Mobile Network Comparison

Bit of an old favourite this week in keeping with the elephantine theme. This amazing video is completely genuine and shows the lovely Peter playing music using a Samsung Galaxy Note. What a smart elephant – he can even draw with it and take photos. He doesn’t even make any attempt to eat it.

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 🙂

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:

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?