Interception

/in /by

The government is going to update the Telecommunications Interception Act which came into effect in 2004.

Nearly a decade on it’s a good idea to review these things and to make sure we have a process that works, that the need is still the same, that the players involved are still doing the same things in the same way.

The Act allows the police, or SIS or GCSB, to call on the telcos for information about customers. Typically this involves a search warrant or similar legal document made out about a particular customer’s account. Telcos can then intercept TXT messages or phone calls or data connections. They can track email trails, they can locate cellphones using GPS or cellsite triangulation. They can access your communications.

Typically the telcos take this kind of intrusion very seriously indeed. They have teams that handle these enquiries, they move with urgency and they get the job done.

(Incidentally, this is partly why the copyright notices cost $25 each – the same team that considers whether or not a search warrant is valid will also look at a copyright infringement notice because both documents are legally challenging and because they involve infringing on a customer’s privacy to a huge degree. It’s not as simple as looking up the records for an IP address and sending on the notice.)

The government says the Act needs updating. It says there are two arms to this legislation – interception and network security.

Interception seems to me, at any rate, to be working well. The telcos respond quickly (I’ve not heard of a telco not responding in a timely fashion) but won’t have a bar of the government agencies taking shortcuts. For a while there was talk of the police faxing through warrants rather than showing up. That was deemed unacceptable pretty sharpishly and I haven’t heard anything similar since then.

Network security, likewise, works well. The GCSB stays out of the way and the telcos roll out state of the art deployments that should be as secure as they can be. Ironically, the Act requires the telcos make their networks hackable – that is, the Act itself is a single point of weakness, albeit one tucked away inside the networks’ operation centres. Left to their own devices, the telcos wouldn’t be willing to entertain any question about their security capabilities. It’s a selling point, it’s basic hygiene and it’s vital to their on-going commercial role.

So what needs fixing?

Well, since 2004 the telco world has changed. No longer do we buy all our services from our telcos. Instead we buy a pipe and get our services from other providers.

Currently these over the top providers (OTT) offer TXT, email and data-centric comms but shortly I’m sure it’ll be voice as well (think Viber, Skype and the like). These services show up to the network operators as bits of data, encrypted by a third party player, sent from one device to another. They have little visibility of what the content is (they can make an educated guess of course – certain services use certain ports, for example) and they certainly can’t crack that encryption to see what’s going on.

Over the top providers don’t always need the telcos’ support to operate, so it makes it very difficult for the telcos to capture this data on behalf of agencies which might, in say three months’ time or a year or more, need to access it.

The new Bill will, apparently, require the telcos to work closely with the GCSB on network security.

I wonder what that means. Will the telcos (private, commercial entities) be required to do things the way the GCSB wants? Will they be required to build things in to their networks that they might not want to include? Things that give them no commercial benefit?

Secondly, I wonder what the enforcement protocols are all about. Are the telcos moving so slowly they need a kick in the pants? What kind of enforcement are we talking about – monetary? Something else? Will we need to start registering telcos in some formal manner so we can revoke that registration should they not fall into line?

Will we be introducing a regime that forces telcos to somehow crack the security of Microsoft, of Google, of Apple? How will that fly with these companies? How enforceable is that from New Zealand?

And if we think about it, aren’t these OTT providers telcos in and of themselves? Don’t we consider Microsoft, for example, to be a telco? It owns Skype – clearly the world’s biggest telco – and it sells OTT services that used to be the purview of the telcos. Surely our definition of what a telco is needs to be updated?

Let’s take Microsoft’s Office 365 as an example. If you buy it from Dick Smith, you get a box with a code and away you go to download and use the service. If you buy it online from Microsoft itself they don’t bother with the box, but the product is the same.

Buy it from a telco (a Gen-i or a system integrator for example) and it’s a telco service and will be governed by the Interception Act. Will that not drive customers to avoid the telcos? Will that not cost the telcos in terms of both lost sales and implementation costs?

The danger is of course that all this cost will be dumped on the telcos. There’s no commercial gain to the telcos in doing any of this – the storage needed, the interception gear required, the teams they’ll have to pay to make it all work – so that cost will be passed on to the users.

On top of that, we run the risk of trying to do the impossible. If a government says simply “make it so” and steps back, we could see telcos being penalised for not hacking Gmail accounts. Is that what we need? Is that going to do anyone any good at all?

Without knowing what the problem is the government wants to solve, it’s rather tricky to understand where this is all going. All of the above is based on the Minister’s press release, which is rather brief. The Bill itself will be available next month and TUANZ will be taking a close look at the detail. It’s important we get this right because if we get it wrong the consequences could be quite miserable.

Mobile

/2 Comments/in /by

Telecom has announced its plans for a 4G network rollout. Starting in October, the country’s biggest telco will start with the main centres and work its way out to smaller centres, deploying an 1800MHz network similar to Vodafone’s.

I’ve been using the Vodafone 4G network around central Auckland for the past week or so and two things have become apparent – speed tests suggest quite a degree of variability at this stage, and the speed test app uses quite a bit of data. I’ve hit my 1.5GB limit for the first time ever and still have half a month to go to the end of my period.

The variability is a concern. I’ve only tested when my phone says it has an LTE connection but the range extends from 3.3Mbit/s down, 1.39Mbit/s up through to 88.69/47.22, which singed my fingers ever so slightly. I typically see a score in the 20Mbit/s range for download and about 15Mbit/s up.

This is only a category three device, of course. The Cat 4s are out later this year and both Vodafone and Telecom say they’ll have them on offer – that raises the lid on theoretical maximums to 150Mbit/s which quite frankly is astonishing.

My usage has changed as a result. If I’ve got downtime somewhere I tend to flip through the news stories and now each one pops as if I were in the newsroom itself. No lag whatsoever. I’ve had to hit refresh a couple of times thinking the Stuff app had stuck again on old news, but no. It was brand new news. Even BBC video clips load with an unheralded ease.

Which of course means I can watch more, and do more, with my phone. Which means I use more data. Which means I will need more data and if Telecom can offer that, I would hope it will see the competitive nature of the telcos brought to the fore, which will be very nice indeed.

Both Telecom and Vodafone have said they will roll out 4G services on the RBI towers and this for me is the best part of the whole launch. Rural New Zealand is poorly served for broadband and mobility – having both delivered in a timely fashion will be great news. Better still, once you’ve got a tower in place with fibre backhaul the speeds per customer off each of these towers should be really quite good. Your rural LTE experience could well be better than the urban equivalent, with its higher density of users per tower.

Because the towers are paid for as part of the RBI programme the cost of rollout is greatly reduced and that means the telcos will be more likely to put kit on those towers.

But both telcos have said they’ll need to wait for the auction of the 700MHz spectrum before they do so. My understanding of radio frequency issues borders on the ignorant (although not as ignorant as those cell tower protestors) but my understanding is that the footprint of each tower at 700MHz is far superior to that of 1800MHz and that the ability to operate over rural landscapes (trees, cliffs, water) is much better.

Vodafone tells me the amount of spectrum available will influence the speed capability. It has a lot of 1800MHz spectrum and will end up with a lesser amount of 700 so that too will impact on the speeds and throughput, but all told whatever the rural user gets it’ll be a lot better than today.

So where are we at with the auction? The minister has said we’ll have one (step one) and that they’ll announce details later on this year (step two) but we’re none the wiser as to how the auction will be run, what size blocks of spectrum will be allocated or what the reserve price will be.

In Australia the reserve price set by government was so high Vodafone Australia pulled out of the auction entirely.

There will be a degree of tension within the government regarding the auction. On the one hand, Treasury will (I’m sure) be pushing the government to maximise its return on investment. That is, make sure the auction brings in as much money as possible. Perhaps we’ll see one block of 20MHz and two of 15MHz (or similar) in order to push bidders towards the bigger block. The more spectrum the more throughput so that will be attractive and that will drive up the bidding.

On the other hand, the economic value of the spectrum lies mostly in its use and the less the telcos spend on spectrum the more they’ll have for network deployment. The cost of spectrum in the UK in 2000 saw BT almost bankrupted and in Europe several telcos did indeed go to the wall. The rollout of 3G was far less aggressive than we’d hoped and the user uptake took several years to get going.

Three equally sized blocks would lead to only a couple rounds of bidding while the three telcos sort out which one is going to buy each block and then they’ll stop bidding. That means less income for the Crown but a faster deployment of network in rural areas.

TUANZ would like to see three equally sized blocks and a reasonably low reserve price to encourage the telcos to deploy. My concern is that 2Degrees be squeezed out of the 4G race with too high a price and that would be a disaster for the industry as a whole, particularly given how much change a truly competitive industry has delivered.

4G wars

/3 Comments/in /by

Telecom has announced it’s launching its LTE network in
October and will steadily roll out services throughout the country using Huawei
equipment.

There are several aspects to this that are worth discussing.
The impending 4G war with Vodafone – data caps and the $10/month premium charge
that Vodafone adds on your bill for 4G are all up in the air now.

Then there’s the choice of Huawei over incumbent
Alcatel-Lucent which while not surprising is still quite telling.
Alcatel-Lucent will continue to manage the 3G network (Telecom’s much vaunted “faster
in more places” XT network that famously hit a wall at high speed and caused
Telecom no end of embarrassment and not a small amount of money) but basically
this is the end of the line for ALU’s relationship with Telecom. I put that
down not only to the XT debacle but also to Alcatel’s lack of a single-RAN
solution. That is, to roll out 4G Telecom will need new boxes on the poles
rather than just changing out the cards in the existing boxes. That makes the
deployment much more expensive than either 2Degrees or Vodafone’s similar
rollouts and that’s a problem.

(EDIT: As has been pointed out, Alcatel will continue to run Telecom’s fixed line network and its operation centres and has just won the contract to upgrade the optical transport layer. I’m just talking about the mobile side of things here)

This also will mean trouble for 2Degrees – it now has to
spend yet more money rolling out 4G just to keep up. This at a time when it’s still
deploying 3G, with a looming 700MHz spectrum auction and when pundits are
suggesting it should probably look around and buy a fixed line operator (Orcon,
for example) or face being marginalised.

But I’m more interested in Telecom’s promise to roll out LTE
on the rural towers built by Vodafone as part of the Rural Broadband Initiative
(RBI) which is very exciting news for all concerned.

Currently the RBI deployment is flying somewhat under the
radar, predominantly because of the road crash that is early UFB deployments.
There are no stories of customers being cut off for days, of Chorus techs
standing around in clumps staring at holes in the ground, of cost blowouts
because of the difficulty of digging through footpaths.

Instead, we hear very little about RBI. Vodafone and Chorus
presumably are rolling out network coverage. Presumably customers are
connecting and presumably they’re reasonably happy with the service.

Vodafone promised the rural broadband pricing would be on
par with urban prices, and while the price points are not too dissimilar ($100
for phone and broadband being one example) the data limits are woeful. You have
a choice of 5GB or 15GB a month – neither of which comes close to urban levels.
That same $100 in the city would get me 100GB of data. Given we want to
stimulate the rural economy, you’d hope there would be pricing for business
users on the RBI, but while I can get 1TB of data for $20/month from Vodafone
in Three Kings, that level of use on the RBI would require me to sell the
entire South Island to pay my debt.

There’s also a lack of competition in rural New Zealand.
Aside from Farmside (the obvious candidate) there aren’t too many other
resellers of Vodafone’s service, nor are there partners clamouring to add their
equipment to the RBI towers – or rather, if there are they’re keeping very
quiet about it.

Both Telecom and Vodafone have said they will go all out on
the RBI towers once it secures some 700MHz spectrum and hopefully once that
starts we’ll see some actual competition for what could be a lucrative market.

Interestingly, I’d expect to see faster speeds on the rural
LTE network than on the urban.

I’ve been using Vodafone’s LTE for the past couple of weeks
and while my peak speed was an impressive 88Mbit/s down and 47Mbit/s up, most
of the time it’s around the 15-20Mbit/s down range, with upload being slightly
less.

I’m putting it down to my being forced to share the network
with others, something that’s a perennial bone of contention (ha) among
wireless users.

Rural customers would, hopefully, have less to worry about
because there are fewer of them per tower.

Given the towers are being built under a government subsidy,
they’re going in to places where commercially there just aren’t enough
customers to justify deployment. That means the number of customers per site is
likely to be far fewer than in an urban environment. Which should mean you’re
more likely to see the higher speeds in rural areas (backhaul notwithstanding
as it’s fibre-based capacity from Chorus).

When you add in some of the cool stuff Huawei showed me in
China (NB: I flew there courtesy of Huawei) – things that will come up in the
next round of revisions to the LTE standard – rural customers will be well
placed to go mobile.

All told it’s an exciting time to be a mobile user. I’m
hopeful we’ll get some decent pricing out of the two main players (and of
course, 2Degrees will be there by default as it roams on Vodafone’s network)
and that can only be a good thing for rural New Zealand.

'>

Virtual competition

/2 Comments/in /by

In the UK Tesco is a major supermarket chain but also
a serious player in the telco space. It’s gone from simply selling mobile
phones in blister packs to the full suite of Tesco-branded services, from
mobile to fibre. You can download movies, listen to unmetered streaming music,
buy toll calling packages and so on.

Tesco isn’t alone in this. Virgin Mobile is one of the
world’s leading mobile brands and has shaken up every market that it’s entered.
It operates in eight countries around the world, including Australia, the US
and UK, and it regularly scores highly in customer satisfaction surveys.

Neither company owns a network or ever intends to.
They are virtual operators and I’m curious as to why we have nothing on the
same scale in New Zealand.

Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs in the
parlance) are operating here, but are so far below the radar as to be
non-existent.

Black+White launched with much fanfare but has almost
vanished since then. CallPlus and Orcon –both big-name brands in the ISP space
– have mobile offerings but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone using them.
The plans seem uninspired somehow and certainly can’t compete with the big
names, Vodafone and Telecom, despite using their networks.

In Australia MVNOs account for 13% of the market, yet
in New Zealand the total for all MVNO offerings is probably in single figures.

I think I can see why – MVNOs in New Zealand are on
account only, and New Zealand is predominantly a prepay market. Immediately,
most of New Zealand’s customers are unable to consider switching to an MVNO
provider because there is no prepay option.

Neither Telecom or Vodafone offer prepay MVNO services
and I wonder why that is. Vodafone in particular has a large percentage of its
customer base on prepay – could it be that Big Red doesn’t want to risk
cannibalising its own customer base?

Until MVNOs have access to prepay services and can
build their own plans and tariffs, we’re not going to see the kind of dynamic
marketplace that the UK or Australia has and that’s a loss for customers.

We’ll be asking the government to explicitly include
MVNOs in its review of the Telecommunications Act with a view to better
understanding the barriers to competition and why it is that a model which
works so well overseas simply doesn’t in New Zealand.

Cost based modelling

/2 Comments/in /by

The Commerce Commission has made the only decision it could
regarding the UBA wholesale price determination process – it will continue to
work towards a final determination due before the end of the year.

Sadly the government has already said the Commission’s work
is irrelevant because it will introduce a review and a new Telco Bill that will
supersede the determination before it comes into effect in 2014. The
Commission’s work, vital as it is, will be completely sidelined in the process.

Chorus has also indicated that it’s likely to ask for a
“final pricing principle” on the UBA price alongside the UCLL (that’s the
unbundled service) FPP it’s already asked for. An FPP is a major piece of work
whereby the Commission works out how much the service actually costs (I know, I
agree it’s a bit odd that it doesn’t do that as standard but when you’ve sat
through as many economists’ presentations on cost models as I have you realise
that the Commission’s true role is to keep economic lecturers employed) and is
likely to take quite some time. The Commission has indicated that it may miss
the December 2014 timeframe and slip into 2015 because of that.

Actually I don’t mind the Commission doing the FPP work. I
think it makes sense to know exactly what we’re dealing with. The problem is,
the government doesn’t want to know what it actually costs to deliver broadband
over copper lines, it wants to make sure Chorus can continue to build the UFB
and as Chorus has said it won’t be able to if the price of copper drops (for
reasons I’ll get to in a minute) the government won’t have a bar of an actual
price point.

This is a shame because the review of the telco act could do
with a dose of facts, to put it mildly.

Currently the government is being led by Chorus’s world view.
Any reduction in wholesale rates will reduce Chorus’s income stream and
therefore jeopardise its ability to pay for the UFB deployment. On top of the
losses to copper line revenue, Chorus also faces a huge blow-out in terms of UFB
deployment costs to the tune of $300m in the first year alone, and so
logically, obviously, you can’t possibly inflict even more of a loss on the
company or it might go out of business/not deploy UFB/all end in tears (delete
where applicable).

There’s only one word for this and as we’re a
family-friendly website I can’t use it, so let me just go for “hornswoggle”
instead.

I know this to be true because Chorus is still talking about
paying out 25 cents per share as a dividend, possibly the largest dividend payout
in New Zealand this year and a rate (given the current share price of $280)
that I haven’t seen since the early years of Telecom’s privatisation where the
US parent consortium took out more money than it paid year after year till the
coffers ran dry.

If Chorus can afford that level of dividend it can cope with
a Commerce Commission determination in the $8-$12/month mark and can spend a
bit of effort on sorting out its installation process so it doesn’t cost $3500
per install.

Several things need to happen and a review of the Telco Act
isn’t one of them.

Firstly, the government needs to step back and let the
market figure out what’s going on. This random intervention model doesn’t work
and just scares the investors (let’s remember, Chorus’s investors aren’t the
only ones in this game).

Secondly, Chorus needs to figure out how to install UFB
without it costing the earth. The other LFCs can do it – so can Chorus.

Thirdly, the Commerce Commission needs to get on and deliver
us a wholesale price that uses actual cost and not retail-minus as it is
supposed to.

Fourth, those government departments that are pushing Chorus
not to do anything useful with VDSL should butt out and let the company offer
the services its customers want – in the interim while we gear up for UFB, that’s
fast fibre. It’s going to be at least another three years before most of us
start to get UFB – that’s three years of training us up to demand UFB speeds
and the best way to do that is with faster copper products.

And if the government insists on pushing ahead with its
review (of an Act it introduced, let’s not forget) then it should use the
Commerce Commission’s work as a benchmark. After all, if we know what it
actually costs Chorus to deliver these services, isn’t that going to be just a
little bit important?

Eric Hertz

/in /by

Americans tend not to have a sense of humour, I’ve found. They take it all too seriously and don’t enjoy life as much as you’d expect.

Eric Hertz was not that kind of American. Instead, he drove a Chevy Camaro in Bumblebee Yellow that looked like it came from the Transformer movie. He laughed when I offered to lease him space on my iPhone charger during a Commerce Commission conference on termination rates. And he and his wife Kathy had become permanent residents, living life to the full in New Zealand as locals, not as temporary visitors.

If the news from today is borne out, Eric and Kathy are missing after their plane crashed in the sea off the west coast of the North Island. Searchers have returned to base for the night – they’ll resume in the morning but barring a miracle, this is a recovery mission, not a rescue.

It’s not overblown to say that Eric has lead 2Degrees to make dramatic changes to the New Zealand telecommunications space. Without 2Degrees we would be facing a duopoly in mobile telecommunications and wouldn’t have rollover minutes, shared data or any of the other innovations 2Degrees has brought to market.

The company has changed the landscape of competition for the New Zealand telecommunications market in an incredibly positive way and we as an industry are all the more poorer for today’s news.

Eric and Kathy could have come in, done the job and left for a life “back home” in North America. Instead, they’d become New Zealanders and made it a mission to travel and see as much of New Zealand as they could. They were as New Zealand as they could be.

Our sympathies and thoughts are with Eric and Kathy’s family and with the team at 2Degrees.

Would you like fries with that?

/in /by

Last week I called for a national digital architecture and I’ve
been having several email conversations about how to proceed with this somewhat
nebulous plan with a number of people far brighter than I am.

One thing seems certain – there’s a desire and a keenness to
get on with it, lest New Zealand be left behind.

Quite how far behind is evident in this blog post (“Computer
science in Vietnam”) which I strongly urge you all to read. It won’t take long,
unless like me you get struck dumb by what you’re reading.

 If we don’t come up with a way forward that brings all New Zealand with it, we’ll have to teach our kids how to say “hello and welcome to our beautiful country” for all the rich visitors who will journey here. Assuming we haven’t dug up all the natural beauty in the mean time, of course.

TUANZ calls for a national digital architecture

/3 Comments/in /by

Telecom is laying off a large percentage of its workforce and as awful as that is for those involved, the company needs to do this to become competitive in the marketplace.

We have the government investing over a billion dollars in the fibre network and a couple of hundred million in rural broadband, matched and exceeded by the industry’s own spend in the area, yet we don’t have any way of articulating just what that will do to the economy of New Zealand as a whole.

We have research which suggests that ICT will overtake tourism in terms of share of the GDP in the near future, yet we’re also told that only 30% of businesses have a website and a large percentage of business owners don’t see the benefits of digitising their companies.

We have some schools making tremendous use of technology in classrooms and other schools where parents lobby to ensure they don’t have to buy iPads for their kids.

We have politicians who still don’t understand the basics of how the internet works and who treat it as some kind of bargaining chip in negotiations with the US over trade access when ICT could become as large and as important to the New Zealand economy as dairying or dead animals.

If New Zealand is to take its place in the global digital economy we need to consider the ICT industry, the investment in infrastructure and in education and how we tie it all together, otherwise we will struggle to keep our heads up. We need to pull in the same direction and that takes coordination, it takes a strategy. It calls for a plan.

In 2008 TUANZ called for a national digital architecture to be formed, providing some kind of cohesion and coordination for the country as a whole and the time has come to revisit the issue. We need a plan to ensure we take advantage of the skills and experience we have, to invest in the areas that will provide a return and will provide growth in the economy. ICT is clearly the rising star, but we have to do more than pay lip service to it.

What would you like to see in such a plan?

Efficiently strangling us with red tape

/4 Comments/in /by

Government, in all its forms, is not renowned for its
understand of technology. History is littered with idiotic decisions founded on
a limited grasp of even the fundamentals of what technology can do and
prosecuted with a vigour usually reserved for flag ceremonies in schools, the
launching of a new naval vessel or the decision to build a statue of the
politician in question.

One of my favourite responses to technology from a
government would be from an anonymous Hamilton City councillor who couldn’t
understand what the fuss was all about with regard to metro-area fibre
deployments. Hamilton’s had one for years, he told me. Great, said I, what do
you use it for? Oh we monitor CBD burglar alarms with it.

Then of course we saw Melissa Lee (not Sandra as I originally had) and her cohort at the
so-called Skynet debate in parliament. She was a standout defender of the new
copyright legislation, forthright in her argument that any copyright
infringement was intolerable and pointing out that in South Korea the economy
is booming, thanks to such infringement. To top it all off she happily tweeted
that after a hard day’s legislating, she’d be going home for a glass of wine
and to listen to a CD of K-pop that her sister had sent her. One can only hope
it included PSY’s take on Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic”.

Now, however, we have a move designed to close a nefarious
loophole in our law, something which is causing government to quake in its
boots and is keeping Treasury officials awake at nights with the sheer horror
of it all. That’s right, you’re all taking your smartphones home with you without
paying fringe benefit tax.

It’s hard to know where to start with such drivel. Do we
attack it on the basis that it’s going to cost more to implement a tax on smart
devices than it would ever bring in as revenue? Do we point out the efficiencies
inherent in allowing staff to have such a device in the first place? What about
the revenue from all those personal apps we buy on our smart devices? How about
the benefits to the environment of giving someone a device which they can use
remotely so avoiding the need to drive into the city each day?

If the government decides to tax smart devices, companies
face two choices – either figure out a complex, costly, annoying model for
managing personal use (not just voice calls of course but also data consumption
– but let’s rule out data consumed via your home wifi) thus driving staff
members to forgo the whole idea in the first place, or simply don’t allow the
staff member to have a smart device at all. No company I can think of would
cheerfully absorb the cost of any such FBT so that’s ruled out right off the
bat.

And what about BYOD? How would any such tax apply in
reverse? If I bring my own iPad to work do I get some kind of credit on my
personal tax for using a personal item for work? Surely I should be forced to
account for the work time accrued when I use my own devices?

Stupidity aside, there is a very real risk that we will
damage our employees’ ability to work remotely, to use these devices as
thoroughly as possible and potentially get in the way of that “aha” moment when
a staff member, noodling around on a device at home, finds a new way to do
something more efficiently or even better, discovers a whole new service to
build a business around. We run the risk of employers deciding there’s no point
in issuing smart phones to staff because of the added red tape. We run the risk
of stifling innovation for the sake of potentially very few dollars more in the
bank.

Governments always trumpet their keenness to cut through the
red tape and make it easier for business to get on. Somehow, they seem to
forget that when dollar signs are involved.

Samsung launch and the fall and rise of BlackBerry

/2 Comments/in /by

Today Samsung has launched its Galaxy S4. It’s slightly taller, has a better screen and processor and the battery is much larger. The interface promises to be more intuitive and it even has a touch of science fiction in that it includes a translator for nine languages.

We don’t have pricing yet but it’ll be on par with currently pricing, I would imagine, and in the year ahead we’ll see millions of them sell to people all around the world.

But much like the iPhone 5 before it, the era of the big surprise has passed, at least for now. The phones are iterative versions of what’s gone before. Strictly speaking the Galaxy 4 should be termed the 3.1 – it’s not a wheels-up redesign, and why would it be? The Galaxy SIII is the most popular selling handset Samsung has and it’s the phone responsible for taking on Apple in its heartland.

We’ve reached a critical point in the lifecycle of the smartphone. The design has moved from buttons to touch screen, the format has gone from included clients to the user-chosen app model. The last great surprise of this smartphone regime was probably the iPhone 4 with its move from sculpted plastic to a slab hewn from pure technology itself. All since then has been expected, signaled, even telegraphed in advance.

There’s nothing wrong with this, just as there’s nothing wrong with the new Samsung phone. It’s a natural phase in the tech cycle and it will take someone else to come along with a new format to really surprise us again. Possibly it’ll be Apple when it finally decides not to build any more iPhones and opts for a new monicker and style, possibly it’ll be Google with its Glass approach. Whatever it is, it’ll need to be quite different, quite stand out to surprise us.

—

What of the last great ruler of the smartphone market? What of BlackBerry?

I had a BlackBerry for many years. A BlackBerry Pearl – mostly because it had gorgeous voice quality and I could do radio interviews on it, but also for its size, its functionality and its long battery life. Sure, it had a browser that was designed by someone who’d never seen the internet, but it was a solid, capable business phone.

That was really BlackBerry’s problem. It was a business device that had, in the US market at least, bled out into the consumer market in lieu of competition. With nothing else coming close in terms of capability, BlackBerry took the world by storm and grew into a multi-billion dollar business.

I remember the first BlackBerry on the market. It looked like a label printer and had about as much functionality, but the nice BlackBerry chap I met (of course, he was from RIM before the name change) told me the design was its best feature. In his world the BlackBerry was a success because of how well it was designed, not because it was the only phone on which you could readily and easily access your email. He couldn’t quite understand why I barked with laughter at that and was most offended when I told him what I thought of BlackBerry’s design, but to my mind the BlackBerry was so popular precisely because it had no competition. It was, and always would be, a business phone not a consumer phone. When Apple ate its market in one gulp, BlackBerry had no comeback and has been in a kind of death spiral ever since.

I waited with something approaching horror for the announcement that it would be dumping its operating system and would no doubt announce it was taking up Windows Mobile, as Nokia did before it, but instead it made a different announcement, one that’s been lost in all the noise.

BlackBerry bought QNX, a company that makes embedded systems, and will use that as the basis for its BlackBerry 10 phone. While yet another smartphone OS is nothing to write home about, QNX gives BlackBerry a leg up in a very interesting market – that of embedded mobile systems.

We talk a lot about the Internet of Things and how 50 billion devices will connect to the internet, dwarfing the number of people online by a long chalk.

If BlackBerry plays its cards right, it could become the lead OS in the new embedded systems world. Cars, home security, air conditioning, refrigeration, irrigation, you name it, it’ll need a chip that can communicate with the outside world. All that is there for the picking and we’re sure to see a landgrab for the hearts and minds of our embedded brethren. We may yet see BlackBerry rise from the ashes.