In the most recent deal, AT&T filed to acquire Nextwave’s WCS (Wireless Communication Services) and AWS (Advanced Wireless Services) assets for $650 million. The bulk of this deal is about the WCS band, so what is this deal about and what does AT&T get for the money?
When the WCS band was first auctioned off in 1997, 30 MHz of spectrum in 2.3 GHz was sold for $14.8 million. At the time, it seems reasonable to pay that much for spectrum with stringent regulatory requirements on RF out of band emissions to protect the adjacent satellite DARS band (Digital Audio Radio Service). Now, the picture… Read More »
If you have been following the wireless industry, you for sure would have heard of the capacity crunch and exploding demand for mobile traffic data services. Hardly any presentation by a vendor, analyst, and even operator starts without a graph of future traffic trends. But quietly, another problem has been brewing; one that has received little media attention,… Read More »
One essence of wireless communication does not change: the reliance on spectrum availability. The frequency spectrum is endowed with different features and characteristics that make trade-offs a necessity. One trade-off is that between data rate and mobility. The lower part of the frequency spectrum which is most amenable for mobile services due to economic reasons aggregate in a… Read More »
The success of personal wireless communications may have been inevitable: communications is an essential tenant of human social structure. Coupled with the proliferation of wireless communication has been a drive to open up new bands of frequency spectrum. The most recent example is the millimeter wave band around 60 GHz which was assigned for unlicensed use and is… Read More »
The 2.5 GHz LTE auction in Brazil came to an end last week with total proceedings of 2.96 Billion Real ($1.42 Billion). The spectrum included a sliver of 450 MHz spectrum for rural access which regulator Anatel was not able to auction independently and was later included with the 2.5 GHz licenses.
Photon Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) is a new technique to increase wireless channel capacity. However, not everyone agrees that this is a conceptually new area in radio communication and they make the case that OAM is a special mode of MIMO communications. This view was presented in a recent IEEE Transactions on Antennas & Propagation paper. The argument… Read More »
In some of my recent postings, I wrote about the limits of the physical layer and what that means for the future of wireless communications systems. Here, I like to mention new research that has promise of increasing the capacity of the physical layer. This new work is based on exploiting a property of electromagnetic waves heavily investigated… Read More »
Below is a link to a recent presentation I made to the local IEEE Ottawa Chapter and the Alliance of IEEE Consultants Network (AICN). I trace the evolution of the air interface of wireless systems from 2G (GSM, CDMA/IS95) through 3G and LTE to LTE-Advanced.
I want to quickly summarize here the rules for the Canadian 700 auction which were recently released by Industry Canada (IC).
There is a general view that we are rapidly approaching the capacity limits of the physical layer. But as demand for capacity continues to grow, the supply of capacity is tapering off. What to do about this and how to continue to inject capacity is being addressed at standardization meetings. Let’s take a quick look at some of… Read More »
Perhaps you heard of Cloud-based RAN (C-RAN), the latest acronym in the mobile industry. If you are familiar with “base station hotel,” then you’re familiar with this mobile network architecture. C-RAN takes the distributed base station architecture to its extreme: It pools the baseband processors in a central location and distributes remote radio headends which are connected through… Read More »
Just back home from MWC’12… What a show this year… Over 67,000 attendees and some 1500 exhibitors, and some student protests in the mix… It was the biggest to date and a good finale for the Fira before moving next year to a new nearby location. For those in the mobile infrastructure space, long gone are the days… Read More »
As a new wave of hype is building around TD-LTE, I wonder what the fuss is all about. For certain, TD-LTE is not a groundbreaking technology – it comes many years after WiMAX and quite a few after its older FD-LTE sibling. But what intrigues me most is the business model for TD-LTE and especially the dilemma of the TDD spectrum holder: what is a winning business model that maximizes the value of my operation and company? Without such a model, TD-LTE will be yet another technology toddler that never makes it to adulthood.
Should operators deploy a macro or micro cellular architecture in 2.5 GHz band? This is not a trivial question particularly for an incumbent wireless operator that already holds spectrum in lower spectrum bands. The same can be said of Greenfields looking to capitalize on the exponential demand for wireless data services.