Friday 25 February 2011
Attach Sequence for LTE Radio
Wednesday 23 February 2011
Circuit Switched Fallback (CSFB): A Quick Primer
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Quick primer on Push-to-talk (PTT)
Monday 21 February 2011
MBMS in LTE Release-9
The logical architecture for MBMS in LTE is shown in Figure 4. The MBMS gateway (GW) distributes data received from the Broadcast Multicast Service Center (BMSC) to the relevant eNBs by IP multicast. The Multi-Cell Multicast Coordination Entity (MCE) specifies the radio resources to be used by eNBs comprising the MBSFN and ensures that the content is synchronized. To support MBMS, logical channels, namely Multicast Traffic Channel (MTCH) and Multicast Control Channel (MCCH), and a transport channel, namely Multicast Channel (MCH), are defined (Figure 5).
Thursday 17 February 2011
Five quick videos from Mobile World Congress 2011 - 3
Friday 3 December 2010
Presentation: IMS for 3G Voice Services and Migration Strategies
Tuesday 30 November 2010
Presentation: Further Enhancements for LTE-Advanced
Saturday 31 July 2010
NTT DoCoMo announces 'Crossy'
The “X” denotes both “connection” and “infinite possibility,” and the “i” both “individual user” and “innovation.” The logo, which resembles the infinity symbol, aligns the letters in a single stream to embody the bonds that organically link people, goods and information, and lead to new innovation.
DOCOMO’s Xi LTE service will offer downlinks of up to 75 Mbps, approximately 10 times faster than the company’s current FOMA™ 3G service. Initially, Xi will be available in the Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka areas, but coverage eventually will be expanded to other major cities and then additional areas of the nation. Xi users will be seamlessly handed over to the FOMA network whenever they leave a Xi service area.
Xi handsets, billing plans and other details will be announced later.
Meanwhile the world got its fourth commercial LTE network this week, and its first outside the Nordic region - in the unlikely telecoms hotspot of Uzbekistan.
The Uzbek launch came from Russian giant MTS, and shows how some emerging global telecoms players plan to leapfrog rivals by deploying LTE or WiMAX in markets where 3G is under-developed, and then harness that experience for their mainstream territories. MTS follows TeliaSonera's three LTE commercial switch-ons (in Sweden and Norway plus a soft launch in Finland).
MTS calls its new network "the first fully operational 4G network in the CIS and Central Asia" and is it initially available in the central zone of capital Tashkent, boasting theoretical peak speeds of up to 100Mbps using dongles. The network runs in the 2.5-2.7GHz band and the equipment comes from Huawei.
Monday 19 July 2010
NTT DoCoMo: Core Network Evolution and Voice Strategy
Thursday 24 June 2010
NTT DoCoMo for LTE Femtocells next year
Friday 18 June 2010
NTT DoCoMo's latest LTE Initiatives
Thursday 25 February 2010
Sunday 1 November 2009
30 years for the first commercial mobile network in Dec.
While looking for the photo of the original phone, I came across one of the earliest phones used by Martin Cooper of Motorola. He is known to have made the first public call in USA over36 years back. Wikipedia has a section on the Motorola DynaTAC in the picture above.
Here is the comparison of DynaTAC with the earlier model of iPhone.And last but by no means least, the mobile internet is 10 years old. Launched by NTT DoCoMo of Japan in 1999, its iconic iMode mobile internet was the first mobile-optimized internet service and spawned countless copies and today counting all the WAP users etc, has over a billion users. That in only ten years.. Domo Arigato, NTT DoCoMo, you have invented the fastest technology to spread to a billion users.
Thursday 29 October 2009
LTE definitely needed and coming next year...dont mention Voice and SMS please
The unremitting growth in data traffic will bring about a 3G network capacity crisis for some mobile network operators as early as 2010. This dire scenario, according to a new study from Unwired Insight, will only be avoided by the early deployment of LTE, and the acceptance that additional LTE spectrum will be required to satisfy this demand.
With 3G traffic volumes set to increase by a factor of 20 by 2015--driven by many technology factors and also dramatic reductions in mobile data pricing--Alastair Brydon, co-author of the new study, points to the example of mobile broadband pricing that has fallen as low as US$2 per gigabyte, "which is nearly half a million times smaller than the price per gigabyte of an SMS message."
Brydon believes that early LTE will be necessary for the following reasons:
- As 2G users continue to migrate to 3G services, the available capacity per 3G user will decline rapidly in networks utilising HSPA, to less than 100MB per user per month in some cases. LTE will be essential to counter this decline.
- While LTE promises peak data rates of over 100Mbps, this is only possible with wide allocations of spectrum, and particularly good radio conditions. Average data rates from practical LTE networks will be nowhere near the peak values.
- Network operators will have an insatiable appetite for LTE spectrum, to stand any chance of keeping up with forecast traffic demand. For some operators, 10MHz of spectrum will be able to support forecast traffic levels only until 2011. A further 10MHz will be needed by 2012 and another 10MHz in 2013.
It also expects the LTE customer base to top 72 million by 2013, mostly users with laptops, netbooks or dongles, with the first smartphones expected to hit the market after 2011.
In another forecast, Informa Telecoms and Media said Japan would account for more than half of Asia's 14.4 million LTE subscribers by 2015.
NTT DoCoMo, Japanese rival eMobile and China Mobile will be the first to launch LTE in the region, Informa said, with Hong Kong's CSL likely to follow soon after.
But rollouts in the region may be hindered by delays, as Japan and Hong Kong are so far the only Asian countries to have awarded spectrum for LTE.
Regulators in other nations are scrambling to free up enough spectrum, Informa added. Even in Japan, there is not enough 2100MHz spectrum available to support DoCoMo's full LTE plans, so it will use its newly allocated 1.5GHz for LTE from 2010.
Wednesday 9 September 2009
HSPA+ is everywhere...
EMobile Ltd. , Japan's smallest mobile operator, has deployed HSPA+, also known as HSPA Evolved, in the country's major cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and Nagoya.
This deployment is based on equipment from Ericsson AB, which supplied the core network and core systems integration services as well as the majority of the radio access network. It builds out the geographical coverage for HSPA+ that EMobile has already established using Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. equipment in a number of Japan's other cities, including Hokkaido, Sendai, Niigata, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Nagasaki.
Japan is a market with a reputation for being first with new technology, but HSPA+ has been passed over, most notably by market leader NTT DoCoMo Inc., which has focused on moving to Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as fast as possible.
The No. 2 player, KDDI Corp. , is similarly pushing toward LTE, although from a CDMA base that takes HSPA out of the equation, while Softbank Mobile Corp. is known to have run HSPA+ lab trials and has also said it will move to LTE when it gets the necessary spectrum.
EMobile is by far the smallest of Japan's operators, with just 1.67 million subscribers at the end of the second quarter, compared to DoCoMo's 54.86 million, KDDI's 31 million, and Softbank's 20.96 million customers, according to Wireless Intelligence .
You can check out the HSPA+ features in Rel-7 and Rel-8 here.
Zapp, mobile operator of Romania, has launched the first stage of its HSPA+, the upgraded mobile broadband service in the capital city of Bucharest. With this service, the subscribers can enjoy peak download speeds of 21.6Mbps, while upload speeds will increase by up to 15 times, from 384Kbps to 5.8Mbps. According to a report, Zapp contracted Chinese firm ZTE to deploy the network, which will run parallel to the cellco’s second phase 3G rollout, expanding its UMTS services to 63 cities nationwide.
O2 Germany is currently running a friendly user test in Munich where O2 Germany's technology partner is Huawei. Beside being O2's network partner for the overall HSPA-network upgrade, Huawei is also O2 Germany's major vendor for UMTS sticks and therefore O2 Germany is using Huawei equipment for the HSPA+ test as well. The used Huawei E182E stick is a slide-out USB stick, supporting quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE as well as quadband UMTS/HSDPA up to 21.6 Mbps and HSUPA up to 5.76 Mbps. Furthermore the stick is MIMO ready.
Spanish mobile network operator Vodafone Spain has announced it will begin deploying HSPA+ technology across its network in the autumn of 2009. The cellco says the upgrade will allow its infrastructure to achieve theoretical download speeds of up to 21.6Mbps, while uplink speeds would increase to up to 5.7Mbps. Initially Vodafone expects to launch the increased speeds in seven unnamed ‘major’ cities, with further expansion to follow. In addition, Francisco Roman, president and CEO of Vodafone Spain, has announced that the operator plans to further extend its provision of ADSL services across the country, although it has not given any specifics for areas it plans to extend its reach to.
Swiss network operator, Swisscom says that it is deploying a HSPA+ (HSPA Evolution) upgrade, with the first areas completed in time for the ITU Telecom World 2009 in Geneva. The upgrade will offer a peak rate data transfer rate of 28.8 Mbps - although the more realistic average is no higher than 8Mbps. The network has launched a HSPA 14.4Mbps service at the beginning of this year.
Chunghwa Telecom, the Taiwanese mobile operator has reportedly selected Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) to upgrade its wireless infrastructure with HSPA+ technology. The operator intends to launch its HSPA+ and 3G services by 2010, boosting mobile broadband download speeds to up to 21Mbps. Initially, devices able to utilise the HSPA+ service will include data network cards, USB dongles and wireless modules before it is extended to cover smartphones, netbooks and notebooks.
ZTE Corp has completed the interoperability test (IOT) of its 3GPP R7-based HSPA+ MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) solution, conducted in conjunction with mainstream terminal chip platform manufacturers, in July 2009.
The MIMO solution, realized with its SDR-based next-generation base station, has reached a theoretical speed limit of 28.8Mbps in both cable connection and wireless environment tests. The trials included data download services for UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), as well as various IOT item tests.
All the test results indicated stable and fast data download performance. The successful IOT testing confirms that ZTE's MIMO solution is now ready for large-scale commercial deployment worldwide.
Sunday 16 August 2009
DoCoMo and Verizon on track for LTE
The data transfers were made over the 700 MHz LTE networks in Verizon's first two major city test sites. Boston and Seattle are expected to be the first two cities that will go live commercially with the pre-4G technology early in 2010. Those cities each now have 10 LTE 4G cell sites up and running on the 700 MHz spectrum.
Verizon isn't yet talking about the data connection speeds. "Everything is as the team expected... But because this is a very controlled environment we don't want to put a number out on the market yet," says company spokesman, Jeff Nelson.
This has pretty much been Verizon's stance throughout -- it doesn't want to talk about test numbers that might not have much relevance on the real networks. Tests have shown connections at anything between 50 Mbit/s to 8 Mbit/s.
NTT DoCoMo was the first carrier in the world to launch a commercial 3G wireless service based on WCDMA but based on its LTE roll-out it will likely be beaten this time around by carriers in other countries.
Verizon Wireless has said it plans to launch a 60Mbps trial LTE service in two U.S. cities in late 2009, to be followed by a commercial service in 2010. European carriers are also getting behind the technology with several tests under way or planned on the continent. TeliaSonera has said it will build a commercial LTE network in Stockholm, Sweden, and in Oslo, Norway.
Tuesday 21 July 2009
LTE Subscribers forecast and market movements
A report last year mentioned that the number of LTE subscribers by 2013 will be 85 million but a new report from research firm Forward Concepts, which looks at trends including 3G evolution and handset shipment growth, claims that the number of LTE users will be 56 million by 2013.
LCD display technology also will come under pressure from other technologies, including OLED, ePaper, Qualcomm's Mirasol and Liquavista, according to the report. The market for these "post-LCD" displays will grow to over $3 billion in 2013, the report said.
The testing process determined by the TD-LTE Working Group has three stages - indoor, outdoor and large-scale outdoor testing, the last of these involving two or three major cities with at least 100 base stations each. The local vendors have already been working on indoor testing in China since the start of the year.
Monday 6 July 2009
LTE activity gathering pace
“People think wireless can’t compete with fixed link, but it can”, said Walker, pointing out that the 100Mbit/s of FTTH is the same as the theoretical maximum throughput of LTE.
“We decided with LTE that we would make sure the technology works before we buy spectrum,” said Walker.
To that end, Vodafone has been working with China Mobile and Verizon to make sure LTE has compatible standards.
Walker regards talk of a killer app as silly for LTE as it was for 3G. “LTE is just about access,” he said.
He predicted the gradual relative demise of the person-to-person phone calls, referencing data that showed 11 times more wireless traffic is being generated by community chatting than by person-to-person calls.
Ericsson, one of the world’s leading suppliers of mobile phones and related network solutions, has warned that it could be 2012 before the first true next generation Mobile Broadband networks gain a good foothold in the UK. The deployment of Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology (aka - 4G), which could deliver download speeds of 150 to 1000Mbps, is being hampered by problems with releasing the needed 900Mhz spectrum.
Presently both O2 and Vodafone own some of the older 2G (900MHz) spectrum, which Ofcom is seeking to have redistributed to rival operators ( Orange , T-Mobile and Three (3) ). This could then be converted for use by 3G/4G voice and Mobile Broadband technologies, such as HSPA and LTE .
NSN has already received LTE solution orders from Japan-based NTT DoCoMo, which is expected to start offering LTE-based services in 2010, Wang stated.
In addition, NSN has also landed orders for the installment of LTE trial networks for T-Mobile and Singapore-based service provider Mobile One, he added.
LTE-enabled chipsets are expected to hit the market starting in the second half of 2009, followed by LTE USB modems and network cards in 2010 and other LTE CPE such as handsets, PDAs, tablet PCs in 2012, Wang predicted.
Japan's DoCoMo is reported to be planning an investment of ¥ 343 billion (US$3.4 billion) for the investment, while KDDI and Softbank Mobile have budgeted ¥ 515 billion and ¥207.3 billion, respectively. According to the Nikkei newspaper, among the four, LTE services are forecast to attract around 36 million subscribers, with DoCoMo projecting 17.74 million LTE customers.
DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank Mobile expect roughly 30% of their existing customers to switch to 3.9G services. DoCoMo is also reported to be expecting to upgrade or deploy some 20,000 LTE enabled base stations by 2014. The network should cover 50% of the population and commercial services will start in 2010.
LTE provides downlink peak rates of at least 100Mbit/s, 50 Mbit/s in the uplink and RAN round-trip times of less than 10ms. Fujitsu recently announced that, in collaboration with NTT DoCoMo, they had successfully completed field testing for LTE, using 4x4 MIMO technology, which resulted in data transmission speeds in the range of 120 Mbps (using 10 MHz bandwidth) in Sapporo's urban environment.
NTT DOCOMO has selected Alcatel-Lucent' Ethernet transmission solution to provide the backhaul network of its Long Term Evolution (LTE) service. Financial terms were not disclosed.
China Mobile Ltd., recognizing that future growth of its 3G services is not yet certain, is looking to secure its future with a nearly parallel development of Long Term Evolution (LTE) capabilities, according to its annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently.
High on the list of limitations TD-SCDMA imposes are the availability, functionality, and price of terminals, and the support for international roaming. The latter particularly impacts China Mobile's high-end and business customers.
China Mobile remains committed to TD-SCDMA, but at the same time it's going all out to develop converged time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) products for LTE, the proto-4G wireless technology set to be deployed by mobile operators worldwide.
Developing a simultaneous LTE strategy will enable China Mobile to limit the time it is dependent on TD-SCDMA, and also help it counter the constraints it's currently experiencing as a result of the TD-SCDMA sector's limited ecosystem.
The Chinese vendors have labored too long under the market perception that they deliver low cost equipment, but can't do cutting edge. To fight this image and enhance their position among tier one carriers, Huawei and ZTE are throwing everything - including their huge credit lines for vendor financing - at gaining early LTE trials, which puts them in the spotlight even if commercial roll-outs are often two years or more away. The latest points go to ZTE, which has won field trial contracts with Telefónica in Spain and CSL in Hong Kong.
This comes shortly after Huawei highlighted its LTE deal with Netcom of Norway, and the Chinese duo are, early market estimates indicate, coming close to Ericsson in terms of their penetration of stage one LTE trials - and ahead of Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens.
Telefónica confirmed reports by Light Reading that ZTE's trial will take place in the third quarter. While success at the Spanish firm may not translate into meaningful revenue any time soon (and Ericsson has already conducted LTE trials with Telefónica too), it will still be a major boost for the vendor. It has not been as successful in getting tier one western carrier deals as its compatriot - although its overall wireless equipment market share grew at a similar rate to that of Huawei in the past 12 months, its base is far more concentrated on the lower margin developing markets.
By contrast with Telefónica, CSL is already a major customer for ZTE and one of the first commercial users of its software defined base station platform, which it is currently rolling out in an IP-based HSPA+ network across Hong Kong. In a recent interview with Telecoms.com, Tarek Robbiati, CEO of the Telstra subsidiary, said: "Further consolidation will come in the next three to five years. In the end there will be only three [infrastructure vendors] left, and two of them will be Chinese. The European vendors are just too slow."
Wednesday 13 May 2009
Surround Sound transmission technology from NTT DoCoMo
NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced that it has developed a highly efficient mobile spatial audio transmission technology that enables a mobile phone user to assign a spatial position to each sound source when listening to multiple sound sources, such as during a game or a conference call.
While existing spatial audio transmission technologies independently process audio encoding/decoding and spatial audio synthesis, the new technology offers a more efficient method by integrating the two processes, thereby minimizing bitrate (or bandwidth) and computation loads suitable for mobile phones and other resource-limited devices.
The processes are collaboratively performed on both the server and client sides. The server identifies the important sound components of each speaker's voice, compresses them efficiently into a single stream and transmits it to the mobile phones. Each phone then decodes the received stream and simultaneously synthesizes spatial audio images
DOCOMO is demonstrating its new spatial audio transmission technology using docomo PRO series™ HT-01A handsets during Wireless Technology Park 2009 at Pacifico Yokohama on May 12 and 13.
Saturday 11 April 2009
Future Phones will be able to understand your thoughts
I remember reading (cant find link, sorry) that NTT DoCoMo has already developed a prototype of phone in which you can speak without any sound and the person at the other end wont even notice. He will hear normal voice.
NTT DoCoMo launched Motion sensing phones couple of years back and the main idea was that the user can control things by motion of their hands. I havent dug into details but I can visualise myself in future working on my laptop and just by waving my hand ask my mobile to start composing a text message. I would be able to dictate the message and just with another wave of my hand, the message will be sent.
Japan has always been the leader of these kinds of technologies and companies out there are working hard innovating new technology. NTT DoCoMo (again) showed off last year a technology where the volume can be controlled just by rolling the eyes. At the moment all these things involve some kind of human attachment which makes them impractical for the time being. In future hopefully there will be better alternatives and more reliable technologies like these.
Anyway, we wont see any of the above technologies anytime soon. There is a funny video on Youtube that you will like about these future technologies that is available below: