Femtocell - eliminated our rural blackspot

ITbuilder HQ is great is many ways. It's in a peaceful rural location on a farm that nestles on the banks of the river Lea. Myriad flora and fauna welcome us to work each day and our black barn office with its red-clay pantile roof and exposed beams has character and charm. Parking is never a problem and the only time we queue on the 10 minute commute in (mostly all of us live close by) was when the river burst its banks with melt-water last winter. Add to this the cheap as chips rent and rates and you would think that we have it made, wouldn't you?

Not quite. The one disadvantage of an office in the sticks is communications. We are sat in the bottom of a valley where broadband internet is strung together over several kilometers of interconnected copper so we can only get a 1Mbps connection if the wind is blowing in the right direction. Also, despite being only a couple of miles from Hetford and Welwyn Garden City with a mast literally only a few hundred yards along the road and the enormous Epping Green radio tower half a mile up the hill, we occupy a complete mobile phone blackspot. Probably not ideal when you are an IT company, right?

When we signed the lease for our office, we already had a plan hatched to solve this little problem. Our friends at Skyline Networks are specialists in getting high-speed, business class internet to out the way places. It was a challenge but with theirs skills, some masts and adjustments to their neighbouring anntenae, they beamed in a 2Mb SDSL service to our office over Wireless Broadband (think WiFi on steroids) that, when tied in with a bog-standard 1Mb ADSL service as fallback, was sufficient for our needs. We worked around lack of mobile coverage by simply setting our mobiles to divert to our Voice-over-IP phone system, the numbers for which were registered on our business call plan for free calls so that we wouldn't have to pay for the diverted calls.

This has served us well up until now when the long awaited Femtocell was released. We got wind of the Femtocell back in 2008 when we googled our black-spot plight and discovered that some clever bods in Cambridge had come up with a small GSM/3G device that could provide a mobile signal to handsets and devices and use the Internet as a backhaul link to route the call to the mobile operator's network. Yes, the name sounds like a battery upgrade pack for a LadyShave, but we wanted one badly. So, we got in touch with Vodafone and made inquiries but their customer service agents hadn't a clue what we talking about, thinking us mad for enquiring after female depilatory accessories. Clearly this wasn't going to be on the market anytime soon.

Roll on to October of last year and Vodafone had released their SureSignal device. For £200 you get a box about the size and shape of a home wireless broadband router to which you could connect four handsets with full and clear 3G coverage. At the time, that kind of money seemed a bit steep to fix a problem that we had been comfortably working around for several years. Surely, as a device aimed at the home market, it could not stay at that price point for long. And lo, last week we discovered on Vodafone's site that it was now being offered for £45 ex-VAT. That's much more like it we thought and placed an order.

Our Femtocell, branded the SureSignal by Vodafone, arrived yesterday and we dived onto it. We unboxed it, plugged it into the mains and also to our data network then stared at it a bit. Some lights flashed and we looked at it a bit longer. Then we checked our handsets and funnily they were showing no bars of signal. Hmmmmmm. Then Russ went and fished the manual out of the recycling bin and discovered that you have to go to Vodafone's website and register the device and your handsets. 15 minutes later we made our first, crystal clear call from a mobile phone from within our office walls (it was previously only possible by running outside and down to the lower field).

Whilst we will probably continue to divert our mobiles to our deskphones during business hours, its going to be handy to nip off and take a private call when necessary or receive text messages instantly. Now we can safely say that our place out in the sticks is perfect.

At last - proper Blackberry mobile sync for us small folk

Blackberry has been a dirty word in our office for quite some time now. The mere utterance of it would result in shouts of derision aimed at any person that dared mention it. This blatant hatred of a handheld device, which outside of ITbuilder HQ is incredibly popular and much-loved, is borne out of our disgust for the BIS synchronisation service that has caused us untold hours of frustration.

BIS (Blackberry Internet Server) is RIM's (RIM is the company who produce Blackberry hardware and software) solution for people who want a Blackberry but do not have a large, corporate messaging infrastructure with which to sync their device. It's the little brother to BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), the service that large companies with equally large IT budgets and large teams to spend them, deploy to keep their company email systems in perfect sync with their Blackberry handsets out in the field. The BIS service on the other hand is bundled free with any Blackberry that is taken on a personal or small business contract. It enables the Blackberry owner to sync their e-mail by way of a server and web portal operated by the mobile network (Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile all provide this) into which the e-mail settings are entered and .. ta da .. your messages are delivered to your handset as well as your inbox.

 "So, why are you getting all worked up about that?" I hear you ask. Well, the problem is that the BIS service is complete and utter rubbish. For the past few years, our valued clients have been nipping into the high-street stores of the mobile networks and picking themselves up a Blackberry. We then get the dreaded call  "I have just bought/been given a Blackberry, can you please set it up for me?" Now, setting it up isn't too much trouble. It's the series of support calls that follow when the inherent problems in the BIS service start to appear that ruffles our feathers. The BIS service has a number of peculiarities which include simply disabling the mail sync if it cannot access the user's mail server for ashort period of time, which is great when you have to do maintenance on an client's mail server and then have to re-enable all of the Blackberry accounts associated with it. Another one we quite like is if you choose to use the option in the BIS service to use Outlook Web Access (Microsoft's webmail included in Exchange server) to access messages for delivery to your device, the service disables every 4-6 weeks 'automatically' and requires that your mailbox password is re-entered in the portal. Another problem most users will encounter if using POP3 is the one where messages that are unread are marked as read when the BIS service has accessed them. If you aren't happy with this, you can of course set BIS to use IMAP to access your mailbox but this then creates duplicate messages to your handheld because new message IDs are generated when a message is accessed by BIS.

Thanks to the many flaws of BIS and the increasing popularity of Blackberry devices (owed, we think, to that annoying 'Sent from Blackberry Handheld' tag it puts on all messages) we have spent way too many support hours troubleshooting them.
Combined with the ease at which a Window Mobile or iPhone handset syncs directly with company systems with the need for no additional servers, software, services or fees this all goes to explain the utter contempt which has been boiling at ITbuilder Towers... until now.

Just before Christmas last year, we were alerted to the introduction into the UK market of a product called Notifysync. It promised to provide equivalent Blackberry sync services to BES, but without the exhorbitant sofware licenses fees, the requirement for an additional server to run it on and the need to almost double your monthly mobile tariff; in fact all of things that make BES unthinkable for your average small business owner. Yes, Blackberry released their Professional Edition sync product last year which doesn't need a dedicated server and was a bit cheaper than BES but still needed a mobile contract upgrade and is a complete b**ger to install (repeated calls to mobile providers to delete and resend service books). No, Notifysync installs onto the handset itself and uses the free, built-in Exchange Mobilesync that the large of majority of business already own and which we know works because of our love of Windows Mobile handsets. It also works on the basic data tariff bundled with any Blackberry handset to allow web surfing.

We received the news of Notifysync with equal measure of joy and trepidation. It sounded like the answer to our prayers but our past experience of 3rd party mobile sync tools has been poor. We downloaded the trial edition with high hopes but low expectations. The task was assigned to Dylan, our junior team member, who was selected simply by virtue of the fact that he uses a Blackberry handheld (more out of necessity than choice) it being the only handset lying around when his preferred Nokia packed in.

Dylan installed the application onto his Blackberry, did a little bit of configuration and he was away! Not only was his Exchange Inbox in full, real-time sync with his handheld but so were his Contacts and Calendar. This is something that the BIS service could never do. We asked Dylan to see if he could break it or find some fault, but it just worked seamlessly and ultimately received the highest accolade any piece of trial software can receive, a sigh of disappointment when the trial eventually ended.

Notifysync has received a 5 star rating from team ITbuilder and we will be singing its praises from the rooftops. Are the dark days of supporting BIS finally behind us?

Smartphone Museum Officially Open

When we recently refurbished our meeting room we wanted some artwork to put on the walls to cosy it up a bit. Nothing at Ikea or the usual home furnishing retailers looked the part so we decided to create some of our own. During the refurb, we had the customary clearout of boxes of accumulated IT hardware that we have squirrelled away over the years in the hope that it will come in useful one day. Amongst this hardware was a rather fine collection of old smartphone handsets dating back to about 2001 and to what is the considered the original Smartphone, O2 XDA.

Since James changes his handset annually (sometimes bi-annually if a particularly exciting model is released) we had such an impressive collection of devices that we thought they needed to be exhibited in way that befitted our love of these gadgets. Yes, we could have traded them in at one of the companies that bore us to death with their tedious adverts promising to shower us with cash in return for old mobiles. But a mobile phone, particularly a smartphone is personal thing and we grow very attached to them (until the latest one come along of course :).

So this is why we created our first exhibit in our own homage to the smartphone. A wall-mounted, glass case to display our beloved smartphones of yore to guests and visitors as well as to cast an admiring glance ourselves from time to time. Please see below for a photo of the finished product.

Are we sad, pathetic individuals that are placing too much significance onto a PCB encased in a plastic shell? We think not. We think that we are preserving the memory of technological innovations that have transformed not only our lives but those of many millions who could suddenly tap out a quick email on the train or be able to receive an urgent document when they were spending valuable time with the kids rather than sat at a desk. Long live the smart phone and we look forward to building exhibit 2 in 10 years time (although we expect to require a much smaller case).

Clockwise from left: O2 XDA (HTC Wallaby), O2 XDAII (HTC Himalaya), VPA Compact (HTC Magician), QTEK 9100 (HTC Wizard 200),VDA V (HTC Vox), v1510 (Asus Solaris), v1605 (HTC TyTN), v1615 (HTC Kaiser)

Source: http://pdadb.net