Versatile Amphibian

One of the big themes at this year’s Mobile World Congress was the integration of multiple radio access standards into a single, seamless wireless connectivity system. Variously called “off-loading” and “small cell”, the idea is to provide mobile device users with seamless access to many different technologies simultaneously, providing a massive boost to quality of service. I visited many of the major vendors at MWC – what follows is a few words on the small cell market. Wi-Fi has been a growing part of the industry for a number of years, particularly in densely populated countries like the UK and cities like New York, however it has hitherto been a somewhat unsophisticated system, requiring separate authentication and lacking decent quality of service. All that has changed in the last year or so as technologies from the cellular industry, such as beam-forming and handover techniques have found their way into mainstream solutions. The objective is to create a system that aggregates mac...

As Ory Okolloh recently put it: if mobile phones are the computers for Africa, why do all the journalists who write about them do so on laptops? I wholeheartedly agree. The smartphone is a great handheld entertainment and communication platform, but it isn’t a good device for the creation of much more than a drunken text message. No, the truth is that that laptop computer - or some variation of it - is almost certainly the utility computing platform for a connected Africa. It can do pretty much everything a smartphone, TV, desktop or tablet can do, yet costs less than any one of those devices. It isn't perfect, but it is the best utility computing device available today. In my view the device challenge is not to identify the computer for Africa, but to create a supply chain that reduces unit costs to a point that is affordable to the middle class (in the first instance). So if the computer for Africa probably isn't a phone, why should it'd connection be designed for a ph...