I wrote a blog post on this topic nearly three years back on the Operator Watch Blog here. That post is very handy as every few months someone or other asks me about this number. Here is a slightly updated number, though I am not confident on its accuracy.
Gabriel Brown, analyst at Heavy Reading shares this chart above in the annual online Open RAN Digital Symposium. Based on the chart above, there are 7 million physical sites and 10 million logical sites. As there are many sites hosting infrastructure from multiple operators, the number of logical sites are more than the number of physical sites.
Again, most of the sites have distributed RAN (D-RAN) so there may be one or more base stations (baseband unit or BBU) and each base station can serve one or more radios. See links at the bottom for tutorials on these topics.
Per MIIT, new China 5G BTS shipments to drop by a third in 2023 relative to 2022 shipments. https://t.co/6iCMCh0ht6
China Tower had nearly 2.1 million telecom towers installed with 3.36m tower tenants at end of 2022. An MIIT minister said that China's operators will deploy 600k 5G base stations in 2023, taking total to 2.9m.
Astonishing scale of investment and execution in #China for #5G, creating a pervasive connectivity fabric that is driving massive digital transformation. 1.4 million base stations for 5G alone!!! For perspective, that nearly 3x India's total base station count...@mandalainsightshttps://t.co/9djZiiy67t
The number of 5G radios in India just crossed 100,000 according to latest data released by the Department of Telecommunications. A base station generally manages multiple radios so not sure how many base stations would be there for 5G and even for older Gs.
In South Korea, according to the Ministry of Science and ICT and the mobile communication industry, as of December 2021, had 460,000 5G wireless stations of which, base stations accounted for 94% of the total, or 430,000 units, while repeaters only accounted for 30,000 units, or 6%.
Light Reading reported in September 2022 that there are nearly 419,000 cell sites across the US, according to the newest figures from CTIA.
China and USA are roughly the same size so you can see how China is ensuring their mobile networks provide the best QoE. It should also be noted that the population of China is over four times that of the USA. On the other hand, India and China have the same population but India is one third the size of China roughly.
Since the industry realised how the 5G Network Architecture will look like, Network Slicing has been touted as the killer business case that will allow the mobile operators to generate revenue from new sources.
According to global technology intelligence firm ABI Research, 5G slicing revenue is expected to grow from US$309 million in 2022 to approximately US$24 billion in 2028, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 106%.
“5G slicing adoption falls into two main categories. One, there is no connectivity available. Two, there is connectivity, but there is not sufficient capacity, coverage, performance, or security. For the former, both private and public organizations are deploying private network slices on a permanent and ad hoc basis,” highlights Don Alusha, 5G Core and Edge Networks Senior Analyst at ABI Research. The second scenario is mostly catered by private networks today, a market that ABI Research expects to grow from US$3.6 billion to US$109 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 45.8%. Alusha continues, “A sizable part of this market can be converted to 5G slicing. But first, the industry should address challenges associated with technology and commercial models. On the latter, consumers’ and enterprises’ appetite to pay premium connectivity prices for deterministic and tailored connectivity services remains to be determined. Furthermore, there are ongoing industry discussions on whether the value that comes from 5G slicing can exceed the cost required to put together the underlying slicing ecosystem.”
I recently published IDC's first forecast on 5G network slicing services opportunity. Slicing should be an important tool for telcos to create new services, but it still remains many years away in most markets. A very complicated undertakinghttps://t.co/GNY4xiLFBV
Earlier this year, Daryl Schoolar - Research Director at IDC tackled this topic in his blog post:
5G network slicing, part of the 3GPP standards developed for 5G, allows for the creation of multiple virtual networks across a single network infrastructure, allowing enterprises to connect with guaranteed low latency. Using principles behind software-defined network and network virtualization, slicing allows the mobile operator to provide differentiated network experience for different sets of end users. For example, one network slice could be configured to support low latency, while another slice is configured for high download speeds. Both slices would run across the same underlying network infrastructure, including base stations, transport network, and core network.
Network slicing differs from private mobile networks, in that network slicing runs on the public wide area network. Private mobile networks, even when offered by the mobile operator, use infrastructure and spectrum dedicated to the end user to isolate the customer’s traffic from other users.
5G network slicing is a perfect candidate for future business connectivity needs. Slicing provides a differentiated network experience that can better match the customers performance requirements than traditional mobile broadband. Until now, there has been limited mobile network performance customization outside of speeds. 5G network slicing is a good example of telco service offerings that meet future of connectivity requirements. However, 5G network slicing also highlights the challenges mobile operators face with transformation in their pursuit of remaining relevant.
For 5G slicing to have broad commercial availability, and to provide a variety of performance options, several things need to happen first.
Operators need to deploy 5G Standalone (SA) using the new 5G mobile core network. Currently most operators use the 5G non-standalone (NSA) architecture that relies on the LTE mobile core. It might be the end of 2023 before the majority of commercial 5G networks are using the SA mode.
Spectrum is another hurdle that must be overcome. Operators still make most of their revenue from consumers, and do not want to compromise the consumer experience when they start offering network slicing. This means operators need more spectrum. In the U.S., among the three major mobile operators, only T-Mobile currently has a nationwide 5G mid-band spectrum deployment. AT&T and Verizon are currently deploying in mid-band, but that will not be completed until 2023.
5G slicing also requires changes to the operator’s business and operational support systems (BSS/OSS). Current BSS/OSS solutions were not designed to support the increased parameters those systems were designed to support.
And finally, mobile operators still need to create the business propositions around commercial slicing services. Mobile operators need to educate businesses on the benefits of slicing and how slicing supports their different connectivity requirements. This could involve mobile operators developing industry specific partnerships to reach different business segments. All these things take time to be put into place.
Because of the enormity of the tasks needed to make 5G network slicing a commercial success, IDC currently has a very conservative outlook for this service through 2026. IDC believes it will be 2023 until there is general commercial availability of 5G network slicing. The exception is China, which is expected to have some commercial offerings in 2022 as it has the most mature 5G market. Even then, it will take until 2025 before global revenues from slicing exceeds a billion U.S. dollars. In 2026 IDC forecasts slicing revenues will be approximately $3.2 billion. However, over 80% of those revenues will come out of China.
The 'Outspoken Industry Analyst' Dean Bubley believes that Network Slicing is one of the worst strategic errors made by the mobile industry, since the catastrophic choice of IMS for communications applications. In a LinkedIn post he explains:
At best, slicing is an internal toolset that might allow telco operations or product teams (or their vendors) to manage their network resources. For instance, it could be used to separate part of a cell's capacity for FWA, and dynamically adjust that according to demand. It might be used as an "ingredient" to create a higher class of service for enterprise customers, for instance for trucks on a highway, or as part of an "IoT service" sold by MNOs. Public safety users might have an expensive, artisanal "hand-carved" slice which is almost a separate network. Maybe next-gen MVNOs.
(I'm talking proper 3GPP slicing here - not rebranded QoS QCI classes, private APNs, or something that looks like a VLAN, which will probably get marketed as "slices")
But the idea that slicing is itself a *product*, or that application developers or enterprises will "buy a slice" is delusional.
Firstly, slices will be dependent on [good] coverage and network control. A URLLC slice likely won't work reliably indoors, underground, in remote areas, on a train, on a neutral-host network, or while roaming. This has been a basic failure of every differentiated-QoS monetisation concept for many years, and 5G's often-higher frequencies make it worse, not better.
Secondly, there is no mature machinery for buying, selling, testing, supporting. price, monitoring slices. No, the 5G Network Exposure Function won't do it all. I haven't met a Slice salesperson yet, or a Slice-procurement team.
Thirdly, a "local slice" of a national 5G network will run headlong into a battle with the desire for separate private/dedicated local 5G networks, which may well be cheaper and easier. It also won't work well with the enterprise's IT/OT/IP domains, out of the box.
Also there's many challenges getting multi-operator slices, device OS links to slice APIs, slice "boundary controllers" between operators, aligning RAN and core slices, regulatory questionmarks and much more.
There are lots of discussion in the comments section that may be of interest to you, here.
My belief is that we will see lots of interesting use cases with slicing in public networks but it will be difficult to monetise. The best networks will manage to do it to create some plans with guaranteed rates and low latency. It would remain to be see whether they can successfully monetise it well enough.
For technical people and newbies, there are lots of Network Slicing resources on this blog (see related posts 👇). Here is another recent video from Mpirical:
Detailed post below but if you are after a quick summary, it's in the picture above.
Couple of weeks back someone quoted that there were 50 billion devices last year (2020). After challenging them on the number, they came back to me to say that there were over 13 billion based on GSMA report. While the headline numbers are correct, there are some finer details we need to look at.
It all started back in 2010 when the then CEO of Ericsson announced that there will be 50 Billion IoT Devices by 2020. You could read all about it here and see the presentation here. While it doesn't explicitly say, it was expected that the majority of these will be based on cellular technologies. I also heard the number 500 Billion by 2030, back in 2013.
So the question is how many IoT devices are there today and how many of these are based on mobile cellular technologies?
The headline number provided by the GSMA Mobile Economy report, published just in time for MWC 2021, is 13.1 billion in 2020. It does not provide any further details on what kind of connectivity these devices use. I had to use my special search skills to find the details here.
As you can see, only 1.9 billion of these are based on cellular connections, of which 0.2 billion are based on licensed Low Power Wide Area (licensed LPWA, a.k.a. LTE-M and NB-IoT) connections.
Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2021, has a much more detailed breakdown regarding the numbers as can be seen in the slide above. As of the end of 2020, there were 12.4 billion IoT devices, of which 10.7 billion were based on Short-range IoT. Short-range IoT is defined as a segment that largely consists of devices connected by unlicensed radio technologies, with a typical range of up to 100 meters, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee.
Wide-area IoT, which consists of segment made up of devices using cellular connections or unlicensed low-power technologies like Sigfox and LoRa had 1.7 billion devices. So, the 1.6 billion cellular IoT devices also includes LPWAN technologies like LTE-M and NB-IoT.
Figures are connections/SIMs sold - not all will be live yet.
I also reached out to IoT experts at analyst firm Analysys Mason. As you can see in the Tweet above, Tom Rebbeck, Partner at Analysys Mason, mentioned 1.6 billion cellular (excluding NB-IoT + LTE-M) and 220 million LPWA (which includes NB-IoT, LTE-M, as well as LoRa, Sigfox etc.) IoT connections.
If I understand this correctly, as of June 2021 there were 1.55 billion cellular IoT connections. Do these include NB-IoT as well as LTE-M?
I also noticed this interesting chart in the tweet above which shows the growth of IoT from Dec 2010 until June 2021. Matt Hatton, Founding Partner of Transforma Insights, kindly clarified that the number as 1.55 billion including NB-IoT and LTE-M.
As you can see, the number of cellular IoT connections are nowhere near 50 billion. Even if we include all kinds of IoT connectivity, according to the most optimistic estimate by Ericsson, there will be just over 26 billion connections by 2026.
Just before concluding, it is worth highlighting that according to all these cellular IoT estimates, over 1 billion of these connections are in China. GSMA's 'The Mobile Economy China 2021' puts the number as 1.34 billion as of 2020, growing to 2.29 billion by 2025. Details on page 9 here.
Hopefully, when someone wants to talk about Internet of Thing numbers in the future, they will do a bit more research or just quote the numbers from this post here.
I wonder if you have seen as many adverts talking about the 5G revolution as I have. In fact I have collected many of them here. The problem is that most of these promised 5G awesomeness can only be delivered when 5G Standalone networks are launched.
Before going further, if you don't know what 5G standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA) networks are, then you may want to check one of my tutorials/video. For beginners here and slightly advanced version here. If you just want to learn about the 5G core, tutorial here.
I believe that the 5G Non-standalone networks are a hack that were designed mainly to show just the 5G icon and in some cases it also provided enhanced speeds. Some operators have realised this and are thinking about the 5G NSA sunset. There are some potential issues with 5G SA speeds that need sorting out though.
GSA recently held a webinar looking at the status of 5G Standalone networks. The video of the webinar is embedded at the end of the post. The webinar summarised the stats as following:
By mid-March 2021, 428 operators in 132 countries/territories were investing in 5G
176 operators in 76 countries/territories had announced they had deployed 3GPP compliant 5G technology in their live networks
Of those, a total of 153 operators in 64 countries/territories had launched one or more 3GPP-compliant 5G services
145 operators in 60 countries/territories had launched 3GPP-compliant 5G mobile services
51 operators in 29 countries/territories had launched 3GPP-compliant 5G FWA or home broadband services
For comparison, there are 807 public LTE networks worldwide
GSA has identified 68 operators in 38 countries/territories that are investing in 5G standalone for public mobile networks
Of those, a total of 7 operators in 5 countries/territories had launched 5G SA networks
Operators in China have deployed/upgraded hundreds of thousands of base stations
T-Mobile has a nationwide network
Plus China Mobile HK, Rain (South Africa) and DirecTV (Colombia)
Also ITC KSA (soft launch), STC KSA deployed, Telstra 5G core deployed, plus various contracts for 5G core systems
Private Networks, Non-public networks (NPN) and Industrial 5G Networks are also expected to make use of standalone 5G networks. As 5G networks get virtualized and open, we will see a lot more of these.
The webinar also highlighted the progress of 5G devices:
There has been rapid growth in the numbers and types of 5G devices being announced and launched
As of end February:
628 5G devices announced
404 commercially available (up from 303 at the end of November)
104 vendors
21 announced form factors
Majority are phones (306 announced, 274 commercial)
Last year I wrote a detailed post on '5G Remote Surgery and Telehealth Solutions' here. Since then many people with little or no understanding of how the technology works have got in touch with me to educate me about all the 5G remote surgeries taking place.
I am always prepared to learn new things and looked at both of these surgeries (detailed below) with open mind. I was still unable to see the 5G angle here. In fact in the case of banana, I don't even know if 5G was used.
Back in 2014, a BBC article detailed how a surgeon in Canada has performed over 20 remote surgeries with the help of a robot including colon operations and hernia repairs. The article goes on to ask, "The technology behind long-distance surgery is now mature enough to be used more widely, allowing people to access world-leading expertise and better healthcare without having to travel. Could it become the norm in hospitals?"
The first case is from Aug 2020 as shown in the video above where Doctor Liu Rong from a hospital in Beijing takes on the challenge of remotely controlling a medical robot in distant Qingdao City via the 5G network to finish an egg membrane suture surgery in 90 minutes.
The question here is that where exactly was 5G used and why? Did both the ends have 5G or just one end? Etc. I was unable to find a schematic to show the end-to-end details that would provide credibility to such a scenario.
To explain what I mean, when Vodafone UK launched 5G, they demonstrated low latency by giving an example of Haptic tackle using TeslaSuit. You can read the details and watch the video here.
As you can see, the end-to-end solution architecture is nicely explained as shown in this picture. I would expect a similar kind of schematic for the surgery scenario. While I can clearly understand the use case for sports outdoor, I am not able to understand the use case for the surgery indoors. Where was the access point? What frequency was used? Was this Standalone or Non-Standalone network? And many other questions like these.
The second case was a more recent one. The video is embedded below.
Even though the video mentions 5G and many other sites (see this LinkedIn post with nearly 2.5 million views) that have picked this up mention 5G, the original Instagram video does not mention 5G. In all likelihood there is no 5G connection with this one.
Surely there will be a real life 5G remote surgery use case someday that will capture our imagination but not today.
One of the most controversial 5G use cases is the remote surgery. In this post I want to quickly look at the history and what is possible. Before I go to that, here is a short summary video that I am embedding upfront.
As far as I can recall, Ericsson was the first vendor that started talking about remote surgery. This is a tweet from back in 2017.
In January 2019, South China Morning Post (SCMP) showed a video of a remote surgery on an animal. While the video and the article didn't provide many details, I am assuming this was done by Huawei as detailed here. The video of the surgery below.
This was followed by Mobile World Congress 2019 demo where a doctor used 5G to direct surgery live from a stage at MWC to Hospital Clinic Barcelona over 3 miles away. The team of doctors was removing a cancerous tumor from a patient's colon. This video from that is embedded below.
Vodafone New Zealand had a silly remote surgery of a dog video but looks like they have removed it. Nothing can beat this Telecom Italia ad embedded below.
There are some realistic use cases. One of them being that with 5G the number of cables / wires in a hospital can be reduced saving on the disinfection.
NTT Docomo showcased 5G Mobile SCOT (Smart Cyber Operating Theater) which is an Innovative solution to enable advanced medical treatment in diverse environments. You can read more details here.
There are lots of other things going on. Here is a short list:
April 2020: Because of Coronavirus COVID-19, NT Times has an article on Telemedicine Arrives in the U.K.: ‘10 Years of Change in One Week’ - even though this does not involve 5G, it just shows that we are moving in that direction.
February 2020: 5G-aided remote CT scans used to diagnose COVID-19 patients in China (link)
February 2020: Verizon teamed with Emory Healthcare to test new 5G use cases for the medical industry at the latter’s Innovation Hub in Atlanta, in a bid to discover how the technology can be used to improve patient care. The collaboration will explore applications including connected ambulances; remote physical therapy; medical imaging; and use of AR and VR for training. (link)
February 2020: Vodafone 5G Healthcare – Conference & Experience Day (link)
November 2019: TIM enables first live remote-surgery consultation using 5G immersive reality (link)
October 2019: Along with a hospital in Malaga, Telefónica has presented what it claims is the first expert assistance system for medical interventions that runs on 5G. (link and video)
September 2019: Mobile Future Forward 2019 - World's First Remote VR Surgery Demo conducted on Sept 4th, 2019 in Seattle by Chetan Sharma, James Youngquist, Evie Powell, Nissim Hadar, David Colmenares, and Gabe Jones. (link)
Finally, a nice video on Benefits of 5G for Healthcare Technology by T-Mobile
GSMA have recently published a series of reports related to China. This includes the 'The Mobile Economy China' report as well as reports on ‘Impacts of mmWave 5G in China’, ‘5G use cases for verticals China 2020’ and ‘Powered by SA case studies’. They are all available here.
China currently has 1.65bn subscribers (Excluding licensed cellular IoT) which is expected to grow to 1.73bn in 2025. The report quotes 1.20bn unique mobile subscribers that is expected to grow to 1.26bn by 2025. With a population of 1.44 billion, this would be assuming everyone over 10 years has a smartphone. 2G and 3G is being phased out so only 4G and 5G will be around in 2025. This would be different for IoT.
The 5G Use Cases for Verticals China 2020 report is comprised of 15 outstanding examples of 5G-empowered applications for verticals, ranging from industrial manufacturing, transportation, electric power, healthcare, education, to content creation, and zooms into the practical scenarios, technical features, and development opportunities for the next generation technology. Every use case represents the relentless efforts of 5G pioneers who are open, cooperative, and innovative.
Flexible Smart Manufacturing with 5G Edge Computing (RoboTechnik, China Mobile, Ericsson)
I have written about 5G Use Cases in a blog post earlier, which also contains a video playlist of use cases from around the world. Not many from China in there at the moment but should be added as and when they are available and I discover them.
Huawei (see here and here) has partnered with China Telecom and Bike sharing company called Ofo.
ofo developed an IoT smart lock based on NB-IoT technology that lowers power consumption, enables wide coverage, and slashes system resource delays at low cost. NB-IoT lets ofo ensure it has bikes located at key locations when commuter demand is highest. Meanwhile, bikes can be unlocked in less than a second. Both improvements have greatly boosted user satisfaction. ofo and its partners added key technologies to ofo’s own platform. These included the commercial network provided by China Telecom, and Huawei’s intelligent chip-based NB-IoT solution. When launching its NB-IoT solution earlier this year, ofo founder and CEO Dai Wei said that the cooperation between ofo, Huawei, and China Telecom is a “mutually beneficial joint force of three global leading enterprises.” At the core is Huawei’s IoT solution, which includes smart chips, networking, and an IoT platform. The solution provides strong coverage in poor-signal areas and a network capacity that’s more than one hundred times stronger than standard terminals. The payment process has dropped from 25 seconds to less than 5, while battery life has been lengthened from 1 or 2 months to more than 2 years, saving costs and reducing the need for frequent maintenance. ofo’s cooperation with Huawei on NB-IoT smart locks bodes well for improving the industry as whole. Huawei’s technology optimizes lifecycle management for locks, while the sensors on the locks collect information such as equipment status, user data, and operating data. They connect the front- and back-end industrial chains to achieve intelligent business management, enable the bikes to be located in hot spots, facilitate rapid maintenance, and boost marketing and value-added services.
This video gives an idea of how this works:
As per Mobile World Live: Ofo co-founder Xue Ding said during a presentation the high power efficiency and huge capacity of NB-IoT make the technology ideal to deliver its smart locks, which are really the brains of its operations. The company offers what is termed station free pushbike hire, meaning bikes can be collected and deposited from any legal parking spot. Users can locate bikes using their smartphone, and unlock it by scanning a barcode. However, the process can be interrupted by mobile network congestion or if signals are weak – for example in remote areas: “Using NB-IoT, users will not be stuck because of inadequate capacity,” Xue said. ... Xiang Huangmei, a VP at China Telecom’s Beijing branch, said the low power consumption of the NB-IoT chip in the lock means the battery will last eight years to ten years, so it will never need to be replaced during the standard lifecycle of an Ofo bike. The NB-IoT network, deployed on the 800MHz band, offers good indoor and outdoor coverage, the VP said citing car parks as an example. One base station can support 100,000 devices over an area of 2.5 square-km.
Finally, to know which operator is supporting which IoT technology, see the IoT tracker here.
Every few years I add Mary Meeker's Internet Trends slides on the blog. Interested people can refer to 2011 and 2014 slide pack to see how world has changed.
One of the initial slide highlights that the number of smartphones are reached nearly 3 billion by end of 2016. If we looked at this excellent recent post by Tomi Ahonen, there were 3.2 billion smartphones at the end of Q1 2017. Here is a bit of extract from that. SMARTPHONE INSTALLED BASE AT END OF MARCH 2017 BY OPERATING SYSTEM
Rank . OS Platform . . . . Units . . . . Market share Was Q4 2016 1 . . . . All Android . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,584 M . . . 81 % . . . . . . ( 79 %) a . . . . . . Pure Android/Play . . . . 1,757 M . . . 55% b . . . . . . Forked Anroid/AOSP . . . 827 M . . . 26% 2 . . . . iOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603 M . . . 19 % . . . . . . ( 19 %) Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 M . . . . 1 % . . . . . . ( 1 %) TOTAL Installed Base . 3,211 M smartphones (ie 3.2 Billion) in use at end of Q1, 2017
Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis 25 May 2017, based on manufacturer and industry data BIGGEST SMARTPHONE MANUFACTURERS BY UNIT SALES IN Q1 2017
This year, the number of slides have gone up to 355 and there are some interesting sections like China Internet, India Internet, Healthcare, Interactive games, etc. The presentation is embedded below and can be downloaded from slideshare
Over the last few months I heard quite a few talks about Smart Cities. Here are two that I thought its worth posting and a very good TEDx talk at the bottom
I think we all agree that more and more people will move from rural to urban areas and the cities will not only grow in population but also in size. The infrastructure will have to grow to be able to cope with the influx of people and increased demand on services.
I guess in most developed nations we have the 1.0 Era Digital City which is long way away from the 3.0 Era Smart City.
To be a full fledged 3.0 Smart City, every aspect of our life may need to evolve into "Smart". Anyway, here is the complete presentation:
If you want to find out more about the Milton Keynes smart city, also see this video on Youtube. There are driverless pods and other autonomous cars which may be considered as initial step towards smart cities, see this interesting video here.
Finally here is the TEDx talk about designing these smart cities for future:
Its June, time for the Internet Trends update by Mary Meeker, KPCB. Last year's update has crossed 3 million views on Slideshare. So many interesting slides, difficult to pick up some of the best ones to add here. I have selected a few that I really liked. The first being the growth in Smartphones and Tablets, as compared to PC's and Television's.
The other very interesting point to highlight is that the number of SMS's are decreasing and the number of OTT messages are rising. Just two days back, BITKOM, Germany released the news that SMS's are declining drastically in Germany. OTT's are taking over, rightly so.
Finally, with people doing too much multi-tasking, the above slide highlights what people are doing while watching TV.
A recent GSMA report suggests that China will be a significant player in the field of 4G with upto 900 million 4G users by 2020. This is not surprising as the largest operator, China Mobile wants to desperately move its user base to 4G. For 3G it was stuck with TD-SCDMA or the TDD LCR option. This 3G technology is not as good as its FDD variant, commonly known as UMTS.
This trend of migrating to 4G is not unique to China. A recent report (embedded below) by 4G Americas predicts that by the end of 2018, HSPA/HSPA+ would be the most popular technology whereas LTE would be making an impact with 1.3 Billion connected devices. The main reason for HSPA being so dominant is due to the fact that HSPA devices are mature and are available now. LTE devices, even though available are still slightly expensive. At the same time, operators are taking time having a seamless 4G coverage throughout the region. My guess would be that the number of devices that are 4G ready would be much higher than 1.3 Billion.
It is interesting to see that the number of 'Non-Smartphones' remain constant but at the same time, their share is going down. It would be useful to breakdown the number of Smartphones into 'Phablets' and 'non-Phablets' category.
Anyway, the 4G Americas report from which the information above is extracted contains lots of interesting details about Release-11 and Release-12 HSPA+ and LTE. The only problem I found is that its too long for most people to go through completely.
The whitepaper contains the following information:
3GPP Rel-11 standards for HSPA+ and LTE-Advanced were frozen in December 2012 with the core network protocols stable in December 2012 and Radio Access Network (RAN) protocols stable in March 2013. Key features detailed in the paper for Rel-11 include:
Uplink (UL) dual antenna beamforming (both closed and open loop transmit diversity)
UL MIMO with 64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (64-QAM)
Several CELL_FACH (Forward Access Channel) state enhancements (for smartphone type traffic) and non-contiguous HSDPA Carrier Aggregation (CA)
LTE-Advanced:
Carrier Aggregation (CA)
Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (MBMS) and Self Organizing Networks (SON)
Introduction to the Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) feature for enabling coordinated scheduling and/or beamforming
Enhanced Physical Control Channel (EPDCCH)
Further enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (FeICIC) for devices with interference cancellation
Finally, Rel-11 introduces several network and service related enhancements (most of which apply to both HSPA and LTE):
Machine Type Communications (MTC)
IP Multimedia Systems (IMS)
Wi-Fi integration
Home NodeB (HNB) and Home e-NodeB (HeNB)
3GPP started work on Rel-12 in December 2012 and an 18-month timeframe for completion was planned. The work continues into 2014 and areas that are still incomplete are carefully noted in the report. Work will be ratified by June 2014 with the exception of RAN protocols which will be finalized by September 2014. Key features detailed in the paper for Rel-12 include:
HSPA+:
Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) Heterogeneous Networks (HetNet)
Scalable UMTS Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) bandwidth
Enhanced Uplink (EUL) enhancements
Emergency warning for Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN)
HNB mobility
HNB positioning for Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA)
Machine Type Communications (MTC)
Dedicated Channel (DCH) enhancements
LTE-Advanced:
Active Antenna Systems (AAS)
Downlink enhancements for MIMO antenna systems
Small cell and femtocell enhancements
Machine Type Communication (MTC)
Proximity Service (ProSe)
User Equipment (UE)
Self-Optimizing Networks (SON)
Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) mobility
Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS)
Local Internet Protocol Access/Selected Internet Protocol Traffic Offload (LIPA/SIPTO)
Enhanced International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced (eIMTA) and Frequency Division Duplex-Time Division Duplex Carrier Aggregation (FDD-TDD CA)
Work in Rel-12 also included features for network and services enhancements for MTC, public safety and Wi-Fi integration, system capacity and stability, Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), further network energy savings, multimedia and Policy and Charging Control (PCC) framework.
