Towers are not a ‘sexy’ topic of discussion – but this one is interesting… New regulations by Industry Canada will require of wireless operators additional commitments to build sub-15 m wireless towers, or let’s call them poles as that’s what most would be. When I was in the business of designing and building networks, the sub-15 m rule… Read More »
By Kellie Wong – Cisco Communities – Service Provider Community Manager Firstly, may I say Happy New Year and I hope everyone had a safe and nice Holiday season. 2013 proved to be an eventful year in the Service Provider space with the introduction of the Network Convergence System (NCS) to power the Internet of Everything (IoE) as well… Read More »
Thirteen years ago we were working at Metawave to address the capacity challenge operators were facing (sounds familiar?). Our solution was an adaptive system that automatically adjust the antenna beamwidth to change the coverage area of a given sector according to the traffic load. By changing the antenna patterns, and consequently the coverage footprint, it is possible to… Read More »
The deluge of demand for mobile data has been much discussed and talked about. News is abounding with figures, quotes and graphics of the increasing consumption (about doubling every year) and its projection to the future (anywhere from 10-25 time increase within the next 4 years). On the other hand, there has not been much discussion on what… Read More »
If you’re in the wireless infrastructure business, you’ve seen it many, many times. I’m talking about the predictions showing exponential mobile data traffic growth. Hardly a conference presentation goes by without seeing this graph on the first or second slide. It became customary to preface any discussion with this context, often with the idea to get people salivating… Read More »
MWC is over. In reflecting on the show, I came up with an idea and tried it out, just for fun. What if I take all the news coverage from the show and generate a ‘word cloud,’ would I be able to zoom in on the few key trends? What would ‘word clouding’ tell me? As it turned… Read More »
A close look at Interbrand’s best brands report reveals interesting results and insights on the wireless industry. Focusing on brands related to the telecommunication industry, which includes hardware, software, and content providers we find the following top brands for 2012:
Below is a list of my top-10 most read posts of 2012. Older posts would get more views than recent ones and I have no way of knowing the numbers of RSS subscriptions, etc. Also, I am hoping that viewed posts equals read posts, but there are no guarantees! Nevertheless, this is still of interest and I thought to… Read More »
The FCC adopted the rules for the 3.65 – 3.7 GHz band in May 2007, a good nine years after it first proposed to allocate the band to non-Government fixed services on a primary basis. This timeline coincided with parallel development of WiMAX where equipment based on the fixed version of the standard (IEEE 802.16d) first came to… 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 »
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 »
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 »
I was recently asked by a business associate how to estimate the capital costs of an LTE network. Inevitably our discussion led to estimating the number of sites required to cover a market. Designing to meet coverage requirements along with its complement, capacity requirements, form the basis for estimating the size, and consequently cost, of the radio access network. This is something that differentiates the financial modeling service provided by Telesystem Innovations. So I like to expand in this post on a few general principles related to path loss models which play a critical part is determining cell size.
The numbers for mid-2011 are in and the big picture for mobile network operators is clear: overall ARPUs continue to decline led by declining voice service revenue. Data service revenue continues to grow, but not at a sufficient rate to compensate for the decline in voice revenue. In fact, data services which on average constitutes a about a third of ARPU fail to stabilize ARPU and hold off the erosion.