eBay opens real-world UK tat bazaar for Xmas greed peak

Pop-up boutique shoppers will need smartphones to buy

eBay is launching its first UK store, albeit temporarily, this Christmas to allow shoppers to browse in the physical world before buying online.

The pop-up boutique opens in London’s West End for just five days from 1 December in what is expected to be the peak buying period for the year.

But while consumers can saunter about the store for Christmas tat deals, they can only buy online using a smartphone or some other connected mobile device. Each product has its own QR code, said eBay.

“Shoppers simply scan the QR code with their smartphone to make their loved ones’ Christmas wishes come true – no tills, no queues, no bags, no stress. Using your mobile phone, you can literally complete your shopping in a matter of clicks,” gushed a spokesperson.

The online trader expects 5.8 million shoppers to log on during the five-day fest, with sales forecast to peak at 30 gifts per second (GPS), up from 16 in the same period during 2010.

It expects 120 gifts to be purchased every minute on a smartphone.

The hybrid store model will not, however, help disappointed recipients of unwanted gifts return them after Christmas.

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Tags: Apps, Christmas, eBay, London, QR Codes, Smartphones, UK

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O2 London LTE trial promises 100Mbps to lucky few

O2 has launched its first 4G LTE network in the UK, kicking off a trial of the high-speed service in London that will offer testers up to 100Mbps. The scheme will run for nine months, with 25 sites going live in November and that being ramped up until a total combined area of 40km gets service. However, participation in the trial will not be generally available.

Instead, O2 is targeting businesses and entertainment venues, such as retailer John Lewis and the O2 Arena. They’ll give performance and usability feedback to the carrier, which will be used to shape O2′s bid for spectrum when the UK bands are put up for license in 2012.

The trial will use the temporarily licensed 2.6GHz frequency, which O2 claims is capable of supporting up to 150Mbps downloads. Samsung’s B3730 is O2′s modem of choice for the test run, a USB stick which also supports 2100MHz WCDMA and dualband GPRS/EDGE for when users are outside of LTE coverage.

“The time to download a 500MB file could be as fast as under one minute,” O2 boasts, “compared to over 5 minutes on 3G,” with around 1,000 participants expected to get their hands on the coveted modems. Coverage will span key areas from London’s Hyde Park to the O2 Arena, with Canary Wharf, Soho, Westminster, South Bank and Kings Cross all highlighted as getting LTE.

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Tags: 3G, 4G, London, LTE, Mobile Broadband, O2, USB Dongle

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O2′s southeastern crash caused by ‘well-organised theft’

Work of an international gang, seemingly

O2′s ongoing outage was down to a well-organised theft of networking kit, which engineers are struggling to replace while promising to connect customers by close of play.

O2 customers in North and East London, Sussex and Kent are still without service following a break-in at one of the operator’s unmanned sites. While clearly professionals the thieves still managed to make a mess of the site, which is why it’s taking so long to get the network up and running again.

Photographs taken and evidence gathered, the engineers are now working on restoring the network and O2 is hoping to have full coverage again later today.

But no one is expecting network switches to turn up in the local boozer or market stall; it seems this theft was professionally carried out and probably with a buyer in mind. Telecom switches are expensive bits of hardware, but only to the right person – your average tealeaf would have more luck shifting a Monet than a network switch, but there are operators around the world who will pay for the right equipment.

In February Vodafone was hit by a similar theft, in Basingstoke, which also saw specialist switches disappear in the middle of the night and customers left disconnected for half a day.

Neither Vodafone nor O2 is saying exactly what was taken, or how far the police investigations have got – but expect to see all the network operators reviewing their security arrangements in the next few weeks.

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Tags: London, Mobile Networks, O2, Security

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O2 struggles for breath in widespread outages

London, Sussex and Kent knocked out

O2′s network is suffering outages around the capital and the southeast, with customers unable to make calls, or connect to data services, since just after midnight.

The outage seems to be knocking out connectivity in North and East London as well as Sussex and Kent, and started just before one o’clock this morning. Some customers report being able to get data connections, even when voice disappears entirely, but many users of O2′s network and its MVNOs are off the net entirely.

Those Virtual Operators include GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile, which are both suffering from the same outage as they’re carried on O2′s infrastructure. GiffGaff has even posted a useful map showing which areas are working and which aren’t.

O2 tells us that it has engineers working on the problem, though we’re waiting to hear the details of what’s gone wrong.

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Tags: Giffgaff, London, Mobile Networks, MVNO, O2, Tesco Mobile

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Vodafone lets Londoners pay for taxis via text message, charge their phones in transit

Mobile payment systems may be gaining only gradual steam in the US, but over on the other side of the pond, Vodafone UK has launched a broad new campaign to integrate smartphone technology where Londoners may need it most — in the back of taxis. As of today, many cab passengers will be able to charge their smartphones in transit, thanks to a wide range of chargers that the mobile carrier has installed in more than 500 of London’s iconic black vehicles. Vodafone is also rolling out a new payment scheme today, whereby cash-strapped travelers can text their cab’s license number to a specific code, allowing any owed fares to be charged directly to their phone bills. The system certainly doesn’t sound as elegant as some of the NFC-based operations we’ve heard about, but it still beats having to navigate your cab driver to the nearest ATM, with the meter tick-tocking away.

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Tags: London, Mobile Payments, SMS, Text, Vodafone

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Vodafone’s network knackered by thieves

Silicon Corridor loses mobile coverage

Millions of Vodafone customers were disconnected this morning after an overnight break-in. Calls, text and data are intermittent west of London with a fix in progress.

The failures seem only to be affecting areas just west of London, in the so-called Silicon Corridor. Wales seems fine and the rest of the country is OK, but reports of intermittent failures are coming in from Swindon, Reading, Oxford and surrounding areas, with the fault making incoming and outgoing calls all but impossible.

Thieves apparently broke in to Vodafone’s data centre, which resulted in kit getting damaged. Putting things back together is taking a while, but Vodafone tells us the fix is in process, and that no customer data was compromised.

We’ll pass on more details when we have them, but in the meantime, if you can’t get hold of a colleague this morning they might genuinely be having network problems, rather than the more usual Monday morning difficulties.

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Tags: London, Network Outage, UK, Vodafone

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Source London: network of 1,300 charging stations coming by end of 2013

London Mayor Boris Johnson has announced a plan to create a city-wide electric vehicle network dubbed Source London. It calls for 1,300 public-use charging stations to be installed by the end of 2013 – assuming the Mayan’s weren’t right about 2012. Any driver who registered for the network and paid an estimated annual membership fee of £100 (roughly $160 at the current exchange rate) could juice their EVs across all of the stations.

For perspective, keep in mind that the city already has 250-plus stations with 16,729 electric vehicles and hybrids registered, of which only 2,100 draw power by being plugged in. That implies if the plan is completed, drivers would technically have better odds of finding a charging station than a gas pump in the city. Combined with Johnson’s schemes to provide cell coverage in the tube and city-wide WiFi, it’s also yet another example of how jolly old London is prepping for the future in between bites of scones and episodes of Top Gear. To learn more about the project, visit Auto Blog.

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Tags: Boris Johnson, Charging Stations, Eco-Friendly, Electric Vehicles, London, Motoring

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UK temporarily giving LTE spectrum to cameras for 2012 Olympics, tells carriers not to worry about it

You might recall that British regulator Ofcom recently got things in order for an auction late next year of Old Blighty’s 2.6GHz spectrum for 4G use, but it turns out that spectrum’s going to make a quick pit stop before reaching its final destination. Broadcasters at the London Olympics have been given the green light to use the bandwidth — which will have already been sold by the time the games kick off in mid-2012 — for wireless cameras, with the government saying it’s fairly certain that carriers wouldn’t have had an opportunity to deploy LTE in that spectrum by then anyway. Though Ofcom’s original spectrum utilization plan from last year didn’t call for using 2.6GHz, it apparently got a wake-up call from the Vancouver games, which revealed higher demand for both wireless cameras and 3D broadcasts than the agency had anticipated — and unlike carriers, which are expected to pay billions of pounds sterling for LTE rights, Ofcom will be extending use of the bandwidth to broadcasters during the Games gratis. Awfully kind of them, isn’t it?

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Tags: 2012, 2012 Olympic Games, 4G, London, LTE, Ofcom, UK Spectrum Auction

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O2 upgrades London network

Nokia Siemens Networks upgrades operator’s London network to meet smartphone demand, with faster speeds, better coverage and improved battery life

Nokia Siemens Networks has completed network analysis, optimisation and upgrades to O2’s base stations across London.

Working with O2, Nokia Siemens Networks monitored and analysed the data and signalling behaviour of different smart devices connected to the mobile network. The methodology provided information on the impact of these devices on different network elements.

The information, combined with traffic growth forecasts, was used to establish a capacity improvement project, upgrading only the network elements and modules identified as bottlenecks for current and future performance within O2’s London network.

The upgrade included enhancing the signalling capacity of the network as well as modernising the network with Nokia Siemens Networks’ flexi multiradio base stations. The flexi multiradio base station is an energy efficient base station with a compact, weatherproof, modular design.

It has been combined with Nokia Siemens Networks’ high-performance site solution that increases network capacity by doubling the number of mobile sectors from three to six in each base station’s area of coverage.

This deployment of 3G six-sector sites was recognised by the Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards 2010. The six-sector site deployment provides improved capacity resulting in the ability to carry significantly more voice and data calls in O2’s network.

“There is unprecedented demand on mobile networks, particularly in dense urban areas,” said O2 UK’s head of technology Nigel Purdy.

“Nokia Siemens Networks reacted swiftly to understand the challenges being placed on our network, and then implemented an effective upgrade to enhance the smartphone experience for our customers. This has resulted in a better use of network resources, minimised traffic loss and enhanced the experience of smartphone users.”

Nokia Siemens Networks said the upgrade also helps conserve smartphone battery life while decreasing signalling load on the network, adding that it is the only mobile network equipment supplier to have successfully implemented a technology that achieves such benefits.

“Thanks to our partnership over the last decade with O2, we worked closely to keep pace with booming smartphone demand and to ensure that O2 UK can cost-efficiently enhance their subscriber experience,” said Nokia Siemens Networks customer team head Pete Mitchell.

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Tags: 3G, 3G Networks, London, Mobile News, Nokia Siemens Networks, O2, Upgrades

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