Sunday 11 December 2011

How Mobile Broadband users use their data allowance


Interesting picture of what MBB users use their data allowance on. Interesting to see that Social Networking is far popular in the North America whereas Real-time entertainment is much more popular in APAC. It is understandable that the downstream Real-time entertainment would contain of VOD services like Youtube and Hulu but not sure what Upstream would consist of. 

Tuesday 6 December 2011

Proximity-based Services (ProSe) - New Study Item in 3GPP Rel-12


There is a new Rel-12 WI "Study on Proximity-based Services" with Qualcomm being the main proponent of this. This was earlier known as D2D (Device-to-device). From the 3GPP SP-110638:

Justification: Proximity-based applications and services represent a recent and enormous socio-technological trend. The principle of these applications is to discover instances of the applications running in devices that are within proximity of each other, and ultimately also exchange application-related data. In parallel, there is interest in proximity-based discovery and communications in the public safety community.


Current 3GPP specification are only partially suited for such needs, since all such traffic and signalling would have to be routed in the network, thus impacting their performance and adding un-necessary load in the network. These current limitations are also an obstacle to the creation of even more advanced proximity-based applications.


In this context, 3GPP technology, has the opportunity to become the platform of choice to enable proximity-based discovery and communication between devices, and promote a vast array of future and more advanced proximity-based applications.


Objective: The objective is to study use cases and identify potential requirements for an operator network controlled discovery and communications between devices that are in proximity, under continuous network control, and are under a 3GPP network coverage, for:
1. Commercial/social use
2. Network offloading
3. Public Safety
4. Integration of current infrastructure services, to assure the consistency of the user experience including reachability and mobility aspects
Additionally, the study item will study use cases and identify potential requirements for
5. Public Safety, in case of absence of EUTRAN coverage (subject to regional regulation and operator policy, and limited to specific public-safety designated frequency bands and terminals)


Use cases and service requirements will be studied including network operator control, authentication, authorization, accounting and regulatory aspects.


The study does not apply to GERAN or UTRAN.

In the past I have mentioned about Qualcomm's proprietary Flashlinq technology that seems to contain lots of similarities. There is also this AllJoyn technology that Qualcomm has been showing off since MWC. Here is a video of that:



There is a lot of potential of this proximity marketing technology mostly for marketing purposes and games. In the end it would depend of the Apps, services and charging based around this. There is also a big possibility for TV and VoD services where you start watching something on your device but then transfer it onto a TV or just a bigger screen.

Monday 5 December 2011

A Golden Next-Gen Hetrogeneous Device


From the 4th LTE North America Conference, 8 - 9 November 2011, Dallas, Texas, USA
Presented by Joe Lawrence, Vice President, CDMA Development Group (CDG)

UE Antenna Sizes on different frequencies


The biggest problem with Antennas for mobiles and now the tablets have been how to arrange antennas for MIMO since the wavelength needs to be λ/4. The picture gives an idea how the antenna size changes with different frequencies. Higher frequencies are better for having multiple antennas as their length and the distance between then decreases.

From a presentation by Shirook M. Ali, RIM in the 4th LTE North America Conference, 8 - 9 November
2011, Dallas, Texas, USA.