Showing posts with label LTE & 5G World Series. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LTE & 5G World Series. Show all posts

Friday 29 August 2014

Wireless Charging: A must-have technology with maturing standards


Wireless charging has been in news recently with the discovery that Apple has found a brilliant way to wireless charge iPhones, iPads and iWatches. While we continue to wait for the details of that one, I thought its worth providing a bit of round up from the LTE World Summit not so long back. A summary of market by IHS is embedded as follows:



Qi (pronounced Chee), probably the most well known standard, not just because its already available in devices like Google Nexus 5 phone and Nexus 7 tablet  but also because its 1.2 standard allows devices to be charged from some distance away. They had an excellent presentation outlining their progress and technology as follows:





Finally, any discussion on Wireless Charging wont be complete without the mention of other big player, Alliance For Wireless Power (A4WP). The above shows a comparison between different standards and the presentation from A4WP is as follows:




Finally, if you haven't seen our concept of futuristic 'Smart Batteries' (crossed 10K+ views) then check it out here.

Friday 4 July 2014

Cell capacity and Opportunistic Use of Unlicensed and Shared Spectrum

One very interesting presentation from the LTE World Summit was about Improving the cell capacity by using unlicensed and shared spectrum opportunistically. Kamran Etemad is a senior advisor to FCC & UCMP and even though he was presenting this in his personal capacity, it reflected some interesting views that are quite prevalent in the USA.

If you don't know about Dynamic Spectrum Access Schemes, I wrote a post on the Small Cells blog here. The slide above is quite interesting as it shows the possibility of a 'Generalized' Carrier Aggregation in 3GPP Release-13. Personally, we believe that LTE + WiFi working together will be far more successful than LTE + LTE-U (unlicensed). As the blog readers would be aware, we have been pushing our vision of LTE + Wi-Fi working together; which we are calling as 4.5G. In case if you have not seen, our whitepaper is here.

The presentation is embedded below for reference:


Wednesday 2 July 2014

Case Study: Migrating from WiMAX to TD-LTE



I was glad to hear this case study by Mike Stacey where they have a WiMAX network already deployed and are in process of moving to TD-LTE. Along with the technical issues there are also business and customer issues that need to be taken into account while doing this technology swap. Surprisingly 3.5GHz is also not a very popular band because there are very few deployments in this spectrum. On the other hand, most of the companies worldwide that have been able to get their hands on this spectrum, generally got a big chunk (60-100MHz) so they would be able to do CA easily (bar the technical issues of Intra-band interference).

Anyway, the presentation is embedded below. Hope you find it useful. If you know of similar experiences, please feel free to add them in the comments.


Saturday 28 June 2014

EE: The Implications of RAN Architecture Evolution for Transport Networks


Here is a presentation by Andy Sutton, EE from the recent LTE World Summit 2014. Unfortunately the event was too big to be present in all presentations but in his own words, "As always the bullet points don’t tell the full story as there’s considerable narrative that goes with this, however it does stress some major themes."

Slides embedded below, can be downloaded from Slideshare:


Friday 27 June 2014

Voice over WiFi (VoWiFi)


One of the changes that I have noticed in the last year is that some of the operators who have been opposed to WiFi in the past have not only embraced it but are now trying to monopolise the same WiFi spectrum they billed as interference prone. Personally, I think the future of Wi-Fi is not just offloading but also working together with LTE. We are billing this as 4.5G and have recently produced a whitepaper, available here.

There has been a flurry of activity on Voice over Wi-Fi in the last few months. Recently the UK operators '3' and EE announced that they are both allowing WiFi calling and SMS. While '3' customers will have to use an OTT app for the time being, EE customers will experience this seamlessly.

I heard Taqua in the recent LTE World Summit talking about their solution and have offered to share their slides (embedded below). It was interesting to find out while having a discussion with them that their solution supports 'hand-in' and 'hand-out'. This takes away a major advantage that Small Cells offered, seamless roaming. Anyway, feel free to let me know of you have any opinion on this topic


Thursday 26 June 2014

LTE-Broadcast: Reality check


When I wrote my blog post about why the 'Cellular Broadcast may fail again' for the Cisco SP Mobility blog, I did not realise that this would become so popular and there would be so many people writing to me to tell me why and how my assumptions are wrong and how they plan to succeed. I have not yet received a successful reasoning on why people disagree with my article and where I am wrong.

In the Video Over LTE Summit just concluded, I did not get a chance to see all the LTE-B presentations but the ones that I saw, were not convincing enough, except for one by Erol Hepsaydir, of '3' UK, that I explain in the end.

Here is my presentation from that event:



The conclusion is not self-explanatory so here it is in my own words.


I am not opposed to the operators trying LTE-B out. I wish more operators do try and hopefully we can have a model where the technology can succeed. When operators succeed in a new technology, it benefits the whole mobile ecosystem directly or indirectly. The operators have to be prepared that they may not see any return. This should not discourage them because the learnings from this may benefit in something else. The customer and their loyalty is more important. We should try and provide them with a value addition rather than think of this as a new source of revenue. People are not interested in watching the same stuff they watch on the terrestrial TV on their small devices; unique and maybe tailored content would help. Finally, don't make the billing model too complex so the users shy away from trying this new technology.

The final presentation of the event was delivered by Erol Hepsaydir of the UK operator '3'. He said that from their point of view, they are trying to have eMBMS to create additional capacity in the network. If they know that many people watch news on different apps and websites, they can offer this as a free service over broadcast. What this means is that they have gained customer loyalty and also free up the capacity for other users who are doing other data related activities. I think this is a very clever approach. He did mention though that they are only in the simulation stages and have not tried it out practically. 

Wednesday 25 June 2014

Diamater: Market Status, Roaming, NFV and Case Studies

Some more interesting presentations from the Signalling Focus Day of LTE World Summit. Good overview of market by Greg Collins of Exact ventures is embedded below.





A good presentation by Tieto where they presented some good case studies for Diameter Interworking. Presentation embedded below:




The final presentation by Diametriq is very interesting because they presented interesting way of mining the control plane. Thee case study presented was of a 'silent roamer' who is not going to spend money while roaming because he is not sure how much money is spent. This can be exploited by the operator to offer flat packages, 1 day pass, etc. to get some revenue from these roamers. Their presentation included some animations that cannot be shown while being embedded. Please download the PPT from Slideshare to view them.


Monday 23 June 2014

LTE Roaming using IPX


A very interesting presentation from Raphaël Glatt of Bics in the Signalling Focus Day of LTE World Summit 2014. IPX is probably the most popular solution as its already being used by many operators for roaming agreements. Anyway, his presentation was the most detailed one I have come across and he was happy to share it with me for this blog. His complete presentation is embedded below:



Monday 9 June 2014

European Regulations for 'Decoupling of SIM' and 'International Roaming'


The following is an extract from an article from Capana:

From the 1st of July 2014, the new EU Roaming Regulations III will become active.

The new EU Roaming regulations set by the European Commission, will allow retail mobile customers to purchase roaming services (such as voice, SMS and data) from an Alternative Roaming Provider (ARP) separate from their domestic service provider (DSP), without affecting either mobile number or device.
The general idea behind the regulations is to promote the interests of European citizens by increase competition between European operators, provide greater transparency, reduce bill shocks, and ultimately provide a greater roaming experience and higher quality of service for consumers.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso said in a press release:
“Further substantial progress towards a European single market for telecoms is essential for Europe’s strategic interests and economic progress. For the telecoms sector itself and for citizens who are frustrated that they do not have full and fair access to internet and mobile services.”
Vice President Neelie Kroes, the Digital Agenda Commissioner responsible for package then continued in the same press release by saying:
“The legislation proposed today is great news for the future of mobile and internet in Europe. The European Commission says no to roaming premiums, yes to net neutrality, yes to investment, yes to new jobs. Fixing the telecoms sector is no longer about this one sector but about supporting the sustainable development of all sectors.”
Requirements
The process of selecting an ARP and its services while abroad within EU is more commonly known as decoupling or separate sale of roaming services. BEREC (the body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) have provided the European Commission with their recommendations of two decoupling models that should be supported; Local breakout (LBO, which is the local provisioning of data services by a visited network operator, or Single IMSI solution where the ARP acts as a reseller of the DSPs service offerings.
Decoupling using Single IMSI
With the Single IMSI solution the ARP will engage in agreements with each domestic operator providing domestic services, then the ARP will act as a reseller of these services to the roaming subscriber. This type of solution is applicable for all types of service providers such as mobile network operators, MVNOs or VSPs. From a subscriber standpoint, they will have a roaming agreement with the ARP regardless of the DSP and the DSP is required to activate services within one working day.
Decoupling using Local Breakout
The Local breakout model refers to local provisioning of data services only, where the services is provided directly on the visited network and traditional SMS and voice traffic is supplied by the home operator in traditional roaming manner. By using the 3GPP option for local breakouts, the VPMN will be able to act as ARP for internet access and other data services.
With these new regulatory changes, there is a higher demand on flexibility in billing systems. Support for more complex multi-partner business models for ARP and MVNO is necessary for both billing and financial settlement activities.

Raymond Bouwman from Rabion Consultancy did an excellent presentation last year in the LTE World Summit, here is his presentation explaining more about the EU Roaming Regulations III



Wednesday 28 May 2014

Case Study: RAN Sharing in Poland


The last post on Network sharing by NEC was surprisingly popular so I thought its worth doing a case study by Orange in Poland on how they successfully managed to share their network with T-Mobile. Full presentation embedded as follows:


Sunday 23 March 2014

Securing the backhaul with the help of LTE Security Gateway


An excellent presentation from the LTE World Summit last year, that is embedded below. The slide(s) that caught my attention was the overhead involved when using the different protocols. As can be seen in the picture above, the Ethernet MTU is 1500 bytes but after removing all the overheads, 1320 bytes are left for data. In case you were wondering, MTU stands for 'maximum transmission unit' and is the largest size packet or frame, specified in octets (8-bit bytes), that can be sent in a packet or frame based network such as the Internet.

Anyway, the presentation is embedded below:


Tuesday 22 October 2013

Korea Telecom ‘Route Decision System’ for midnight buses

Interesting presentation from Korea Telecom in LTE Asia 2013 about how they use Big Data to decide the night bus routes. Here are two pics which are self explanatory


We will soon start seeing operators using the data being collected from users and this can also be a nice little earner for them.

Monday 12 August 2013

C-RAN Architecture and Challenges


I have blogged about Cloud RAN or C-RAN in the Metrocells blog here and am looking forward to more discussions on this topic in the SON conference later this year.


I came across this interesting presentation from Orange in the LTE World Summit this year where the authors have detailed the C-RAN architecture and also discussing the fronthaul challenges faced by C-RAN. The presentation is embedded as follows. Please feel free to add your comments with your opinions.




Thursday 8 August 2013

2 Factor and 3 Factor Authentication (2FA / 3FA)

Found an interesting slide showing 2 Factor Authentication in picture from a presentation in LTE World Summit


You can also read more about this and Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) on Wikipedia here.

Friday 19 July 2013

Nice way of showing HetNets, by Cisco #LTEWS

This is from a presentation by Akram Awad of Cisco in the LTE World Summit 2013 in Amsterdam. I really like the way HetNets are explained





Sunday 7 July 2013

500 Billion devices by 2030, etc...

Few weeks back in the LTE World Summit 2013, I heard someone from Ericsson mention that internally they think that by 2030 there will be 500 Billion Connected devices on the planet. The population projections for 2030 is somewhere around 8.5 Billion people worldwide. As a result the figure does not come much as a surprise to me.

John Cunliffe from Ericsson is widely credited for making the statement 50 Billion connected devices by 2020. Recently he spoke in the Cambridge Wireless and defended his forecast on the connected devices. He also provided us with the traffic exploration tool to see how the devices market would look up till 2018. Here is one of the pictures using the tool:



In terms of Cellular connectivity, we are looking at 9 Billion devices by 2018. The interesting thing to notice is that in 2017, there are still some 4 Billion feature phones. While in the developed world our focus is completely on Smartphones, its interesting to see new and existing SMS/USSD based services are still popular in the developing world. Some months back I heard about Facebook developing SMS/USSD based experience for Feature phones, I am sure that would attract a lot of users from the developing world.

One thing missing from the above is non-cellular connections which will make bulk of connectivity. Wi-Fi for example is a major connectivity medium for tablets. In fact 90% of the tablets have only WiFi connectivity. Bluetooth is another popular method of connectivity. While its mostly used in conjunction with phones, it is going to be a popular way of connecting devices in the Personal Area Network's (PAN's). So its no surprise that we will see 50 Billion connected devices but maybe not by 2020. My guess would be around 2022-23.

Thursday 20 June 2013

Economical M2M using LTE - #LTEWS

In the upcoming LTE World Summit 2013 (programme here), I will be doing a briefing on the topic 'Economical M2M using LTE'. I have some ideas but I would like to hear more on what you think? In fact, is LTE the right technology from the M2M device point of view? Or do they better stick to 2G (I dont think 3G is good enough generally from low data M2M point of view). What other issues can be foreseen? Security? Roaming?
A recent presentation from Telefonica shows how they are partnering with other operators worldwide to create universal solutions. Will this help? Why not use these solutions for everything, not just LTE? LTE is data only technology isn't it?

The presentation is embedded below to draw your own conclusion but I an interested in hearing your thoughts on Twitter or here on the blog.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

#LTEAsia 2012 Highlights - via Alan Quayle

A summary of LTE Asia 2012, slides and highlights via Alan Quayle blog.



Some of the interesting findings from the conference include:
  • TD-LTE is gaining momentum, and its beyond WiMAX operators and China mobile, many APAC operators are considering it for unpaired spectrum and to efficiently meet the asymmetric capacity requirements of mobile broadband which is mainly download
  • Software defined radio and self-organizing networks are proving critical to manage operational costs
  • Single RAN is proving the best way to manage network performance
  • Signaling is in a mess - what is the good of standards when it creates such a mess?
  • IMS gaps continue - what is the good of standards when it doesn't meet basic migration needs?
  • The SS7 guys have reinvented themselves as the Diameter guys
  • Business model innovation - LTE is not just for mobile devices, LTE is for quad play and an interesting array of business applications
  • The 3G network of many operators is congested - forcing the move to LTE
  • CSFB (Circuit Switched Fall Back) works
  • VoLTE testing / roaming / network issues remain - given voice remains by revenue the core service, our industry should be ashamed we're having so many problems with VoLTE
  • A belief on OTT partnering, but not quantification on the OTT's willingness to pay for QoS (Quality of Service)
  • Many operators have a question mark on the use of WiFi off-load - its not a technology issue rather one of economics and customer experience, LTE-A and small cells in hotspots appears to be the focus.

Briefly reviewing the slides shown below:

  • LTE Data Points
    • 96 Commercial LTE deployments mainly in the 1.8 and 2.8GHz bands
    • APAC has 40% of LTE subscribers, likely to be the high growth region
    • Drivers for LTE: Throughput, efficiency and low latency
    • TD-LTE: 12 commercial deployments, 24 contracts and 53 Trials
    • Streaming video dominates traffic on handheld devices, with YouTube being the top traffic generator at 27% of peak traffic
  • South Korea Data Explosion
    • South Korea has seen OTT explode, Kakao Talk 51 mins of usage per day
    • 20 times smartphone growth in 2 years (28M in June 2012, 53% penetration)
    • 60 times mobile data growth to 37TB per month in 2 years, 32% is from LTE devices
    • LTE subs use 2.9GB per month compared to 3G sub on average use 1.2GB
    • LTE subs reached 10M, 141% monthly growth
    • Customer drive for LTE is speed (37%) and latest device (31%)
    • Challenge Jan 2010 and Jan 2012 ARPU fallen from $48-$35 while data use risen from 180MB to 992MB
    • Focus beyond voice, messaging and data into VAS: virtual goods (Korean thing), ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and cloud services / solutions (focus on enterprise)
  • HK CSL Migration to LTE
    • 3G is congested, LTE is not
    • Key is LTE devices available, unlike the early 3G days
    • Migrating customers away from unlimited plans to family and shared plans that deliver value
    • LTE sub uses 2-5 times the data of 3G subs
    • CSFB works
    • Average speed seen is 20 Mbps
    • Using Software Defined Radio, Single vendor RAN, Self-Organizing Networks
    • Migration to LTE-A, small cells and WiFi where appropriate
  • Starhub's migration to LTE (they launched LTE at the event)
    • 50% of voice traffic is still on 2G
    • Using AMR to re-farm 2G spectrum to LTE
    • Site access is critical - drive to software defined radio to avoid site visits
  • NTT DoCoMo's VoLTE Evolution
    • 70% devices in portfolio are now LTE
    • All smartphones support CSFB
    • Drive to VoLTE is simply to switch off 3G voice (2G already off)
    • BUT IMS has missing functionality / standards - migration from 3G to VoLTE is not easy - example of failing in standards on basic issues
  • Yes: Example of innovative converged 4G operator in an developing market that uses web principles for service delivery
  • Role of Mobile Identity in BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
    • BYOD is as significant a trend if APAC as any other market
    • Provides a nice review of the approaches in managing BYOD
  • LTE Quad-Play in Emerging Markets: TD-LTE case study
  • Smartphone growth implications: Review of the signaling problem and mitigation strategies across 3G and LTE.  Highlights challenge current standards process 


Read the complete post here.