Mobile Network Comparison

Nokia has just announced that they will be axing over 1000 jobs to cut costs for the struggling mobile manufacturer. The company’s aim is to save money and streamline its operations but the net result is tons of people out of a job. The redundancies come after an announcement in June last year that large-scale lay-offs would be inevitable.

All the job losses will be in the Finnish company’s IT department. Over 1000 workers are set to lose their jobs outright with 300 positions being removed completely and over 800 more outsourced to India with companies such as HCL Technologies and TATA Consultancy Services. Almost all the people affect work for Nokia in its Finland offices although there are workers in Canada and Germany too.

Nokia has been making a big effort to produce savings and these latest redundancies are the final batch of a total of around 16,000 job losses since 2010. It has already closed its production plants in Europe as well as its headquarters to try and get some positive cashflow.

The news from Espoo, Finland is that Nokia has been having a tough time recently and is haemorrhaging cash as it struggles to play catch-up with bigger players like Apple and Samsung. The company is currently not turning a profit and is aiming to producing savings of £1.3 billion by the final quarter of the year.

These particular cuts are not related to the recent news that Nokia has been overtaken in global mobile phone sales by Samsung. But it’s definitely going to be a tough few months coming up for the company. Nokia has already issue a warning about its upcoming 2013 Q1 results even though its Lumia handsets performed relatively well over the Christmas period.

What do you make of these redundancies? Is Nokia right to outsource more staff? And will they be able to turn things around this year or might this be the beginning of the end for the Finnish company? Let us know 🙂

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An IT consulting and technology firm in Cambridge has managed to get a mobile network up and running on a Raspberry Pi board. PA Consulting Group has won numerous awards for its innovative projects before but the latest hack is probably the most impressive. They’ve managed to get a full-blown GSM cell base-station to run on the $25 computer.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny single-board computer that is very low priced yet have power features and hardware and can run Linux. When it was first released earlier this year, it made headlines and quickly sold out many times over. It has a speedy ARM processor, a USB port, HDMI interface and was designed to help today’s youth learn to do proper computer programming.

It was invented by Cambridge University professors who also work in the area’s Silicon Fen tech industry and has proven to be massively popular for a variety of inventive applications. It’s sold not-for-profit and people have used it to make a physical drum kit out of vegetables, a high altitude balloon (pretty much a do it yourself space probe) and a voice-controlled robot. It can even play Quake III.

However, this is the first time someone has managed to run a mobile phone network on the hardware. The idea was to show how you don’t always need expensive specialist hardware – sometimes, bulk-produced off the shelf solutions can be usable. This proof of concept demonstration shows that the cheap and minuscule computer can successfully do everything a base station needs to do such and route voice calls and text messages over a GSM network.

The method used open source software such as OpenBTS which implements the GSM mobile standard and FreeSWITCH which routes the traffic and interfaces the platform to the internet. It wasn’t that simple though, the engineers had to optimise the code for the Raspberry Pi. Check out this fascinating video for more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcKgrzbix4

What do you think? Is this just an interesting test or would it be possible to expand this to use in the real world? Are you tempted to get a Raspberry Pi or have you got one already? And what do you think the coolest thing someone’s done so far with these computers?

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Insiders are reporting that Apple has slashed its orders for new iPhone 5 screens prompting rumours that they are scaling down production in preparation for the launch of the iPhone 6. It seems unlikely but it’s an increasingly-popular explanation for Apple cutting down its component orders.

Sources said to be familiar with Apple’s component purchases have told the Wall Street Journal that in the first quarter of 2013 wholesale orders for iPhone 5 screens are down by about 50%. And it’s not just screens – they are saying that Apple has recently cut its orders from component suppliers producing all sorts of iPhone parts.

Analysts were initially worried that this information indicated a lack of confidence in Apple’s flagship smartphone. After all, iPhone 5 sales seem to have been slowing over the last few months. The Wall Street Journal’s correspondent Juro Osawa reports that the cuts were made about a month ago and this could indicate that the demand for the new iPhone could have been overestimated. Apple may have overproduced phones in the run up to Christmas and now is slowing down new production while existing inventory is sold.

The existing rumours about a newer cut-price iPhone may be causing consumers to wait instead of buying an expensive iPhone 5, again causing demand to fall. However, the most likely explanation is the continuing changes and evolutions of the smartphone market and greater competition across all price points. Following the breathtaking results from in smartphone sales over the last year, experts predict that smartphone sales are growing but that premium products like the iPhone 5 are likely to take a smaller proportion of all sales. This could result in the production cuts we’re seeing at the beginning of this year. However, as we have not heard about similar figures from competition manufacturers such as Samsung so it’s hard to be sure about the cause of the scale down.

Another explanation is unrelated to waning demand for the iPhone 5. Apple may merely be reducing production in anticipation of a new smartphone launch. Whether it’s a full update and brand spanking new iPhone 6 or a smaller upgrade (perhaps an iPhone 5S) remains to be seen. Given the iPhone 5 is still quite new and by extrapolating from typical Apple release schedules, we’d have to admit a brand new phone is unlikely. The iPhone 5 was only just released back in September and one of the main changes from previous models was the new taller, four inch screen.

Regardless, a new Apple smartphone of some sort may be a good explanation for the information we’re getting about iPhone component orders. In the meantime, the suppliers may be struggling following this news. Many have very specialised factories to make production for Apple as efficient as possible but this means it is much hard for them to switch to other non-Apple products. Such a significant decrease in orders is going to make it very hard for them to fill the left over production capacity.

What do you think? Is Apple struggling to sell the iPhone 5 or is it more likely that a new phone is coming? And if there will be a new iPhone, what do you think it will be called and when will it be released? Let us know…

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