Metro Femtos another option for LTE.

Around six months back, Unstrung article mentioned that Vodafone dreams of Metro Femto. Now Doug Pulley of picoChip s all set to champion this concept. In the recently concluded LTE World Summit, he said "The macrocell is dead. It's a fallacy to think you can reuse existing cell sites to get LTE services. That whole premise is broken."

Both China Mobile and T-Mobile have said they plan to use existing 3G cell sites for their LTE networks. But Pulley contends a traditional macrocell deployment won't work because of the basic laws of physics.

Here's the deal: "User throughput rolls off the further you get from the base station," says Pulley. "[With] increased throughput, the signal becomes more sensitive to noise and interference. The further it has to travel, the weaker it gets."

So that means LTE cell sites need to be small and a have smaller radii than traditional macro sites to get the full data throughputs that LTE can offer, which will be up to three to four times higher than 3G HSDPA release 6, according to Adrian Scrase, CTO at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) .

"You've got to have new sites, and the capex implications of that are potentially horrible," says Pulley.

So future LTE femtos have to be cheap. PicoChip is developing a system-on-chip (SoC), code-named Feynman, that will enable a dualmode HSPA/LTE residential femtocell with a bill of materials of $70 in 2011. A lamp-post mounted, dualmode HSPA/LTE version of the femtocell will have a bill of materials of about $170.

"This is orders of magnitude cheaper than doing it any other way," says Pulley.

For equipment suppliers, though, the concept of small, cheap base stations, especially those that might supplant current base station models, is causing some tension, according to Pulley.

T-Mobile is keen on LTE femtocells. "Femtocells [will be] an important measure to supplement LTE for indoor coverage and capacity scenarios," says Frank Meywerk, senior vice president for radio networks at T-Mobile.
And China Mobile suggested that operators outside China could use the TD-LTE (Time Division LTE) version of LTE for capacity-enhancing femtocell deployments. That's an option for many European operators that, as part of their spectrum allocations for 3G UMTS services, have been awarded 5 MHz of time-division duplex (TDD) spectrum, along with their primary allocation of frequency-division duplex (FDD) spectrum.

TD-LTE would be a particularly useful choice for operators looking to maximize coverage in dense urban areas, as such deployments would "not interfere with FDD spectrum," according to Bill Huang, general manager at the China Mobile Research Institute. "I've heard that without having fixed spectrum allocated to femtos, it's not possible to deploy femtocells" because of interference issues.

Canada's Telus presented findings that femtocells do indeed have better performance in metro deployments.

"We're all here today to determine if there is a performance difference with going with very small cells," said Sam Luu, associate director of technology planning and strategy at Telus. "There is a significant performance difference at the edge and at the site."

But Luu cautioned that metro femtos are, for now, still only an interesting idea. "You can talk about technical better performance," he says. "But it still requires the R&D to get it off the ground. We're still in the early stages of evaluating the technology."

I have mentioned here and here that Femtocells can be considered as starting point for LTE rollout. Thinking about all the posts, it may be a better that an enhanced version of Femtocell or Femto++ is used. By this i mean that traditionally HSPA/LTE Femtocells are to allow max. 4 calls (more correct would be 4 radio links because the users could be in multi-call with CS and PS connection ... I know there is no CS for LTE but I am talking about HSPA) simultaneously and the Femto++ would allow 16 calls simultaneously.

In fact Huawei has a 16 channel Femtocell that is being trialled but not everyone is happy to refer to it as a Femtocell. A better term suggested is Picocell or my personal view is that depending on the power output, it could be classed as Femto++ or Picocell.

Operators can also reduce the cost of rolling out Metro Femtos by encouraging users to keep the access open on their Femtocells open and giving them a reward for every originating and terminating call made on their Femto.

More information on Metro Femtocells is available here:

• Metro Femtocells and Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) Compared
• What does picoChip do?

LG causes a stir with the first LTE handset modem chip

LG recently announced that it has independently developed the first handset (user equipment) modem chip based on 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology standards. The modem chip can theoretically support wireless download speeds of 100Mbps (megabits per second) and upload speeds of 50Mbps. This represents a significant step toward creating a market-ready 4G phone.

LG demonstrated the chip at its Mobile Communication Technology Research Lab in Anyang, Korea, achieving wireless download speeds of 60 Mbps and upload speeds of 20 Mbps. The fastest phones currently on the market use HSDPA technology and download at a maximum speed of 7.6 Mbps.

For the past three years, LG have been pursuing 3GPP LTE standardization, working to develop and test commercially viable LTE technology with approximately 250 of R&D staffs. The result is a 13 by 13 mm modem chip, perfectly sized for the next generation of slim-yet-powerful handsets. For its demonstration today, LG used a test terminal running Windows Mobile to play back high quality, on-demand video. In addition to this handset modem, LG is also developing the first preliminary LTE-based data card, which can replace the wireless cards currently used in computers.

“Now that LG has developed and tested the first 4G handset modem, a commercially viable LTE handset is on the horizon,” said Dr. Woo Hyun Paik, CTO of LG Electronics. “This latest breakthrough gives us a strong technology advantage that we will use to bolster our industry leadership.”

Dr. Paik added, "Our successful development of this LTE handset modem signals the start of the 4G mobile communications market. LG will continue to advance this technology and develop further technologies to maintain global leadership.”

Mobile phone carriers have now built LTE test networks and are currently working on early stage handsets. The first LTE mobile phones will likely reach the market in 2010.

If you remember, LG was one of the partners with T-Mobile and Nortel when they tested LTE some months back.

Anyway, LG also caused a stir with this announcement because it boasted of having 300 patents related to the technology.

The report, in Korea Times, caused ripples of nervousness because LG is not a participant in the patent pool that several large vendors formed last spring for LTE. The aim of this group is to create a cross-licensing framework, and sign up sufficient numbers of IPR holders, that it will achieve “fair and non-discriminatory pricing” amounting to a single digit percentage of the cost of a handset, and single digit dollars for a laptop, for all associated intellectual property, commented Arstechnica.

Patent pools are gaining in popularity as new standards emerge with ever larger numbers of patents involved, but with rising pressures to be cost effective. The WiMAX community created the Open Patent Alliance earlier this year, and this week, the IEEE standards body struck a two-year deal with Via Licensing, one of the most prominent patent pool administrators. This agreement will create one or more patent pools for key IEEE communications standards, including Wi-Fi. The standards group believes this will help drive its specifications into the market more quickly because vendors will have greater confidence that IPR licensing will be fair and patents declared upfront before standards find their way into commercial products.

There were some interesting discussions on IPR framework in the LTE World Summit that i will hopefully blog soon about.

via: LTE Watch

Forward texts to your email account

In the past few years text messaging has really grown especially with the young people like me although it’s a different matter I prefer to call instead of texting.

It’s not a rocket science that texting is cheaper and sometimes keep people going on their mobiles and also it’s a way of passing time for today’s youths.

I came across some interesting thing called txtForward earlier today, which I thought was worth a mention here. As its name suggests, txtForward automatically forwards incoming or outgoing text messages to a specified email address.

Now this can encourage young people like me who find dealing with email quite easy than the actual texting on the phone.

But at the same time this could be a boon for the heavy text user who might just want a simple and reliable way to archive their messages. And in case you didn't realize, text messaging is apparently being used by teens to avoid taking phone calls by their parents. How amazing, today’s youth like me are definitely one step ahead than the older ones.

Anyway, the unfortunate state of affair is that most smartphones simply do not treat text messages as important, and hence are generally limited in terms of message-level searching, as well as in their backup and archival.

Available for the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry version of the software worked flawlessly for me. Of course, the trial is limited to only 10 forwarded messages, so my experience with it is limited. One downside for privacy advocates is that the emails are sent out via Electric Pocket's servers, though the company gave assurance on its website that no logging, recording, or monitoring of messages takes place.

Still something to cheer up for wireless sector

In the last year as everybody knows because of the lack of money in the market situation has turned towards grimness. In these difficult times everybody tend to take measures whether right or wrong we can’t say for sure. One thing though which is sure is that everybody tries to cut cost in these difficult circumstances and hence results in the some unpopular decisions. Telecomm companies are no different than others and hence quite rightly taken stern steps towards cutting costs. There is some nervousness especially among the investors which gives an impression that spending in the wireless sector will be hot has as well.

Although the certain trends and strategic vibes coming out of the major companies doesn’t suggest so for the time being. Infact I must say wireless infrastructure spending has overtaken wired in the majority of large enterprises.

I can see the main reason behind this increased spending is that companies are well aware that majority of us like to have wireless these days. Majority of the companies, no doubt also expect all their networked equipment to be wireless enabled. This obviously presents a strategic view in front of the companies and investors as a need for mobility and hence the need to upgrade or replace an existing wired LAN.

As everyday passes by in these hard economic times the budget is getting reduced and hence there is a sense of urgency to be more efficient. I might not be very wrong is say that at the moment wireless/mobility sector seems to be achieving that efficiency by taking certain calculated steps.

Companies are trying every possible bit to get the maximum out of the existing or newly planned wireless infrastructure and the technology as such.

Once such company which everybody thought will say goodbye to Wireless is Alcatel-Lucent.
In the highly anticipated strategic announcement by the newly appointed CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, Ben Verwaayen, has announced and hence strongly countered that it is committed to being a major supplier of mobile infrastructure.

I guess Ben Verwaayen see that there is a huge potential in the wireless market and hence despite being pressured by some of its major investors he still wants to go ahead with the spending on the wireless infrastructure major being the LTE.

In the last year whenever I spoke to my friends in different companies I got the view that everybody wants to cut the cost so that they can continue or maintain their R&D section. In my view this is the right thing to do specially for the giants of telecoms. It’s quite simple that R&D projects will enable to develop new and exciting products and hence the revenues.

Based on the above information which gained by talking to different people at the top of the industry I’m 100% confident that companies like Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Network, Alcatel-Lucent etc will maintain its R&D resources and will be ready with LTE products when the market demands. It is very much obvious companies will focus in a more targeted way than in the past and thus may be putting LTE at the very centre of their efforts. The whole ideas to regain the market share and become a leading supplier within 18 months.

340m 'Active' mobile broadband users by 2014

Mobile broadband computing (MBC) has grown very strongly in 2008, to 35m global subscribers. This is forecast to increase almost 10x by 2014, to 341m according to a new report titled "Mobile Broadband Computing" by Dean Bubley from Disruptive Analysis.

Some of the interesting highlights from the report as follows:

• Growth has been driven by cheap HSDPA modems and flatrate data plans.
• The majority of MBC users exploit conventional-seized laptops with separate 3G USB modems (“dongles”). This model will continue to lead despite the growth of netbooks, built-in 3G, WiMAX and MIDs (mobile Internet devices).
• At present, Europe accounts for 50% of global mobile broadband users, reflecting earlier introduction of consumer-friendly USB dongles and ferociously-competitive low-priced HSDPA tariffs.
• “Free” netbooks, provided on a subsidised basis by mobile operators on typical 2-year contracts are popular, but have a limited addressable market.
• By the end of 2011, about 30% of mobile broadband users will be exploiting notebooks with built-in 3G or WiMAX modules. 58%, roughly twice that proportion, will use external modems like USB dongles.
• By 2014, there will be 150m users of notebooks and netbooks with embedded mobile broadband worldwide. In terms of shipments, 100m wireless-enabled laptops will be sold annually by then – but not all will be activated.
• By 2012, there will be 45m users of WiMAX-enabled MBC devices. 11m of these will also use 3G or LTE connections in various hybrid approaches.
• Use of LTE in mobile broadband computing devices will be very limited until 2012. After that, ramp-up will be rapid, reaching 75m units shipped in 2014.
• By 2011, only 40% of mobile broadband users will be on long-term monthly contracts. Most will use prepaid, session-based, bundled or “free” models.
  

Some of the other interesting points from the extended summary as follows:

• Some operators' marketing teams have become over-zealous about competing with fixed broadband. In some markets, HSDPA is now cheaper than ADSL/cable. This is unsustainable, as the cost structures differ hugely. There are physical limits to the capacity of mobile data networks, which will rapidly be reached with the explosion of low-cost traffic. Some cellular networks now see more than 90% of 3G traffic from PCs. Network operators are now hostage to future high-bandwidth Internet applications gaining viral adoption among mobile users.
• Adoption of embedded-3G and embedded-WiMAX notebooks will grow slowly alongside separate “dongle” modems. Predictions of 50%+ attach rates in 2-3 years are over-optimistic; there are numerous practical, commercial and economic reasons for delayed adoption
• To date, most mobile broadband users have connected with an existing notebook PC, together with a separate datacard or USB dongle. Looking forward, a broader set of choices are emerging, with the advent of embedded-WWAN notebooks, small & inexpensive 7-10” sized netbooks, MIDs and the use of 3G handsets as “tethers”. Implicitly, these all compete to some degree against higher-end smartphones as well.
• At present, the majority of mobile broadband subscribers are engaged through
  traditional monthly contracts, typically over 12-24 month periods. However, further evolution is necessary. Disruptive Analysis expects a variety of new business models to emerge and take a significant share of the overall user base, including:
• Session-based access, similar to the familiar WiFi hotspot model.
• Bundling of mobile broadband with other services, for example as an adjunct to fixed broadband or mobile voice services.
• “Comes with data included” models, where the upfront device purchase price
  includes connectivity, perhaps for a year.
• Free, guest or “sponsored” mobile broadband, paid for by venue owners or
  event organisers.
• Incrementing capacity of Networks by perhaps another 10x in the next 6 years will need investment in more spectrum, more cell sites, newer radio technology, better backhaul and dedicated “hotspot” solutions like femtocells and WiFi. Yet in the current climate, these investments face delay, meaning a “capacity crunch” is possible in some cases.

On an unrelated note, More than 25 per cent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013, according to research by Gartner. Though this does not specifically say mobile content, I think the same phenomenon will be observed in the mobile world and maybe to a larger extent with applications like Youtube already very popular with the mobile users.

Help to decipher the text messages

The world of text messaging is evolving so fast that honestly its becoming difficult for me to keep track of the 'text slangs'. If you are in a situation like me then dont worry help is at hand.

ITPro published an article recently reporting that the 'Post Office' (yup you read it correctly) has released a guide that lists lot of common slangs being used for texting. A word of caution would be that some of the terms are specific to Brits so they may not be applicable in other english speaking countries.

Some of the interesting terms listed are:

• ATM - At the moment
• 4EVA - Forever
• Code 18 - Someone who is bad at using technology
• 404 - Clueless
• BAB - Boring
• P999 - Parent Alert (Note 999 is emergency number in UK. So this would become P911 in US, P112 in Europe and P100 in India)
• GOOD job - Get Out Of Debt job
• Code 11 - Old Fashioned (London specific)
• 143 - I Love You (more commonly used one is ILU)

The guide is available from the Post office site here. (Ftp link for PDF)

There is also a very interesting book called "Txtng: the gr8 db8" that was published not too long ago.

The book is not expensive and I found it very interesting as it contains loads of useful information and statistics. The best thing is that in the end it contains very detailed list of text abbreviations, not only in english but also in 11 other languages (using english charachters though) including Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish and Welsh.

iBangle: Not a phone but great concept

The iBangle is Gopinath Prasana’s vision of a future iPod where the devices have become darn close to becoming jewelry. If you factor in inflation and the cost of Apple products today - might as well call it jewelry because it’ll cost as much. I digress, the iBangle is a thin piece of aluminum (of course) with a multi-touch track pad. To achieve the perfect fit, a cushion inside the ring inflates to keep itself taught against your wrist. Unisex? Maybe.

If this concept becomes reality, it would be just mater of time before a phone is rolled in along with this.

The wearable concept is also puched in the Nokia concept phones like the Nokia 888 and Morph.

LTE Advanced: NSN Proves relaying technology

Nokia Siemens Networks has broken new ground with another technological first: mobile broadband communications beyond LTE. Company researchers have successfully demonstrated Relaying technology proposed for LTE-Advanced, enabling an exceptional end-user experience delivered consistently across the network.

Completed in Nokia Siemens Networks research facilities in Germany, the demonstration illustrated how advances to Relaying technology can further improve the quality and coverage consistency of a network at the cell edge - where users are furthest from the mobile broadband base station.

Relaying technology, which can also be integrated in normal base station platforms, is cost efficient and easy to deploy as it does not require additional backhaul. The demonstration of LTE Advanced means operators can plan their LTE network investments knowing that the already best-in-class LTE radio performance, including cell edge data rates, can be further improved and that the technological development path for the next stage of LTE is secure and future-proof.

These performance enhancements have been achieved by combining an LTE system supporting a 2x2 MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna system, and a Relay station. The Relaying operates in-band, which means that the relay stations inserted in the network do not need an external data backhaul. They are connected to the nearest base stations by using radio resources within the operating frequency band of the base station itself. Towards the terminal they are base stations and offer the full functionality of LTE. LTE-Advanced is currently being studied by 3GPP for Release 10 and will be submitted towards ITU-R as the 3GPP Radio Interface Technology proposal.

The improved cell coverage and system fairness - meaning offering higher user data rates for and fair treatment of users distant from the base station - will allow operators to utilise existing LTE network infrastructure and still meet growing bandwidth demands.

The demonstration has been realised by using an intelligent demo relay node embedded in a test network forming a FDD in-band self-backhauling solution for coverage enhancements. With this demonstration the performance at the cell edge could be increased up to 50% of the peak throughput.

More info on LTE-A coming soon.

No LTE networks in UK before 2011

According to Silicon.com, any rollout of a next generation mobile network in the UK is still years away, says telecoms kit maker Ericsson's UK CTO John Cunliffe.

"I would say probably the end of 2010 at the very earliest," he told silicon.com. "Networks will be ready for rolling out - shipping in commercial quantities - next year and then the devices, we think, will start to come in 2010," he added.

Cunliffe would not give an estimate on how much a commercial rollout of LTE in the UK might cost. "People need to do more modelling around rollout costs," he said. "It's a new equation."
However, he claimed operators switching to LTE would reap the benefits of "total lower capex and lower opex" - provided they are willing to stump up the infrastructure cash.

However Cunliffe highlighted that any large-scale deployment of rival 4G technology WiMax would also require similar investment in infrastructure to that of an LTE deployment. "If you think about WiMax starting off as essentially a radio you need a much bigger ecosystem around it," he said.

"By the time you actually deliver a service, the operators still have to pay for the infrastructure that goes around it and they've still got their opex - their people costs and so on - so the WiMax piece - the radio piece - is actually a small piece of the equation. In terms of the maturity of the 3GPP ecosystem, it's well ahead of where WiMax is."

"The fastest being deployed in the UK at the moment is 7.2Mbps but our roadmap continues until 42Mbps. We can even see that it may be possible for the technology to reach as much as 80Mbps…so there is certainly a lot of mileage in HSPA…People maybe think that we've got to have LTE to get to the higher speeds but HSPA will go a long way before we need to get to LTE speeds."

Cunliffe added the top speed of LTE currently being demoed by Ericsson in lab conditions is 160Mbps and a drive test has reached a maximum of 154Mbps, with an average of 78Mbps.

What are the biggest hurdles to a UK LTE network being rolled out? Cunliffe believes they are timing - when operators will switch, especially those with significant investment in HSPA - as well as the inexorable issue of ROI: "Obviously there will be questions about return on investment," he concluded.

2009 is crucial for mobile vendors

Some time ago I wrote in my blog about the good results posted by the companies for that particular quarter. At that time I was slightly bullish in terms of future earning of the telecoms giants.

With the new financial results predicting more economic woes, the early signs suggest that the majot telecoms companies might have a rocky ride ahead.

Most of the major vendors have already issued warnings for their handset sales. The news comes amid a week of profit warnings from other handset makers, including Research In Motion and Palm, as the handset market faces declining demand in the midst of a global economic slowdown. The research firm Gartner also released statistics about the smartphone market, which saw its weakest year-on-year growth since the firm started tracking the industry, and Nokia saw its share of the smartphone market fall to 42.4 percent, down from the 48.7 percent share it had a year earlier.

I remember during the year 2000/2001 when we saw the major telecoms burst, Nokia was still holding up and it produced some good results. I expect/expected similar this time as well from Nokia.

I was proven wrong when Nokia issued a market warning for the second time in less than a month, cutting its outlook for global handset sales, as the world's largest handset maker braces for a slowdown in the coming year.The Finnish giant now expects global handset sales to drop below the 330 million units for the fourth quarter it estimated on Nov. 14, and also said its estimate of 1.24 billion units for 2008 would have to be revised down. Those numbers were cuts from previous estimates. The company also said it expects growth to slow in 2009, with the market contracting 5 percent from its 2008 levels.

Indeed these figures coming out of Nokia presents bleak picture and make everybody nervous. It is very much evident by looking at the current climate that year 2009 will be challenging for telecoms industry.

However I still believe that companies like Nokia have a strong, enviable base to build on and I believe even in tough situation it will continue to strengthen its position on many fronts.

There is no doubt that in the face of a global economic downturn and weakening demand, handset makers and vendors affiliated with cell phone components are probably headed toward a large shakeup.

Companies with more high-end portfolios, including Apple, Research In Motion and HTC will be better positioned to handle any turmoil that would affect the handset market. All three have showcase devices that could help propel them through any choppy waters. In the case of RIM, there are multiple devices that could turn into large sellers, most notably the BlackBerry Storm, which Verizon Wireless has already launched.

However, others such as Motorola and Sony Ericsson, which cut 450 jobs from its North American headquarters earlier this fall, are in a weaker position. Motorola has said it is planning on focusing more on phones running on Windows Mobile and Google's Android platform to chart it back to growth, but said an Android phone would not be in the market until the end of 2009.

Most of the handset vendors will develop a strategy where they will concentrate on the market where the handset sales are still on the up. Europe has already been considered saturated in terms of mobile sales and hence this doesn’t come as surprise when Ovum declared in its report that Europe has become the first regional mobile market to be hit by the economic downturn.
But the the US mobile market has to date resisted the downturn and developing markets such as Latin America continue to enjoy double-digit revenue growth rates. Markets such as Latin America which remains overwhelmingly buoyant gives enough hope to vendors hence the expectation that they will be able to ride out the current financial crises.

I guess 2009 is going to be interesting.