Monday 11 January 2010
Technologies and Standards for TD-SCDMA Evolutions to IMT-Advanced
Tuesday 15 December 2009
Teliasonera reaches a milestone with first commercial LTE Networks
Read the press release here.
By the way, its a bit shameful that the operator wants to market itself and its using the term 4G for LTE as it probably sounds more sexy :) I blogged couple of years back and it still applies that LTE is 3.9G and IMT-Advanced/LTE-Advanced is 4G.
Sunday 15 November 2009
Global LTE Commitments, November 09
Thursday 5 November 2009
Network Operator commitments to LTE as of Oct. 2009
Read more: http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/pages/mapping-it-out-operator-commitments-lte#ixzz0W0sBukPZ
Thursday 8 October 2009
TD-SCDMA Politics!
As ordered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, each of the nation’s three main operators will have to build and operate a network based on one of the three different standards that were vying for a share of the world’s largest cellular market.
China Mobile (by far the dominant carrier with over 460 million subscribers) will operate on TD-SCDMA, the 3G technology that was developed entirely in the People’s Republic by the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology in collaboration with Datang and Siemens. China Telecom will run on W-CDMA, while China Unicom gets CDMA2000.
Considering how immature TD-SCDMA technology still is - and how discouraging its build-up trials have proved - China Mobile seems to have landed the worst possible deal.
Then again, that was the whole idea of this so-called reorganisation of the country’s telecoms industry. Let the incumbent cellco work on the many problems that will have to be ironed out before TD-SCDMA can be considered a credible 3G alternative, and that should give the two smaller operators enough time to catch up by taking advantage of proven technologies and an established pool of equipment suppliers.
The Chinese government wants a more balanced, more competitive telecoms market, and this should help do the trick. But the move is also likely to have some strange consequences in the relationship between mobile operators and phone makers.
China Mobile faces two different handset-related challenges when it comes to 3G. The first one is qualitative: existing TD-SCDMA phones are technically inferior to those that subscribers have been using in the rest of the world for well over eight years now. The second is quantitative: only 40 or so TD-SCDMA models exist, while China Mobile says it will need several hundred.
So the company is resorting to some unprecedented behaviour for a cellular operator. At the last Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Wang Jianzhou, the chairman of China Mobile, met with a group of handset vendors (including Nokia, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and some of the Chinese manufacturers) and offered to pay them part of the R&D costs of developing better TD-SCDMA products.
Handset makers have rarely witnessed such generous attitudes from an operator. Even rarer is the fact that the offer is coming from what is now the world’s largest operator. Add to that the unfavourable financial conditions most of these OEMs are enduring and you could safely assume they’ll go and see what they can do to help China Mobile.
Tuesday 29 September 2009
OFDMA Femtocells: A Roadmap on Interference Avoidance
There are all kinds of statistics about the number of Femtocells worldwide. There could be upto 70million by 2012. If this happens the big problem would be the interference between Macro and Femtocells and also between Femtos. OFDMA (used in LTE and WiMAX both) Femtocells can handle the interference better than CDMA (UMTS and CDMA2000) Femtocells due to its Intracell interference avoiding properties and robustness to multipath.
So what are the main problems that the operators will face when deploying femtocells? Lets look at some of them:
- Access method: Three different approaches exist namely, Open access, Closed access and Hybrid access which is a mix of both of them. The first two approach has some problems and I have suggested a solution before ;) but the best solution may be to go for Hybrid approach where limited connectivity is available to non-subscribers of the femto.
- Time Synchronisation is another important aspect of OFDMA Femtos. To minimise multi-access interference and for successful handovers, synchronisation between all the Femtos and between Femto and Macro is a must. This should be acheived without any complicated hardware so as to keep the cost down.
- Physical Cell Idendities (PCI) could be a problem because of limited numbers
- Neighbouring cell list, which is restricted to 32 in LTE, could be a problem if too many Femtos are around
- Handovers could also be a problem if the UE keeps jumping between Femtos and macro. One solution could be the use of HCS.
Interference analysis will definitelty play an important part in the rollouts. If not properly managed, could result in dead zones within Macro. Power control Algorithms and Radio Resource Management strategy will help but effective Spectrum allocation technique is needed as well. The diagram above shows different approaches for subchannel allocation in OFDMA femtocells.
The Femtocells would need to be self-configurable and self-optimising. I tried to explain the SON concept earlier which is similar. Self-configuration comes into picture when the Femto is switched on. Once the parameters are adjusted then Self-Optimisation tries to optimise these defaults into something better and more suited to the current environment. Sensing of the environment plays an important part in this. The diagram above shows different approaches being used by different Femtocells. The cheapest approach would ofcourse be the measurement report approach where the phone is made to report the environment. The only problem being that whichever phone was used (automatically selected) will have considerable amount of its battery power used up :)
There is a book that is under publication and will be available early next year. At the same time if it interests you, you can look at some of their publications including the IEEE one that has been quoted here. Here are all the necessary links:
- The Centre for Wireless Network Design
- Professor Jie Zhang homepage
- David López-Pérez, Research Fellow, homepage
- Femtocells World Summit presentation on Self-organisation of the Subchannel Assignment in OFDMA Femtocells
- OFDMA Femtocells: A Roadmap on Interference Avoidance - IEEE Communications magazine, Sep. 2009
- ICC 2009: Femtocells panel presentation slides
Hope someone finds all this info useful :)
Thursday 27 August 2009
Security of Mobiles and Networks to be tested soon
In comments made to the German edition of the Financial Times, the hacking group claims that governments, and criminals, are already using the technique which can break the encryption used to protect 2G GSM calls in near-real time using existing systems. The group says a public exposure of the technique will take place in the next month or two and allow anyone equipped with a laptop and an antenna to listen in to GSM phone calls.
Wednesday 19 August 2009
Greener Base stations are must for the future
But there is now significant competition, both from new divisions of companies such as Pirelli, established telecoms companies such as Sagem and Alcatel-Lucent (who have joined together to provide the Vodafone femtocell) and large players such as Huawei of China which ships equipment to 60m broadband subscribers and is a major supplier to the Chinese mobile operators.
However there is new factor which start to develop from the past year or so, i.e the factor of energy costs. It’s not a secret for anybody how energy process has soared in the past few years and now the telecoms are getting affected by this as well. Energy costs, both to build and run mobile networks, are getting increasingly important. Operators use a phenomenal amount of power, 400GW - or 200,000 tons of carbon - and over half of this is on the radio access. While this seems a lot, this equates to 25kg per user, or the same as an hour's drive on the motorway.
There is now research in place in order to study the whole energy chain, from the carbon cost of building the base stations, macrocells and femtocells, to the running costs.
In my view after looking at the femtocells especially at the Green Radio at the Wireless2.0 conference in
There is no doubt that energy factor is going to have a significant impact on the design and manufacture of femtocells and traditional mobile phone cells. If, as expected, the market takes off with millions of devices, this is going to have a huge energy cost.
As mentioned by Nick Flaherty in his blog that the carbon emission will also be a challenge for the home grown suppliers to provide low energy solutions, both in operations and also in the manufacturing to provide truly green radio. And this will help the
There is no choice for the companies to look for the alternative and green solution. As costs of deploying solar and wind power falls and energy costs rise, carriers have started looking toward green cell sites.
Once such company who is taking a lead in this prospect is Alcatel-Lucent. It’s planning to have alternative energy-powered cellsites matches that of electrically powered cell sites, which could prompt a new wave of solar-and wind-powered base stations, even in areas where an electrical connection is available. In my opinion there is no other way round as the cost of traditional energy is increasing manifolds (together with carbon emission), the price of green technology falls and networks become more efficient, using alternative energy to provide all or part of the energy at cell sites is becoming less prohibitive
Alcatel-Lucent has been working with alternative energy in wireless for five years, but it has deployed only 300 sites, mainly in Africa and the Middle East until now, which rely entirely on alternate fuels. But in the last year especially after the recent recession the alternative energy solution become a priority which resulted in a surge in interest in those technologies.
Every body in this credit crunch are finding means to cur the cost and the operators are looking to avoid the enormous costs of transporting diesel to their remote cell.
The recession has certainly given some momentum to the alternative energy cell sites and there is no doubt acceleration towards this genuine cause.
This is purely simple Economics as Electricity is a large part of an operator’s operational budget as it feeds massive quantities of power to a highly distributed network of cell sites to support not just the base station power amplifiers and radios on-site but also the air-conditioning units necessary to power them. The increase in energy costs is being largely offset with the increased power efficiencies of most vendors’ equipment. The huge site cabinets are now getting replaced with compact modular base stations, which not only consume less power but also require far less cooling. The current generation of equipment has cut power consumption between one-third and one-half. Many new radio systems also are coming equipped with energy-saving software, which powers down the base station during non-peak hours or when relatively few customers are on the cell.
Current economic climate and energy efficiency factor will definitely serve to promote green energy sooner rather than push it off to a later date. Furthermore as the market for alternative energy solutions grows in other industries the cost of the technology goes down for telecom, sending the price of solar panels and wind turbines down. Combining the above trend together with regulatory and political environments the alternative energy solution is imminently favorable as a green solution.
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.
Wednesday 12 August 2009
August 2009: Mobile TV Roundup
Qualcomm is slowly building content for its Flo TV mobile service for cell phones with the recent announcement that Discovery Communications launched a Shark Week Mobile Channel.
Discovery Channel’s Shark Week programs are scheduled to air on the Flo TV service through Aug. 14.
Flo TV uses the analog spectrum previously occupied by television broadcasters, and offers programming from several of the large network brands. Flo TV President Bill Stone says he envisions expanding the service from cell phones to cars and other consumer electronics products.
Flo TV, however, is not the only mobile TV service. AT&T CruiseCast launched a satellite-based television service in cars June 1.
CruiseCast, which is really an AT&T logo slapped onto RaySat Broadcasting equipment and services, offers 22 TV channels and 20 satellite radio channels. Its satellite antenna is a fat disc the size of a Bundt cake affixed to the roof of a vehicle.
The service costs $28 a month, plus $1,300 for equipment, which requires certified installers who charge an additional $200-$300, says Jim Llewellyn, who demonstrated the service July 31 in San Diego.
If you feell you're missing out on The Ashes action, you can now watch the Ashes for free on your W995.
A 3-month pass for the Sky Mobile TV service now comes bundled with the device exclusively on the 3 Network.
With the service, you can watch eight made-for-mobile channels that use highlights content from the Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra channels. You’ll also be able to watch live matches right on your W995 too.
Australian cricketers Glenn McGrath and Matthew Hoggard appeared at the launch of the new bundle, and McGrath expressed his thoughts on the new bundle, saying ”the Sony Ericsson W995 on 3 is a real must for any dedicated cricket fan. To be able to access crucial games via Sky Mobile TV on the go, especially when a tournament like The Ashes is on is invaluable to me.”
After the initial 3-month period, Sky Mobile TV will cost you £5 a month. So, while the savings aren’t amazing, amounting to a whopping £15 in total, it’s still a great feature to have right now if you’re a cricket fan.
Testing of free mobile digital TV for cell phones, netbooks and other on-the-go devices is ramping up in the weeks ahead, and the first devices that can provide such broadcasts should be on store shelves by next year, according to the broadcaster-based group behind the effort.
Trials are underway around the country in cities such as Chicago, New York and Raleigh, N.C. The biggest test pond will be Washington, D.C., where broadcasters have the attention of what may be the nation's most powerful audience — politicians. "We already have two stations on the air there, and we'll have the rest of our stations on air by next week," said Schelle.
Cell phones are probably the largest single group of devices that could receive local TV programming.
"There are 250 million of them out there," said Schelle. It's not clear whether wireless carriers are as enthusiastic.
MobileCrunch has picked up an interesting story from AV Watch - who themselves have spotted a USB tuner that plugs in to your TV, and then streams out 1-Seg (that’s a Japanese TV standard) formatted TV that your iPhone/iPod Touch can pick up via an App running over WiFi. Nice.
WISH-TV today announced the expansion of its mobile offerings to include a new application for BlackBerry smartphones. This mobile application is the latest addition to 24-Hour News 8’s fully synchronized television and digital offerings that are available free of charge at www.wishtv.com .
WISH-TV unveiled its iPhone custom application with great popularity and much success in May 2009. In addition to these specialized applications, 24-Hour News 8 is also available via any web-enabled mobile device.
LIN TV , WISH-TV’s parent company, in conjunction with News Over Wireless (NOW) has developed the custom BlackBerry smartphone and iPhone applications for each of its 27 local television stations. Six LIN TV stations, including WISH-TV, launch the BlackBerry smartphone service today. LIN TV is the first in its local markets to provide instantaneous and on-demand access to its local news, sports and entertainment, as well as video, weather forecasts and traffic reports to BlackBerry smartphone subscribers.
Wednesday 22 July 2009
All data packets are not created equal
Have a look at this video from last year then read this extract from a report in Mobile Europe:
The most inefficient mobile data applications are mobile email, location based services, secure applications and things like stock updates and tickers.
This is what Alcatel-Lucent’s Mike Schabel, Phd, Alcatel-Lucent General Manager, 9900 Wireless Network Guardian, told journalists in an excellent presentation on the difficulties the huge increases in wireless data usage will give mobile operators.
Schabel said that although attention has been focused on P2P traffic because of the volume involved, such services are in fact very efficient in terms of the network resources they use. In essence, a user downloading a film, or watching a video, gets online, establishes a radio connection, does what they have to, and then gets offline.
This kind of behaviour is predictable and manageable, Schabel said. In contrast, Schabel’s team found that in one operator, mobile email was using 25% of the available signaling capacity, even though it was only responsible for 4% of the network traffic volume. This is because of the constantly on-off nature of a push mobile email device as it receives messages, continuously signing on and off the network. Location based services, that also required a constant “conversation” with the network, are also very resource intensive.
Schabel said that examples such as this show that there is a “hidden cost” in many of the data services that mobile operators are looking to deploy. Operators need to factor in cost per minute and cost per bit, he said. A further cost comes when as a result of not understanding network activity such as this, or the way an application works imperfectly on a device, can cause outages and delays in the network – causing poor user experience.
The answer, he said, is first to understand the root cause of problems occurring within the network, or on other elements upon which the service relies (content/ app server, handset, web server, etc).
Second, operators then can plan and design their networks to meet predictable and known demand (“System engineering 1.0”, in Schabel’s words). This may include additional bearers and resources, but it may also be something as simple as re-aligning existing resources. Only then would operators need to consider other throttling or management methods such as policy management, or CRM and billing tools.
Schabel was speaking to publicise his company’s tool, the 9900 Wireless Network Guardian. This is a device that takes in core network data information in real time, analyses it, and produces data on specific issues of network performance.
Schabel said that the issue to date is that wireless network monitoring tools have been “blind” to IP traffic, while packet inspection and other IP techniques cannot “see” the wireless network. What is needed is a system that marries to two together, so operators can see services operating both in cost per bit, and cost per minute terms.
Read Complete report here.
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.
Thursday 25 June 2009
Operators give Femtocells Thumbs up in Femtocells World Summit
"We will expand that into a marketing trial of the AT&T-branded 3G Microcell, which will be open to customers through our AT&T stores ... in a handful of cities,” said Gordon Mansfield, AT&T's executive director for radio access network delivery, speaking at the Femtocells World Summit in London. "We're on track for a full national launch by the end of 2009."
He also said the carrier was exploring ways to expand the femto opportunity beyond simply selling standalone home base stations that offload cellular backhaul from the macro network and boost bandwidth for cellular users. For instance, integrating a femto into other devices in the home.
Meanwhile, Vodafone UK 's surprise femtocell service launch announcement yesterday won't force T-Mobile International AG 's hand to launch a rival service in the U.K. or in any of its markets.
The German giant is sticking to its femto guns and does not feel compelled to take on the largest mobile operator by revenue with a commercial home base station service of its own, simply because Vodafone was first to market in Europe.
"We won't be pushed by that announcement," said Klaus-Jürgen Krath, T-Mobile's senior VP of radio networks engineering, speaking on the sidelines of the Femtocells World Summit in London today. "Let's see how they do in the market...
"There is not any firm launch plan that I can disclose now," he added.
T-Mobile has been busily testing and investing in femto technology for the last few years, but the operator maintains that there are still technical and marketing issues that need to be resolved before a consumer mass market solution is possible.
T-Mobile is a strategic investor in access point vendor Ubiquisys Ltd. and femto chip startup Percello Ltd.
According to French mobile operator SFR , France is a tough market for femtocells.
And one of the issues that makes the country extra special in Europe is the growing public concern about the health risks from cellular antennas and handsets, according to Guillaume de Lavallade, director of network marketing at SFR, who was speaking at the Femtocells World Summit in London.
WiFi hotspots have been disconnected in public libraries; there have been court actions to prevent the installation of cellular masts or have them removed when they're close to schools or homes; and the national government is investigating the health risk associated with masts and handsets, explains Lavallade.
"Introducing femtos in France in this environment is raising these questions," he says.
You can explain that the emitted power of femtos is 10 times less than that of WiFi, comparable to a DECT phone, and that 3G handsets emit less power when connecting to the femto than on the macro network, or that a network based on a femto architecture generates less power than a macro architecture, he says.
"It's difficult for an operator to take those facts and figures to the consumer," he says.
SFR has been trialing a femto from Ubiquisys Ltd. , which was spotted on a French Website recently.
Monday 15 June 2009
Free Sim, Free Calls forever and no Topup needed - Welcome to '3'
A minimum contract period of 30 days and the ability to make free Skype calls, all for the princely amount of £0 per month is not bad at all. For the occasional one off calls or texts, 3 will charge users 20p per minute regardless of the networks and the time of call while texts will cost users 10p each. Furthermore, each MB of data will be charged at 30p which is fairly reasonable.
If you are likely to make more than 45 minutes worth of calls per month AND you'd like to stick to 3, then they've got a £9 price plan that gives you 100 anytime, any network minutes or texts, or any mix of the two plus free 300 minutes of 3-to-3 calls and a free mobile phone.
Users will not be coerced into topping up their mobile account regularly; 3 recommends using either theh INQ1 or the Skypephone S2 which are both available for £70 for the contract. Nevertheless, you should be able to plug any 3G phone to get the service.
Via: IT Portal