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… 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… 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… 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.
The rules for the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction are set to be announced soon after parliament returns from its two months winter recess on January 30th. In the lead up, we’ve had an amazing debate raging between the incumbents (Rogers, Bell and Telus) who back an open auction and the new entrants (Wind, Mobilicity,… Read More »
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has just approved LTE-Advanced and WiMAX-Advanced (aka WiMAX 2.0) as part of the IMT-Advanced standards. Aside of marketing catch phrases like “putting fiber optical speed on your mobile phone,” the statements about efficiency – being able to transfer higher data rates in lesser bandwidth – are what the industry will… Read More »
Large amounts of spectrum in the 2.5-2.7 GHz band are available now for mobile network deployments. Spectrum auctions in Europe in the past two years made much of the 190 MHz available to network operators. This band sold at a significant discount to the 800 MHz band (between 5 – 35x). While in the United States Clearwire used this band to deploy WiMAX, in Europe, operators are unanimous of LTE. So, what are the deployment options?
On December 22, the FCC approved of AT&T’s purchase of the unpaired D and E blocks from Qualcomm for a total of $1.925 Billion. What went missing in most media reports that the D and E bands are unpaired 6 MHz bands in what’s commonly known as the “lower 700 MHz band.”
The year closes with the 800 MHz spectrum auction in France where the regulator Arcep finishes with a bang netting €2.639 billion for the 60 MHz made available. In September, Arcep raised €936 million from the sale of 2.6 GHz spectrum for a total of €3.6bn, about €1.6bn over the €2.5bn reserve price.
While much attention has been focused on LTE data rates, another important parameter, latency, has gone largely unnoticed. Yet, latency is critical to enable a number of applications particularly voice services (VoLTE). I review in this post some of the publicly reported results I found on LTE latency.
The 2.6 GHz spectrum auction in Belgium closed yesterday after it netted a total of €77.8 million for a total of 155 MHz. Although the media reported the outcome as being low, I think the price is representative for this band at 4.6 euro cents per MHz-PoP. This is more so the case as the license is valid for 15 years while in other countries the licenses are for period of up to 20 years.
When it comes to planning radio access networks, mobile traffic data forecast become very important: Operators need to properly size their networks, and the ecosystem needs to predict potential bottlenecks and come up with creative solutions.