Over the past week, I had the opportunity to get a full status update on Radio Access Network (RAN) transformation at the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Summit in Amsterdam. I also had the opportunity to speak with a few service providers on the evolution of the telco network. Understanding the pain points and motivation of the carriers is… Read More »
Is OpenRAN (Open Radio Access Networks) the path to saving costs in radio access networks? Vodafone seems to think it is as it trials the technology in its networks in the UK and Africa. Among Vodafone’s goals are: 1. Improve supply chain resilience; and 2. Connect rural communities using standardized, lower cost network equipment. This is good news… Read More »
It has been a long time since I attended an ‘academic’ conference, focusing instead on industry and finance events. But this week, I had the chance to drop by at IEEE VTC Fall, one of the leading conferences on mobile technology to get the pulse on the state of R&D and keep tab on latest developments from the… Read More »
We have released our annual Cloud RAN report with new insights and analysis on the development of this market during 2014. Cloud RAN is certainly gaining in interest in the operator community. This is due to practical reasons related to cost savings that can be realized first by the process of centralization and then by the virtualization of… Read More »
Since the first building blocks of SON were laid down around 2008 by 3GPP and NGMN, uptake in SON deployments has been very selective by a few leading carriers for some use cases. However, universal applicability remains elusive. To say the least, the SON market is struggling – but why, and how that can be turned around is… Read More »
I recently came across a presentation on advanced antenna systems with the statement: “advanced antenna systems for power consumption savings not for capacity.” I was very intrigued for a couple of reasons. The first is how much of a problem is power consumption in wireless networks is. The second is that I recalled a conversation I had over… Read More »
At a recent conference I attended, a strategy executive at Deutsche Telekom stated that they would turn off the 3G network before turning off 2G GSM as the migration to LTE evolves. Sounds bizarre? Not really, it makes a lot of technical sense. One reason to come to this decision is the nature of the LTE architecture and the way LTE handles voice traffic. As a full-packet network, LTE is fundamentally different from the full circuit-switched GSM and hybrid circuit and packet-switched 3G networks which include today’s data workhorse HSPA+. In LTE, voice is just another application, albeit one with specific parameters and requirements. Therefore, voice is packetized and classified according to a certain Quality of Service level (QoS) to maintain important parameters such as latency and jitter. This is essentially what Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is.
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 results of the spectrum auction in Spain were published on Monday. The auction was for digital dividend band frequencies in 800 MHz, a slice of 900 MHz spectrum and 2.5 GHz spectrum.