T-Mobile UK and 3 UK says they are on course to complete their joint network infrastructure program by the end of 2010. When completed, it's claimed it will be Europe's largest shared network and will offer smartphone and dongle customers the biggest 3G coverage in the UK, along with 'excellent levels of connection coverage and performance'.

The HSDPA 3G network already offers outdoor coverage to more than 90% of Britain's population and, by the end of this year, network coverage will be expanded to more than 98% of the population.

In December 2007, anticipating the rapid growth of Mobile Internet and data usage that was to come, T-Mobile UK and 3 UK pooled their 3G network infrastructure in a 50:50 joint venture company, Mobile Broadband Network Ltd. (MBNL). The purpose was to be able to create Britain's best 3G network more rapidly and more efficiently than either party could do alone.

The resulting shared network requires fewer masts, consumes less energy and is claimed to provide customers with a 'superior mobile broadband service'.

MBNL has already consolidated more than 7,000 sites out of a total of over 12,500 T-Mobile UK and 3 UK mast sites due to be brought together by October this year. When completed, the integration program will also mean more than 3,000 redundant sites will have been switched off.

Reinforcing the network's capacity, a new contract worth over £400 million has been agreed between MBNL, on behalf of T-Mobile UK and 3 UK, and Nokia Siemens Networks. This will include the provision of 3G radio network infrastructure, mobile network planning, implementation, optimization and maintenance. The provision of equipment and services is already underway.

Graham Payne, managing director of MBNL said: "Smartphone and mobile laptop data traffic growth in the UK has been unprecedented, and every sign is it will continue growing fast. With Nokia Siemens Networks, we are confident of providing the UK's most smartphone friendly, high-speed 3G network to more people in the UK than any other operator, delivering exceptional services to both T-Mobile UK and 3 UK subscribers."

Both T-Mobile UK and 3 UK say they have experienced very high growth in mobile data and Internet usage resulting in the MBNL network carrying 'by far' the highest volume of data traffic of all networks deployed by Nokia Siemens Networks globally.

Emin Gurdenli, technical director at T-Mobile UK said: "As high-speed mobile broadband becomes increasingly adopted for fast, simple Internet access wherever you are, network performance becomes an increasingly important competitive differentiator. The growth in mobile broadband usage clearly provides challenges for networks. They are challenges we have anticipated and intend to keep on anticipating with our further investment in technology and services."

Graham Baxter, chief technology officer at 3 UK said: "We believe that with Nokia Siemens Networks as our principal technology partner, MBNL will deliver on its objective of creating what will be Europe's largest HSDPA network in record timescales to quickly enable the best customer experience."

To ensure that both operators can enjoy the benefits of the MBNL network expansion, while functioning independently, Nokia Siemens Networks has implemented its Multi-operator Radio Access Network (MORAN) platform which offers flexibility while merging two networks, enables the re-use of existing infrastructure, and allows a reduction in the number of sites.

Steve Glanville, head of the T-Mobile UK and MBNL customer team at Nokia Siemens Networks said: "As operators across the world strive to realize the opportunities offered by mobile broadband, they also face major challenges related to costs and efficiency. We have a strong existing relationship with T-Mobile and 3 UK, and are committed to helping them deliver their growth objectives. We are helping them simplify their network, meet the ever increasing consumer demand for capacity, and realize cost savings."

comScore today released data from the comScore MobiLens survey, reporting a 68 percent increase in the use of mobile mapping and direction services across Europe in the last year. In February, more than 21 million mobile users age 13 or older in the EU5 countries (U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy) used their mobile handsets for navigation.

The highest growth among EU5 countries was seen in the UK market, with an 86 percent increase to 5.7 million mobile map users.  Italy remains the second largest market for mobile mapping and direction services with 4.9 million users, but has experienced the least growth (53 percent) versus one year ago. Germany ranked third with 3.9 million mobile map users, followed by France (3.5 million) and Spain (3.1 million).

According to comScore, among those who accessed maps via their mobile devices for the three month period ending February 2010, most (68.2 percent) accessed those services in a car or other vehicle. 35.3 percent of the total users accessed the services while using public transport; and 27 percent did so while walking, running or cycling. Mobile subscribers using handsets with advanced positioning technology, known as assisted GPS (A-GPS), are more than 8 percentage points more likely (71.7 percent) to use maps in a vehicle than those without (63.9 percent). The largest difference can be seen among those who use map and direction services on public transport, with 41.5 percent of A-GPS users have accessed the services compared to 28 percent of non A-GPS users.

"The higher incidence of A-GPS usage in cars suggests that the superior speed and precision in these devices are being used for more than just identifying locations – they are being used as full in-car navigation systems," says comScore Senior Analyst, Alistair Hill.

"That these services offer similar functionality to premium services without the significant price-tag has certainly contributed to their early success," continues Hill.

"Mobile mapping services also have potential for integration with other location aware services, such as mobile social networking applications that provide links to friends and insights on surroundings and, subsequently, offer great promise for the location-based advertising market."

SFR, in collaboration with Nokia Siemens Networks, will be displaying the latest HSPA+ technology, with download speeds of up to 28 Mbps, on a live 3G network in a trial to be held in the city of Marseille. After the successful trial and deployment of 14.4 Mbps for SFR in 2009, Nokia Siemens Networks is continuing to support the operator's drive to ramp up its mobile data bandwidth.

"We have witnessed significant changes in mobile devices and service usage over the past year, with mobile operators ramping up their networks to ride this explosive trend," said Nicolas Huguet, head of the SFR customer team at Nokia Siemens Networks. "It is essential for our customers' success that we have a constant pipeline of innovative technology that enables increasingly fast and easy network transformation. The technology showcased today with our partner SFR will bring fundamental improvements to its customers' service in quality of experience."

The cornerstone of the HSPA+ trial with SFR is Nokia Siemens Networks' Flexi Multiradio base station, which is said to be ideal for providing higher broadband throughput, enabling a highly cost-efficient transition to HSPA+ and LTE with simple software upgrades.

Derdack, a specialist in mobile messaging platforms and enterprise notification software, today announced that the European Southern Observatory (ESO), said to be the world's most productive astronomical observatory, has selected message master Enterprise Alert to increase availability for critical IT services.  The installation in Santiago, Chile will add automated, mobile notification capabilities to existing network monitoring functionality provided by WhatsUp.

Andrew Wright, Network Specialist, ESO said, "We knew that message master Enterprise Alert was already successfully integrated with WhatsUp at our headquarters near Munich, Germany.  The latest version of Derdack's software has powerful features for notification automation, in particular two-way closed loop notifications, the ability to automatically escalate alerts, assignment of ownership of alerts, and failover capabilities. It was a straightforward decision to roll out the software to our Chile operation. During the implementation I have been very impressed with Derdack's highly responsive service and support."

ESO operates a Support Centre in Santiago which is connected to the telescope installations in Chile's Atacama region and 600 km and 1000 km north of Santiago.  The observatories rely on the IT network and consistent internet access to transfer huge amounts of scientific data at a very high rate back to its offices in Europe.  If there is a technical fault such as a server failure or interruption in internet access, ESO's WhatsUp software would send a ‘fire and forget' email notification to support engineers.  However if the problem also affected email access or the network itself then there was no way to send these alerts.

message master Enterprise Alert will be implemented with an external GSM modem in Santiago. Hence, it can function independently of the monitored network or Internet access and can alert IT staff on any failure of these services. It is interfaced with a local installation of WhatsUp.  Once an alert has been generated by WhatsUp, message master Enterprise Alert will send a text message to the appropriate support engineer's mobile phone and track delivery.  In the event of delivery failure, delay or non-response, message master Enterprise Alert will automatically escalate the alert to the next available team member. 

A number of future business uses for message master Enterprise Alert have already been identified.  These include communicating day to day tasks to field based engineers and potential integration with weather monitoring systems for early notification of adverse conditions such as electrical storms which could damage sensitive equipment.

Wright commented, "We chose message master Enterprise Alert as it is a future proof and comprehensive notification solution that offers the flexibility and scalability that will enable us to leverage our investment into other areas of our business in addition to IT monitoring.  We will improve critical service uptime and improve continuity of our scientific operations."

Matthes Derdack, Managing Director of Derdack added, "Constant availability of internet access is vital to the continuing operation of the observatories.  By introducing network-independent notification capabilities, ESO will gain the ability to recover far more quickly from Internet and IT issues that affect service uptime and data transfer operations. We are proud to support the scientific operations of one of the major astronomical research facilities in the world."

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan – Mobile Broadband in Central and Eastern Europe – says that the market earned revenues of €1.1 billion in 2009 and forecasts this to reach €5.2 billion in 2014. The service penetration is expected to grow from 2 per cent to 10 per cent within the forecast period, says F & S..

"Due to relatively low overall broadband penetration, mobile broadband will be a complementary rather than supplementary service to fixed broadband in CEE countries," says Frost & Sullivan ICT Research Analyst Edyta Kosowska. "Therefore, mobile broadband operators should initially focus on improving the service quality through sufficient network upgrades as customers expect the same download speed and data download limits as from fixed broadband internet. Only when achieved that, the operators should follow Western European players' strategies and concentrate on developing wider range of value-added services (VAS)."

The Frost & Sullivan study assesses the status of mobile broadband in five CEE key markets: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Slovakia. The analysis is based on key performance indicators and looks at the way different mobile broadband technologies are evolving on those markets. The technologies considered are: code division multiple access (CDMA) revision A and revision B; flash orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (Flash OFDM), high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), high speed packet access plus (HSPA+), mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (Mobile WiMAX) and long-term evolution (LTE).

"Most of the market participants start mobile broadband service development from large cities' centres, where they can count on relatively quick return on investment," states Edyta Kosowska. This move is still economically justified, as the highest demand comes from people with increased mobility needs such as company workers and students. "However, in the near future, growth potential will be mainly visible within rural areas, where overall broadband penetration remains relatively low. Therefore, focusing on this target group can be a worthwhile consideration," adds Kosowska.

Targeting population from the rural areas is a very good solution especially in the EU countries. "First of all, companies implementing this strategy can count on market regulators' favour, as it links directly with the ‘preventing digital exclusion' policy. Additionally, part of the investment might be financed by EU funds," concludes Kosowska.

According to Juniper Research, revenues from remote patient monitoring using mobile networks will rise to almost $1.9 billion globally by 2014, with heart based monitoring in the US accounting for the bulk of early mobile monitoring roll-outs.

The mHealth report found that mobile healthcare monitoring will demonstrate substantial growth in the US and other developed markets.  However, while mobile monitoring will contribute to healthcare cost savings in developed markets, national wealth and the structure of the Healthcare market in a given geographical region will have an important bearing on the extent to which it is rolled out.

Anthony Cox, Senior Analyst at Juniper Research said, "In Africa, the opportunities for m-health monitoring will be limited but SMS based education programs will be rolled out there and these can be of great benefit."

Other areas which will contribute to m-Health revenues include Fitness and Healthcare Smartphone apps and eventually advanced apps which link in to sensors worn on the body.

Further findings from the mobile healthcare report include:

• The market for health and fitness mobile applications will thrive and eventually spawn a new market for advanced apps which integrate sensors worn on the body
• Establishing the correct route to market for those selling m Health services will be key to their success
• In the past eighteen months there has been a renewed interest in m Health from operators globally

The report includes major analysis of the current state of play in the mHealth market and contains six year forecasts for key areas within the mobile health area and associated service revenues. Forecasts include the number of mobile monitoring events, revenues from mobile health monitoring, 2 scenarios detailing cost savings attributable to mobile health monitoring, number of health and fitness application downloads, health and fitness download revenues.

Carbon Trust Investments has invested £1.45 million in network optimisation company Arieso, joining existing investors Oxford Capital Partners, ADD Partners and Qualcomm Ventures.

Rachael Nutter of CT Investment Partners said: "Energy consumption in mobile phone base stations is a significant proportion of the opex of mobile operators, as high as 50% in the most extreme cases. Arieso's technology tackles this whilst improving service levels. We are excited about the potential for rapid scale-up of this technology on the back of a number of highly successful demonstrations"

Shirin Dehghan, CEO and co-founder of Arieso said: "Arieso has leading edge technology demonstrating dramatic service and cost improvements with a number of the world's largest operators. We are delighted to have Carbon Trust Investments joining our existing investors. This investment will allow us to ramp up our team and take advantage of our recent success in the field to deliver full-scale roll-outs."

Arieso's enterprise product GEO monitors and geo-locates calls made in a wireless network, allowing network operators to understand the service experience in real-time, enabling them to identify hotspots where infill network capacity is required, or where antennae positioning could be optimised to improve service and reduce power, reducing both capex and opex.

In a trial for US tier-1, Arieso claimed its software enabled 48% power reduction, 75% increase in data throughput and 64% fewer sites requiring additional 50W carriers, which are installed to boost wireless signals particularly in urban areas.

To get the data Arieso provides, the current alternative for mobile network operators driving vehicles to test service and strength of signal at different points.

Carbon Trust Investments Limited is the venture capital investment subsidiary of the Carbon Trust, a not-for-profit company with the mission to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy.