery lifetime with 4 or so hours and can play MKV smoothlessly + has a built in camera and a SIM card slot.

But, it lacks the sexyness other devices with an apple have plus it’s heavy and large in size.

So I am looking for a hand luggage sized device that is not too much of a drawback. Options are an iPad / tablet device or a very small but powerful notebook – maybe a Macbook Air.

As I am not very sure which way to go, I’d like to present the options as I see them and ask for advice. I’ll promise to not listen to it 🙂

iPad

• Pro: sexy, light, long battery life time, good display, 3G support, WiFi, good media player, nice form factor, tons of digital magazines and books, touch display, Flash storage only
• Con: no camera, large frame around the display (wasted space?), have to convert MKV, limited set of applications

Macbook Air:

• Pro: camera, hardware keyboard, rather light, okay battery life time, WiFi, good media player, not have to convert MKV (though might be slow), “real OS”, Outlook, Powerpoint and Word available, Flash storage only
• Con: no 3G, no LAN, hardware keyboard, no touch display, not as sexy, battery life not significantly longer than with my current notebook, no trackpoint

Of course there are other SSD notebooks (like the Thinkpad X100e or X200), but they are heavier (at least I haven’t found one with ~ 1kg weight) and of course there are other tablets (even with Windows 7), but sometimes they have fans built in or don’t have the extended battery lifetime an iPad can bring to the table.

So if you were in my situation, what would you do? Wait for the iPad 2? Hope for a Macbook Air with 3G? Wait for Android based alternatives?

Almost two years ago, I decided to not display any advertisements on the Küchenserver (see https://www.kuechenserver.org/tag/werbefrei/#/archiv/2009/01/16/werbefrei/ for the German post about this). However everytime I’ll have a look at my stats around Christmas, I get tempted once again to break with my intentions.

I once published a post titled “funny xmas mailing” and since then Google washes a lot of visitors to this blog’s shores. I could be friendly, as I am now, and provide them with the information they desire free of charge, I could try and monetize the tree-shaped mail I’ve posted two years ago or I could try to gently monetize this by displaying Google Ads in the posts in question. Having roughly 10k visits during this time of the year, it would not make me rich, but it would pay for the domains for a year or so.

Not that it’ll change my decision significantly, but what would you do if you were in my shoes here?