You knew that NFC hardware can be embedded into SIM cards, right? Right? Regardless of whether you’ve been paying attention, the practice is about to become a whole lot more common, as 45 of the world’s largest mobile operators have extended their support for the GSM Association’s standard. Among the networks, you’ll find heavy hitters such as China Mobile and China Unicom (which account for nearly 800 million subscribers between the two), along with familiar names such as America Movil, AT&T, Deutsche Telecom, KPN, Orange, Rogers, SFR, SK Telecom, Softbank, Telus, Verizon and Vodafone. Even Isis, the unholy mobile payment lovechild of AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, has pledged its support… in hopes of taking your money, that is. The new standard is expected to drive the proliferation of NFC across the globe, with Anne Bouverot, Director General of the GSMA commenting, “Mobile operators, working together, are ideally positioned to roll out services based on the requirements published by the GSMA, providing proven security and interoperability, global reach and customer care for consumers and businesses and a secure platform for service providers.” Now, as you’d expect, we just wanna see it happen. For a complete list of the cooperating carriers, check out the PR after the break.

[SIM card photo via Shutterstock]

Continue reading SIM-based NFC gains global support from 45 mobile carriers, all huddled around GSMA’s standard

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Think mobile data demand is big today, with 94 million smartphone shipped this year and 5 billion mobile subscribers? Well, Cisco ( s csco) says it’s going to get a lot bigger by 2015, with worldwide mobile data traffic set to increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month. That’s 75 exabytes annually by 2015 [MIGHT WANT TO THROW IN AND/OR LINK TO A DEFINITION OF EXABYTE]. Last year, I called it the mobilpocalypse, but this year, I’m going to say it’s a looming tsunami, driven by everyone’s favorite bandwidth hog, web video, and the proliferation of mobile devices. In short, we can blame this wave on Netflix on the iPad.

Cisco anticipates that in 2015, the average mobile user will consume 1,118 megabytes of traffic per month. For perspective, today the average mobile connection generates 65 megabytes of traffic per month, equivalent to about 15 MP3 music files. While the average growth is impressive, those megabytes will be spread across a wider number of devices, from tablets (big bandwidth hogs) to e-readers, which consume much less bandwidth, making it all the more significant. The Cisco study predicts that by 2015, more than 5.6 billion personal devices will be connected to mobile networks, and there will also be 1.5 billion machine-to-machine nodes — nearly the equivalent of one mobile connection for every person in the world. Cisco doesn’t give the current number of connections, but the GSM Association puts it at about 5 billion.

Cisco anticipates that mobile network-connected tablets will generate 248 petabytes per month in 2015 while machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic will reach 295 petabytes per month in 2015. The numbers are interesting because they are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to data demand and profitability. Consumer video is in high demand thanks to devices such as tablets, but it’s also something operators are watching because they are worried it will clog their networks while not bringing higher margins. Meanwhile, much of the M2M connectivity will be small amounts of traffic, but extremely profitable.

The question operators must answer is how soon these dynamics will reach some sort of equilibrium, or perhaps, if those dynamics will reach an equilibrium. Cisco notes in a presentation that, “in 2010, global mobile data traffic experienced a 2.6 times growth for the third year in a row, despite a slow economic recovery, increased traffic offload, and the advent of tiered pricing.”

Operators are trying to cut back on data use, whether because their networks are overwhelmed or simply because they want to keep their nice margins on wireless data. However, that growth is still coming, and operators are undoubtedly trying to shape their customer base to ensure that a consumer-heavy subscriber portfolio doesn’t drag down their bottom line. So tiered pricing, pricing that ignores the reality of consuming more data at faster speeds, and possibly limits on what one can download in cheaper plans are all likely to make an appearance.

Crazy Stats (and one Chart) to Beef Up Your Mobile Broadband Reports

Related GigaOM Pro content:

• Mobile Broadband: Pricing for Profits
• Metered Mobile Data Is Coming and Here’s How
• Everybody Hertz: The Looming Spectrum Crisis

GigaOMTech

Europe is to grasp a gigantic boom within mobile broadband subscribers, nearly doubling people over the subsequent day, an additional report has predicted.

While it is completely just to state that the excitement as well as novelty of mobile internet has worn off somewhat, the gsm association, people who create the description, has made out we now how can expect “explosive development” which result in mobile broadband – both here held within uk as well as inside europe.

Back within 2009 as soon as mobile broadband first reared its head on the broadband scene, specialists envisaged different countries looking portable broadband crazy – even washing the face to the density regarding replacing fixed-line broadband products.

Unfortunately which help in the users, they’re these days consuming the words. When mobilt bredb¥nd is a favourite alternative for occupied businesspeople, Customers on the go, in addition to the ones people who simply how can’t msn without the world wide web after away as per house, the accuracy is that slow speeds as well as awful transactions in some areas have stopped it from acquiring the fame which has been predicted.

The technological just didn’t develop given that without delay since we all expected, but an extraw tech breakthrough is on the horizon, and it is such type of that’ll result in the novel surge inside subscribers, says the gsm association account.

Currently, the a number of mobile world wide web organizations utilize a technological named hsdpa (which stands which result in superior speed downlink packet break through). Such type of jobs off the back regarding the 3g effects (an identical technology which your mobile phone makes use of to join to the world wide web), however thankfully it goes quicker instead of an iphone!

The 3G network supplies a variety of uk subscribers theoretical speeds about nearly  .2mb/s, but really, here is never the circumstance. the actual speed regarding your mobile broadband depends on how close you are to your nearest exchange point, best ways a great number of other people are a variety of attempting to make use of it all together, in addition to whether or not there are many even a small obstacles (exchanges, trees, pylons) within mean.

Luckily the spanking innovative technology is they say that merely round the corner, having hspa+ (high speed packet infiltrate, at the same time called evolved hspa) as regards to to hit our dongles. Such innovative group can offer theoretical speeds of nearly 2mb/s.

A charming young buck by the name of John Herlihy of Google Europe believes, like most people in the Western World that desktop PCs will be dead in the next few years. However, he believes they’ll become irrelevant by the year 2013, which may put a damper on some PC makers’ sales forecasts.

Smiling John, shown here, said:

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy told a baffled audience, echoing comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity.

Now I’m of two minds here. Yes, I agree the desktop is going the way of the dodo. Laptops are strong enough to stand in for desktops these days and a nice docking system can go a long way to let the average Joe become desktop independent.

However, I have a constellation of devices connected to my always-on PC that I wouldn’t have connected to my iPad. Even simple backup hardware is hard to connect over the cloud. Granted, he did say “research” and not “fragging zombies and rendering DVD menus for your own rip of What About Bob,” so there’s a good chance he meant that the general populace will use mobile devices for most Google-related activity and desktops for the things at which desktops excel.

Desktops still have a place, but its shrinking. I could see a thin client sitting on an office desk sooner than later, with email, storage, and office apps in a cloud. But for uber-nerds heavy iron is what we crave and what we’ll buy. You can’t stick two water cooled graphics cards into a laptop and still call it a laptop.

What think you? Will PCs die out?

via SiliconRepublic

Did you get the newsletter? Thin is in baby. Don’t look now Apple (and other 10 companies making thing, tensy,tiny notebooks) but here comes the GSMA (Yeah I’ve never heard of them before either) with the impressive ECS S10IL Laptop. Have a look inside for our review.

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