Monday 10 October 2011

What is GELTE?

GSM, EDGE and LTE Interworking.
This presentation available to download from here.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Simultaneous Voice and LTE (SVLTE)


When LTE is an overlay to a CDMA/EV-DO network, the current de facto standard for voice delivery is Simultaneous Voice and LTE (SVLTE). In this arrangement, voice service is deployed as a 1x service running in parallel with LTE data services. For this solution to work, the handset needs to have two radios that are on simultaneously. The problem that is obvious is that the power consumption would generally be higher as two radios are on when the voice call is ongoing. The advantage (and I think its a big advantage) is that the data speeds are not affected by ongoing voice call and at the same time the state machine is simple.

For some reason this idea is not very popular for the 2G/3G evolution to LTE as the reliance will be on the CS Fallback. I had discussed this idea in the LTE World Summit and had blogged about it, you can read more details and comments here.

There is also a recent whitepaper from Huawei that covers these issues going towards VoLTE. Its available here.

Edit 06/10/11: Changed the acronym of SVLTE from 'Simultaneous Voice Over LTE' to 'Simultaneous Voice and LTE' as this is correct and referred to elsewhere.

Monday 3 October 2011

LTE Survey from Telecom Asia and Maravedis

Click on the pic. to enlarge

Interesting survey results. As seen in Fig. 2 above if Video and P2P is the main drivers for LTE for some operators, soon they may end up in trouble as the users will consume as much as allowed and given opportunity. An interesting thing though is that the operators are thinking of a fallback strategy that includes Wifi, Femtocells and Picocells (Fig. 3). Finally (Fig. 4), interesting to see that operators believe in launching Smartphones for LTE, I guess CS Fallback is the only possible option for the time being (and maybe for some time to come).

You can read the complete report below:
If its too difficult to read the embed, go to Slideshare here and download presentation.

Saturday 1 October 2011

Future Mobile devices: Winners & Losers in technology

NTT DOCOMO announced a range of futuristic ideas and products that they are going to demo at CEATEC this month. Some of the products/ideas as follows:

Extra-high-speed, next-generation LTE service

  • Experience the first Xi-compatible tablets “docomo Tablet GALAXY Tab 10.1 LTE SC-01D” and “docomo Tablet ARROWS Tab LTE F-01D,” set for October release.
  • Try out new broadband services for the high-performance Xi network, including internationally popular services and games such as Hulu and Qik Video.

Smartphone-ready device to measure acetone in breath for diet support

  • The compact device measuring acetone for diet support that can easily be used anywhere and anytime.
  • Visitors blow into the smartphone-connected device to measure acetone in their breath-the higher the concentration, the greater the level of hunger.
  • The device also identifies when people are burning fat, based on the concentration of acetone in their breath, which rises when body fat is being burnt.

Smartphone jacket for ultra-high-speed battery charging

  • This special battery jacket for smartphones achieves a full charge in just 10 minutes. A recharging indicator will show how the jacket will charge a smartphone 10~15 times faster than conventional charging devices.

Smartphone jackets for various purposes

  • Three types of special jackets for smartphones that are equipped with sensors that can be customized to measure ultraviolet light and bad breath, gamma radiation and body fat.

Environmental sensor network

  • Presentation of real-time atmospheric data (temperature, humidity, wind direction/speed, precipitation, ultraviolet intensity) collected by DOCOMO’s nationwide network of approximately 2,500 environmental sensors, and a demonstration of visualizing the data using augmented reality.

The DOCOMO booth will also offer a mobile handset recycling service, where visitors can drop off old and unwanted mobile phones, rechargers, battery packs and stands. This service is open to all mobile phone users regardless of their carrier, and mobile phones will be destroyed using specialized tools to ensure the protection of personal information.

You can watch these in action here:








I also recently attended a Cambridge Wireless Handset SIG event and David Wood gave an interesting presentation that is embedded below:

Other presentations from that event available here.

Friday 30 September 2011

Macrocells or Metrocells?

Just went through Alcatel-Lucent strategic paper on whether to go for more Macrocell sites or rather have Metrocells instead.

A good description of Metrocells is available in the document:

Metro cells, the latest evolution in small cells, are based on the same low cost femtocell technology that has been successfully used in home and enterprise cells, but with enhanced capacity and coverage. With higher processing and transmit power, the first generation of metro cells is engineered to serve from 16 to 32 users and provide a coverage range from less than 100 meters in dense urban locations to several hundred meters in rural environments. However, unlike home and enterprise cells, metro cells are owned and managed by a MSP and typically used in public or open access areas to augment the capacity or coverage of a larger macro network.

Available in both indoor and outdoor versions, metro cells are plug-and-play devices that use Self-Organizing Network (SON) technology to automate network configuration and optimization, significantly reducing network planning, deployment and maintenance costs. While indoor versions use an existing broadband connection to backhaul traffic to a core network, outdoor versions may be opportunistically deployed to take advantage of existing wireline or wireless sites and backhaul infrastructure, such as Fiber-to-the-Node (FTTN), Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH), Very-high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL) street cabinets, and DSL backbone.

Since metro cells use licensed spectrum and are part of the MSP’s larger mobility network, they provide the same trusted security and quality of service (QoS) as the macro network. With seamless handovers, users can roam from metro cells to the macro network and vice versa. Metro cells also deliver the same services as the macro network (for example, voice, Short Message Service (SMS), and multimedia services), and support application programming interfaces (APIs), that may be used for developing new, innovative services. In short, metro cells promise to be the ideal small cells for network offloading.

For more details on the whitepaper see: http://www.slideshare.net/zahidtg/metro-cells-whitepaper



Saturday 24 September 2011

Public training on UMTS and HSPA/HSPA+


We are conducting our first public training on UMTS and HSPA/HSPA+. There are still a lot of people working on UMTS / HSPA / HSPA+ even though quite a lot of focus is being put on LTE.

This course is split into 3 parts and the person attending it can decide which days he wants to attend. The intention is to bring a person with minimal knowledge upto a good speed and to a level where (s)he can become an expert by putting some extra effort.


Discounts available for regular readers of this blog. Please ask.