Archive for July 2013
The 2012 ACMA Communications Report shows that at June 2012 3.129 million people over 18 years of age (18%) don’t use a fixed line. This number has doubled in the last three years. The USA Wireless Association CTIA in the USA reports that at December 2011 34% of American households were mobile only.
So while this trend continues it will reach a limit imposed by the need for fixed access to carry the ever increasing volumes of internet data. Mobile networks could carry all of the voice calls, SMS and MMS. With the current technology, number of base stations and mobile spectrum the volume of data carried on the fixed network could not be carried on mobile networks. In Australia according to the ACMA report there were 421 PB (One Peta Byte is 1015 Bytes) downloaded in the three months to June 2012 – who says the Government isn’t watching what you are doing! Of this only 32PB (7.6%) was downloaded to mobile phones and devices. There were 6 million fixed internet access services and 22 million mobiles and dongles used to access the internet. Thus the 21% of internet connections which are fixed carried over 92% of data. Mobile networks would need to have their capacity increased by a factor of 13 and then be able to continue to grow capacity to match the annual over 50% yearly increase in internet data.
Of course it is technically possible for a mobile network to be designed to carry all the internet data as NBN is proving. It would be technically possible to scale this sort of network up to serve everyone and not just the 4% NBN is targeting. It would require a base station for approximately every 250 premises (tripling the number of base stations to circa 60,000), perhaps a doubling of the mobile spectrum, and some serious fibre for backhaul (like that needed for fibre to the node FTN). Food for thought!
The latest system on a chip offering from Qualcomm in the Snapdragon series is a cracker. The Snapdragon 800 is Qualcomms first to support LTE Advanced which allows aggregation of LTE channels to improve speed and efficiency.
LTE-A ultimately will allow the aggregation of up to five 20MHz channels from different LTE bands which will deliver up to 1 Gbps down to the mobile and 500 Mbps up. There is an excellent white paper on 3GPP Release 9 and beyond including LTE-A on the 3G Americas web site here.
The Snapdragon 800 chip has the more modest support for two channel aggregation which yeilds LTE Category 4 downlink speeds of up to 150Mbps. The Snapdragon 800 is manufactured for Qulacomm by Taiwan’s TSMC using its new 28nm High Performance Mobile process. As well as running LTE-A the Snapdragon 800 chip also supports LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA, CDMA1x, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM it has quad core processor which can run up to 2.3 GHz per core. It supports USB3, Bluetooth (4.0), WiFI (802.11ac), GPS, up to 55 M pixel camera and 1080p and extenal 4K (3840X2160) video. It is amazing how much can done on a single low power chip. There is more information here .
The Snapdragon is currently used in LTE-A versions of some phones icluding the Samsung Galaxy S4 for use by SK Telecom in Korea on its LTE-A equipped network. It is understood that SK are in negotiations for inclusion of LTE-A in the upcoming iPhone 5S. As both Samsung and Apple have used earlier Qualcomm Snapdragon chips there is a good chance the 800 will appear in upcoming products.
Nokia Siemens Networks NSN will be renamed Nokia Solutions and Networks NSN following a $A2.7Bn Nokia acquisition of the half of NSN it does not own from Siemens.
NSN has ticked up $8Bn in losses over its first five years. Siemens, which had to tip in 1 billion Euro into NSN in 2011 as a result of the ongoing losses, has been looking to exit the business.
With over $19BN in annual revenue this year NSN has turned in a small profit on the back of big orders for 4G network kit and drastic restructuring involving 20% (56,000) staff cuts. Nokia obviously sees potential whereas Siemens has lots of other, more profitable, irons in the fire in its divese engineering empire.
Why such a low price Ray Le Maistre’s blog has some suggestions here.