Top 15 blog posts from 2012

In Descending order:

1. Overview of LTE Handovers
2. Quick Introduction to LTE-Advanced
3. 3GPP Release-12 and beyond
4. Twitter et al. for Small Cell Planning
5. Tech Laws we should all know about 
6. Real Life Pictures of Small Cells Deployments in London
7. CSFB Performance
8. What is coming next after LTE and IMT-Advanced
9. LTE 'Antenna Ports' and their Physical mapping
10. Voice-Over-LTE (VoLTE) Signalling
11. 17 LTE Voice Modes
12. Cellular-Wi-Fi Integration - technology and standardization roadmap
13. On Signalling Storm... #LTEWS
14. What is nano-SIM card
15. R&S Whitepaper: LTE Transmission Modes and Beamforming

'Small Cells' Analyst Forecasts

Interesting discussion, courtesy of Think Small Cell



If you just want to view the slides quickly, available below:

Everything you ever wanted to know about M2M

Machine-to-Machine in Smart Grids & Smart Cities from Zahid Ghadialy

Related posts:

• Evolution of 'Internet of Things' to 'Internet of Everything'
• M2M-Related Standardization Bodies
• Standardisation on M2M at ETSI M2M platform
• Supporting M2M Services over LTE: Challenges & Solutions
• Evolution of Machine Type Communications (MTC)

Small Cells 'Terminology' and 'Comparison'

Here is AT&T's attempt in comparing the small cells. The above comparison is probably based on the assumption that LTE Small cells are not yet widely available. Once they are, then LTE can be put in for most columns in the Technology part.

See also:

• Small Cells: Comparison and Deployment Scenarios - NSN

Deploying Femtocells in Private Aircraft and Less Conventional Settings

Deploying Femtocells in Private Aircraft and Less Conventional Settings from Zahid Ghadialy

Future mobile technology with Graphene

Some days back I attended an interesting talk where the speaker showed how Graphene will revolutionise the future mobile devices. Here is what Graphene is:



Another version:



A concept phone video from Samsung



And a Nokia demo from the last MWC that uses Graphene as a sensor and also opens the possibility of using other gestures except for touch

Four Options for Traffic Offloading

Data v/s Signalling Traffic in Dongles and Phones

From a presentation by Peter Zidar in the Small Cells Global Congress 2012.

The above picture shows that even though the amount data traffic carried by dongles is much more than the amount of traffic carried by the mobile phones, the amount of signalling is far higher from the mobiles than that of dongles. This is mainly because the mobiles need to conserve the battery power and for this reason they disconnect from the network as soon as there is no need for exchange of data. Remember the Fast Dormancy issue in the smartphones? If not see this post.

Related posts:

• On Signalling Storm...
• A Twitter discussion on 'Data Tsunami' myth
• M2M and the 'Big Data'
• Understanding smartphone traffic

IMS Whitepapers from Spirent

Couple of old but interesting whitepapers from Spirent available, in case you are interesting in IMS. Available to download from here (registration required)

Related blog posts:

• IMS Release 10 Tutorial
• ETSI INT IMS/EPC Interoperability Standardisation: Motivation, Roadmap & First Results
• UICC and ISIM (IMS SIM)

2 Presentations on Mobile technology Security

Present and future Standards for mobile internet and smart phone information security from Zahid Ghadialy

Other related posts:

• Evolution of 3GPP Security
• 'Mapped Security' Concept in LTE
• 3GPP LTE Security Aspects
• New Security Algorithms in Release-11
• 6th ETSI Security Workshop

Spectrum auction results from The Netherlands

The result of the auction: 

	800	900	1800	2100	1900	2600
KPN	2x10	2x10	2x20	2x5		30
Vodafone	2x10	2x10	2x20	2x5
T-Mobile		2x15	2x30		4,9+9,7	25
Tele2	2x10

The total price of the auction:

• Vodafone 1,380,800,000 euro (1.381 billion)
• KPN 1,351,852,000 euros (1.352 billion)
• T-Mobile 910,681,000 euro (910.8 million)
• Tele2 euro 160,813,000 (160.8 million)

After the auction is the distribution of the main bands is as follows:

	800	900 no	900 new	1800 no	1800 new	2100 no	2100 new	2600
KPN	2x10	2x12,4	2x10	2x18,4	2x20	2x15	2x20	2x10
Vodafone	2x10	2x12,4	2x10	2x4,8	2x20	2x15	2x20	2x10
T-Mobile		2x10	2x15	2x30,6	2x30	2x20	2x20	2x5
Tele2	2x10	-	-	-	-	-	-	2x20
TO		-	-	-	-	-	-	2x20

Sources:

• Dutch multiband spectrum auction ends with four winners
• Veiling eindigt met vier winnaars, Tele2 nieuwkomer

LTE Rollouts planned:
Vodafone - Summer 2013
KPN - February 2013

Added 15/12/12:11.48

You can also see it visually as in the slide below:

Half Duplex Operation (HD-FDD) in LTE

It was interesting to hear the other day that there is an option for HD-FDD but it is still undergoing investigation and not standardised yet. From what I hear, operators are showing an interest and we may see it coming to an operator near us in the next couple of years.

Complete presentation below:

Half Duplex Operation in Multimode/Multiband/MIMO-capable Handsets from Zahid Ghadialy

The advantages are obvious but probably the only reason this was not standardised actively is probably because then peak rates often quoted when promoting technology will be halved. The economy of scale is also important and we may not see this becoming popular unless many operators decide together to push for this.

Other posts of interest:

• Quick Introduction to LTE-Advanced
• Quick update on 3GPP Release-12 progress
• TD-LTE in China: Progress and Plan

"Small Cells" - An introduction for beginners

A good starting point for beginners on Small Cells:

 

Related links:

• Small Cells: Comparison and Deployment Scenarios
• Whats inside a Picocell?
• Building the World’s Largest Residential Small-Cell network
• ‘Small Cells’ and the City
• ‘Proximity Marketing’ and ‘Location Based Services’ (LBS) using ‘Small Cells’
• Radio Challenges and Opportunities for Large Scale Small Cell Deployments

Mobile Device Testing and its Path to Commercialization

Improvements to GSM, GPRS and EDGE to interact with the LTE experience

Improvements to GSM, GPRS and EDGE to interact with the LTE experience from Zahid Ghadialy

See Also:

• What is GELTE?

Quick update on 3GPP Release-12 progress

Some months back, I blogged about the 3GPP Rel-12 workshop, since then there has been progress on the Rel-12 features. Here is a quick update from 3GPP:

Future 3GPP RAN standardization activities for LTE from Zahid Ghadialy

You can download the PPT from Slideshare.

Other related posts:

• Quick Introduction to LTE-Advanced

5 videos on Augmented Reality

Looks like Augmented Reality (AR) is getting hot, just in time for Christmas. I wonder how many products will be sold based on AR. As I suggested in an earlier post, there may be 1 Billion users by 2020. Here are the videos:

Google's Ingress is an AR baased game:



Augmented Reality Book of Spells, Harry Potter experience:

Wonder when/ever it will come to a mobile near you.

LightBeam - Interacting with Augmented Real-World Objects in Pico Projections:



The next is a bit old but worth mentioning:

LuminAR from MIT


Finally, the science of Haptics will allows us to "touch" objects in a virtual world in future

Augmented Reality and Touch

Components of a BTS Site - nice pic

Data growth from 0.6EB/Mo to 10.6EB/Mo by 2016 (18x)

A slightly old slide that I found while looking for some information but worth putting up here.

1 EB (Exabyte) = 1000000000000000000B = 1018 bytes = 1000000000gigabytes = 1000000terabytes = 1000petabytes

As we can see, Cisco predicts (and I agree) that the mobile data consumption will increase from 0.6 exabytes per month to 10.6 exabytes per month by 2016. What is really debatable is what actually is a mobile device and how much of this data will go through the operators network.

If for example a tablet contains SIM card but you use your own home/work WiFi. Does this qualify as a mobile device and is this data included. What if its exactly the same scenario and the device does not have a SIM card then would you say this is a mobile device? What happens when the operator allows you to use an Operator WiFi which is secured via login/password and you use the tablet without SIM card on an operator WiFi. Would you count this data, is the device considered as a mobile device.

The bottom line is that data usage will continue to grow but probably not on the mobile networks. WiFi would be a prime candidate for offloading, due to it being mostly free (or costing much less - except in the hotels). Some of the recent pricing by the operators make me feel that they do not want the users to use their network for every day use, only for important work.

See Also:

• Operators strategy for supporting the ‘Mobile Data Explosion’
• Cellular or WiFi: Which is the preferred network access?
• Data Consumed by Different Streaming Applications
• A Twitter discussion on 'Data Tsunami' myth
• How Mobile Broadband users use their data allowance
• Understanding smartphone traffic