Oz MobileNet

Current and Planned Mobile Spectrum in China

Anyone concerned at the scale and takeup of TDD LTE can stop worrying.

According to the China Daily the world’s largest mobile company by subscriptions China Mobile which has over 700 million mobile customers is letting a contract for 207,000 TDD LTE base stations. They are currently down the track with a 13 city trial rollout with kit from ZTE and Alcatel Lucent. CM is expected to concentrate on the 2.6GHz (2.57 – 2.62 GHz) TDD LTE band 38.

CM’s 2013 capital spend has increased to $30Bn USD more than half of which will go on the new TDD LTE network. Telecom Asia reports that CM plans to cover 100 cities and 500 million population with the 200K base station deployment. The Telecom Asia article points to the large quantity of under utilised TDD spectrum around the world.

The potential booming LTE TDD network equipment and device market may see these underutilised assets pressed into service to feed the growing appetite for mobile and wireless data services especially in high population developing markets.

Unwired/Austar Now Optus/NBN Broadband Wireless Spectrum

Optus’ rather more modest investment in TDD LTE following its $252M purchase of Vivid from Channel 7 in February 2012 has seen it deploy 2.3 GHz TDD LTE at 13 sites in Canberra (launched in June 2013) and taking this to 50 sites this year.

Optus has 98 MHz of 2.3 GHz and 65 MHz of 3.4 GHz TDD spectrum as part of the Vivid purchase. This is mainly in capital cities. The other 2.3 and 3.4 GHz spectrum assets were previously owned by Austar are now being used by NBN Co for the wireless part of the NBN rollout.

These previously underutilised spectrum assets, licenses for which run out in 2015, are now seeing increased use.

NBN Co has started to sell the higher speed 25/5 Mbps wireless broadband. The faster speed service is wholesaled at $27 per month just $3 more than the original 12/1 Mbps service.

The fixed wireless part of the NBN which is expected to service some 4% of NBN connections (around 500,000 premises) when it is completed in 2015. It will use around 2,300 base stations each costing between $300,000 and $400,000. The base stations will be equipped with TDD LTE technology using the 2.3 and 3.4 GHz spectrum which NBN acquired from  Austar for $M120  in February 2011. This spectrum 98 MHz in 2.3GHz band and 65 MHz in 3.4 GHz band came to Austar as part of a swap with Unwired (then Vivid Wireless now owned by Optus). Basically Unwired had the spectrum in metro areas and Austar had the non metro.

The fixed wireless equipment used by NBN for this service is to be provided, built, operated and maintained by Ericsson. The up to $1.1Bn contract for this work was let in June 2011 and includes options covering 10 years. The contract also covers business support systems including service activation, management and assurance as well as network performance and capacity management. The agreement requires Ericsson to design, build, operate and maintain NBN Co’s network end-to-end, including business support systems.

By March 2013 17,000 fixed wireless customers were connected and there are now around 80 base stations completed. NBN had targeted 70,000 fixed wireless connections by the end of June in its August 2012 Corporate Plan. This seems unlikely to be achieved. It appears that the NBN is not immune from the problems of site access and approval for base station sites which beset all mobile operators. As well CEO Mike Quigley has pointed to some radio path issues which may require changed designs further slowing progress.

The NBN approach should offer good speed stability – obviously not as fast or consistent as fibre (either FTTP or FTTN) but superior to true mobile wireless broadband. NBN can engineer the TDD LTE base station capacity to the known demand of the customers served by the site. The radio path can also be more controlled as the customer antenna is externally mounted and can give predictable signal strength and signal to noise performance. NBN has a lot of spectrum to work with. It is higher frequency than common mobile broadband networks leading to higher radio path losses. The greater path loss however can be compensated for by the higher gain of the customer antenna and the predictable path due to the fixed external to the building mounting. NBN has another strength in that it has access to fibre links and so it can engineer the base station backhaul capacity (the capacity of the transmission link from the base station to one of the 252 points of interconnection) to match customer demand on the base station.

The NBN Fixed Wireless Factsheet is here.

NBN Co Satellites

The 3% of the NBN’s customers using satellite will also get 25/5 Mbps service once the two new dedicated NBN Ka-band (26-40 GHz) satellites are launched by Ariane Space from Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana in 2015. These satellites NBN Co 1A and NBN Co 1B will be launched using Ariane 5 770 tonne heavy-lift rockets under the $300M launch contract.The satellites each costing $1Bn and with 80 Gbps capacity will be built by Californian company Space Systems Loral.  At present around 25,000 connections have been made by NBN using their interim satellite service at speeds of 6 Mbps. This interim service was lauched on 1st July 2011 using satellite capacity rented from Optus ($200M) and IPStar ($100M). These interim service connections and the balance of NBN satellite customers will be converted to the 25/5 service following the commissioning of the new NBN satellites in 2015.

After the telegram perhaps the next to go will be the good old public or pay phone.

With the number of mobiles in the world fast approaching the world population and passing it at around 7.2 billion in the middle of 2014 it is not unexpected that the need for public phones is declining rapidly.

There is an interesting report in a recent Economist quoting UK statistics with British Telecom’s public phones reducing from 92,000 to 60,000 in 10 years to 2012. Of the remaining 60,000 12,000 get less than one call a month – no need to queue or to empty the coin tin to often.

In Australia the rate of decline is even higher with ACMA reporting in its Communication Report 2011/12 that payphones in Oz went from 45,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2012.

Did you ever wonder what happened to fixed telephones and subsequently mobiles through the years following the break up of the AT&T owned Bell System in January 1982. The Wiki has a pretty comprehensive coverage here however this week  the Wall Street Journal had a great chart showing how the old monopoly which was split into seven Baby Bells plus some new entrants have morphed into into some mighty corporations.

From a mobile perspective the split of the wireline operators and licensing of competitive operators (originally one per area under the old AMPS system) has made it much harder for even these massive corporations to provide a national service except by complex roaming arrangements. Contrast this with most of the rest of the world which, with some notable exceptions, have operators with national licenses and nationally consistent service, pricing and roaming.

Wall Steet Journal Chart – Click to see larger image

The Huffington Post reports that Indian Government telco BSNL is about to turn off its telegram service according to Huffington Post the last in the world.

The service, HP reports, is loosing BSNL $23M per year which with just 5,000 telegrams per day sent represents over $12 per telegram. This is a far cry from the cost of mobile calls in India among the lowest in the world and which can be as low as 1 cent per minute.

The story reminded me of a piece from the Melbourne Argus in 1853 which someone sent me which read;

So all technologies have their day. As we marvel day by day the latest internet service or smart phone you can wonder what will the generation in another 160 years be expending that restless enterprise of the human mind on.

Bucking the long term trend where networks are upgraded and then customers and operators wait impatiently for devices to use the new capability Samsung have announced a Galaxy S4 which will work on LTE Advanced networks. The device is projected for launch later this year.

LTE Advanced utilising LTE Release 10 is on very few of the circa 170 LTE networks in the world today (145 networks January 2012 and estimated by GSA 234 by December 2013). SK Telecom in Korea has launched LTE-A with the Samsung phone and 13 operators, Telstra among them, have either announced or plan to implement LTE-A in 2013.

LTE Advanced improves on standard LTE (3GPP Release 8 and Release 9) by allowing channel aggregation up to 100 MHz – should an operator be fortunate enough to own that much spectrum. Otherwise it increases MIMO layers up to 8 and provides support for HetNets which will provide exciting capacity and performance improvements to networks in the future using integrated Picocells. There is a good summary presentation on LTE by Qualcomm, the maker of the chip at the heart of the newly announced turbo Galaxy S4, here.

Most LTE devices today are Category 3 100/50 Mbps in 20 MHz spectrum. Telstra in February said that they are aiming to launch a Category 4 phone and a dongle later this year. Category 4 is 150/50 Mbps while the LTE Advanced Category 6 is 300/50 Mbps. Samsung say it will be twice the speed of the fastest existing LTE devices in real world speed.

3GPP Release Timing Chart by Qualcomm

Ever wonder What causes mobile device market success to turn so quickly? Why have Nokia and RIM Blackberry gone from hero to zero in just a couple of years? How did Samsung rise so rapidly in a crowded and capable field to be the largest producer of mobiles by volume? Can someone do to Samsung what Samsung did to Nokia? An interesting Mobile Future Forward Research Paper by Chetan Sharma here has a good analysis of the factors which drive the market.

Telecom analyst company CCS Insight has predicted that 1.86 billion mobiles will be shipped in 2013 and that 53% of these will be smart phones. By the end of 2013 5.9 billion mobiles will be in use around the world. By 2017 they say 2.3  billion mobiles will be sold and that 75% will by then be smartphones and 650 million of these will be LTE capable.

CCS say that the smartphone market will be driven by lower cost units in developing markets and that Apple will have to sacrifice margins on its iOS devices if it wants to keep up with market growth. They also say that as the big two Apple iOS and Google Android battle with two companies desperate to make  a mark in Microsoft and Blackberry there are a number of upstarts like Tizen, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS, Baidu Yi and Aliyun waiting in the wings.

You can see their report here.

EE the company formed from the merger of 1800MHz operators Orange (owned by France Telecom) and T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telekom) has the jump in 4G services in the UK. EE launched at the end of October 2012 and now has 500,000 4G subscriptions and nearly 55% of the population covered by its 1800 MHz LTE 4G network. It plans to go to 85% coverage by the end of 2014. Meanwhile O2 (owned by Telefonica of Spain) and Vodafone are rolling out a joint 4G network which they plan to launch in 3Q 2013 with the fourth UK operator Hutchison owned Three UK is planning to market 4G from the end of the year.

EE had the massive advantage of licensing almost all the 1800MHz spectrum in the UK (3UK has a small 1800 MHz holding). The others had to wait to acquire 4G spectrum at auction concluded in February 2013 to get access to new 4G spectrum in the 800MHz and 2.6 GHz bands. The results of the auction were;

The issue for all but EE will be the ability of most of the existing 4G phones like the iPhone to operate in the new UK 4G spectrum bands. The 800 MHz band will give deeper and wider coverage than EE’s current 1800 MHz so in the longer term EE’s competitors will gain on its head start but only when they can get a good range of popular handsets.

Adaptive Multi Rate AMR voice coding is the most common voice coding on modern mobile networks it provides very good quality voice packed into 12 Kbps. This compares to 64 Kbps non compressed PCM (ITU-T Rec. G.711) used in fixed networks. AMR also supports lower bit rates for useful but poorer quality voice yielding more capacity or in some cases some voice communications in dire radio propagation conditions.

W-AMR or Wideband AMR coding is a newer standard which was introduced into GSM and WCDMA with 3GPP Release 5 and provides double the voice bandwidth (50 to 7000Hz) compared to AMR (300 to 3400Hz) using 12.65 Kbps. It also offers 8.85 and 6.6 Kbps coding options for use during adverse radio conditions or to temporarily increase networks voice capacity.

The W-AMR capability needs to be implemented in both the network and the phone. The GSM Association gsmcom.com reported in June 2014 that 109 operators in 73 countries  support W-AMR and the new mobiles from the most popular makers like Samsung, Apple HTC and Nokia support W-AMR out of the box. As well the calling and called phone need to be W-AMR capable to get the highest quality voice call. Calls to non W-AMR capable mobiles and to or through the fixed network are limited by the 3,400 Hz G.711 bandwidth. There will be some improvement in quality of a one end W-AMR call due to improved echo and background noise supression capability built into the newer coding.

Telstra launched W-AMR on NextG in June 2011 and it reports that it is now seeing large increases in the volume of calls able to enjoy the higher quality. W-AMR would be of particular benefit to professional broadcasters, businesses using mobile for voice conferencing as well as normal users calling in noisy locations. You can see a demo of W-AMR by Martin Stanford on the (then) Orange Network in the UK here.

You can see GSA’s information on W-AMR here.  Note you will have to register first using the link on site.

Samsung Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5 are LTE Category 3 Devices

Advanced units sold today such as iPhone 5, HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 are Category 3 LTE however components supporting the next speed step in 4G devices Category 4 LTE corresponding to 3GPP Release 10 have been announced and some trial devices supplied to carriers.

Telstra in February reported testing with a Category 4 LTE device which yeilded 100 Mbps in lab testing and in the field in Perth where they have 20MHz of LTE 1800 spectrum it yeilded 90 Mbps. Telstra reported that it expects to have a LTE Category 4 phone and a USB dongle later this year.

Qualcomm MDM 9X25 Family Announced in February Support Category 4 LTE

Theoretically Category 4 devices can hit 150 Mbps downloading using the current maximum channel bandwidth of 20 MHz. This compares to the existing marketed Category 3 devices 100/50 Mbps. There is a useful statement of LTE speeds achievable with different channel widths at LTE University here.

On 12th June Vodafone launched their 4G LTE network in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth , Adelaide, Newcastle and Wollongong. Vodafone is the last Australian mobile network operator to launch 4G LTE.  Telstra having launched back in September 2011 claimed to have 1.5 million 4G subscriptions in February 2013 while Optus launched in July 2012.

You can see Vodafone’s 4G launch press release  here.

Vodafone has been working very hard to upgrade its network and improve performance after losing almost 1.5 million subscriptions since 2010 due to network performance and service issues. They are preplacing their radio access equipment with kit from Shenzhen, Guangdong based Hauwei and introducing HSPA+ 3G capability using 2X10MHz of 850 MHz spectrum – the same as used by Telstra’s NextG. This low band 3G will give improved breadth and depth of coverage  while the newly launched 4G LTE will provide faster data speeds in the areas it covers.

They had been testing their LTE network in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs in Alexandria, Bronte and Randwick with 10MHz bandwidth. They report blistering uplink data speeds during testing of 60 to 67 Mbps with 25 to 30 Mbps up. Of course this is with just test services on the network. They claim that, similar to other carriers who have already launched LTE, customers can expect to see 2 to 40 Mbps speeds in the real world. As always the data speed is principally dependent on the quality of the radio signal, the amount of contiguous LTE spectrum available, the capacity and quality of the backhaul and core network and the data demands of other users on the shared LTE channel.

In major cities Vodafone do have the advantage of being able to deploy 20MHz of contiguous 1800 MHz spectrum compared to 15 MHz for Optus and 10MHz for Telstra in NSW and Victoria 20MHz in Perth and 15 MHz elsewhere.Theoretical maximum data speed for Category 3 LTE devices with 2X2 MIMO in 20 MHz of spectrum is 102 Mbps. For Telstra with 10 MHz of spectrum also with 2X2 MIMO this maximum speed reduces to 79 Mbps. All other things being equal – which they never are – Vodafone 4G should be 20% faster than Telstra over much of its network.

Mobile Spectrum Holding Prior to 4G Auction Showing Vodafones Strong 1800 MHz Position

$1.964 million was bid for 4G spectrum in the 700MHz and 2.5GHz band at the auction concluded in May 2013.

The winners at auction were as follows;

The 700 MHz spectrum will provide wider and deeper coverage than the 1800 MHz  currently currently used on the Telstra and Optus LTE networks and soon to be used by VHA. Due to the high reserve price ($M311 per 2X5MHz) set by the Minister for Communications on this spectrum the 700 MHz band sale yeilded 95% of the $M1,964 for the auction. This despite the fact that largely due to Vodafone’s no show 2X15 MHz of the 700 MHz spectrum worth $M933 at the reserve price was left on the table after the three clock rounds. Ex Communication Minister Stephen Conroy has set in place a public consultation process on disposal of the unsold spectrum. Information on this is here. Already the Police Federation is making a bid for 2X10MHz of the unsold spectrum to be given over for emergency services communications.

One issue which has yet to be played out is the mobile device support for the 700 MHz band LTE Band 28 which Australia has adopted. This band plan termed APT700 is central to the 700 MHz part of the 4G auction.  There is growing interest in the APT700 banding outside of the USA which has a different and incompatible 700MHz plan covered by LTE Bands 12,13,14 and 17. A compatible plan could be adopted in Europe though this is unclear at this stage. There is a comprehensive discourse on APT700, including the issue of the need for two duplexors to support it, here.

The question is how big an issue will it be for Australian network operators and consumers to buy a range of advanced devices which will include support  for the Asia Pacific (LTE Band 28) plan. Mike Wright ED Networks and  Access in Telstra thinks this will not be an issue. Just as Telstra’s use of 850 MHz spectrum for NextG and 1800 MHz for LTE worked well as others joined the bandwagon, Mike says some European and South American, as well as Asia Pacific operators will come on board with the APT700 LTE band 28. See Mike’s post here.

Another question is – what is TPG’s motive or plan for their modest investment? It is hard to see a good business case to roll-out a network built with 2.6 GHz spectrum alone. They might be able to get a roaming deal with one of the big three and use their spectrum in a limited coverage network alongside this. OneTel had an arrangement something like this back in 2000. You could hope for a better outcome for TPG if they tread this path.