Aussie Telcos Consider 3G For Last Mile 65
Mattygfunk writes "Whirlpool reports Aussie telco R&D labs are scrambling to transform 3G mobile networks into last mile solutions rivaling the best wired broadband networks, as telcos come to grips with lack of consumer interest in 3G mobile services and a likelihood of no payback on their multi-billion dollar investments in the spectrum."
oh, an affordable application... (Score:3, Informative)
(Oh, as a small remark.. German Telekom's shares are in public hands.. )
3G/Last Mile (Score:1)
Proper Use (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely right (Score:3, Interesting)
I said that I thought this lacked the critical mass, and the momentum to really compete with GSM 2.5G as a mobile voice/data solution, particularly when you look at how ghastly the handsets are for CDMA450. He said that even so, there is a use for CDMA 450 as a fixed wireless technology.
This makes a lot of sense, because laying cable in urban Russia is a bureaucratic nightmare, not to mention the fact that your competitors may control the ducts that you want to use. Even when you can lay cable, it's much more fun building a wireless link in a climate like ours. Actually my last mile in my apartment at home is wireless (point to point microwave, rather than cellular) and I'm very happy with it. And there is a real shortage of fixed lines in Moscow - one of my colleagues had to wait two years for a line to be installed by the public operator. I was told four years when I asked.
The other thing that I heard at the same conference was that in those areas where the license payment was sensible, 3G would be used to build extra capacity in the wireless network, on the assumption that there are quadra-mode (?tetra-mode) handsets to work on all 3 GSM standards, and W-CDMA. I've seen mention of these handsets already, although given how long it's taken with 2.5G, I'm not holding my breath.
Load of rubbish ( not a troll despite my low karma (Score:5, Interesting)
This system is particularly well known for being resistant to interference. The original CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access - the W stands for Wideband) system was originally developed by the American military to provide resistance to jamming.
The key characteristic of WCDMA is that each handset signal is spread across a wide chunk of the spectrum (around 1.9 GHz in UMTS), by applying a code which is chosen to render the signal orthogonal to those of the other handsets. Applying the code at the other end to retrieve the original narrow-band signal has the beneficial side-effect of spreading any narrow-band interference across the original broad area of the spectrum, thus reducing its intensity. To effectively jam the system would involve swamping the entire UMTS spectrum, which would take a massive amount of power.
As for red lights causing interference in the ~2GHz spectrum - well, that's just plain silly.
Amusing troll, though.
How was this modded up? (Score:2, Interesting)
- it talks about red lights causing interference, even though 3G is far from 'immediately below infrared'...
- (real clue) talks about ultrasonic devices causing interference with 3G phones. How one earth can *sound* interfere with *electromagnetic radiation*???
Re:How was this modded up? (Score:1)
Re:Not without its technological difficulties (Score:1, Informative)
Infra red is 150000GHz to 400000GHz.
AT 3G frequencys the signals are considerably attenuated by passing through objects like walls and people, typicaly 30dB per wall. Trees with wet twigs and leaves that are about a quarter of a wavelength (4cm) create significant rf shadows.
I'm just a radio ham who experiments with such stuff but my back of an envelpe calculations suggest they are going to need lots more base stations (since higher power is unlikly) to get the same coverage as GSM, paticularly inside buildings.
Re:Not without its technological difficulties (Score:3, Informative)
The situation is further complicated by the fact that as a result of the code-based multiple access technology the effective size of a cell varies with the number of users connected, making the design of networks with good coverage non-trivial.
I used to work for Ericsson as a RF Engineer for UMTS networks (though these opinions are, of course, my own) and, although I would quite like to be proven wrong, I get the strong impression that 3G will never deliver. The "2Mb/s" bandwidth is a theoretical maximum for a terminal right next to an otherwise unused base station. 365 Kb/s (asymmetric, with 64 on the uplink) is a much more realistic figure. Providing even this with good coverage requires an enormous number of base stations.
Even with groovy multimedia apps, there is a limit to how much people will be willing to pay for this technology. IMHO (IANAA - I am not an accountant), this is going to be a hell of a lot less than the many billions which have already been spent on licenses and networks.
Cue Chopins "Funeral March".
Re:Not without its technological difficulties (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that I work on detectors for the THz band which sits between the far-IR (down to about 4 THz) and the mm band (up to about 300 GHz) I can say that the parent is complete, utter BS. The 3G band is not very far from the 802.11b band anyway, and below the 802.11a band (I think, I await corrections).
Last Mile... (Score:5, Insightful)
The last mile has been a stumbling block for telcos for about two decades, now. Available silicon can easily handle fibre to the curb, but getting it in already existing buildings has been a problem.
The ISDN suffered from unknown physical plant characteristics - stubs, splitting pairs, and other analogue phone cruft seriously debilitated ISDN acceptance. ADSL leapfrogged the ISDN performance by learning from the mistakes in the ISDN development/deployment.
Hopefully, this repurposing of technology may be just the boost that an ailing telecommunucations industry needs. The hardware portion of the high-tech sector has suffered an abundance of losses after the dot-com meltdown.
Number of Users? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Number of Users? (Score:5, Informative)
Afaik WCDMA cell can scale from 512 users at 8k/s to 2 users at 2mb/s. Sounds like too little? Well, the cell size for WCDMA is significantly smaller than on gsm, and as the voice calls will be mostly routed through the gsm network, the improvement should be pretty visible. But definetly no warezing channel.
What I'd like to know however, is the roundtrip time over different 3G technoligities. Even GPRS has adequate bandwith for browsing/mail/messaging, but the 1 second roundtrip time with The TCP 3-way handshake really kills the experience.
WCDMA is the non-qualcomm version of 3G, as qualcomm got too greedy with it's CDMA tecnology patents. Yet another case in to the "patent system needs to fixed" bucket. Someone else should write about how much users their CDMA2000 can handle. (The UMTS version, not the 1x version).
3G is just one step that provides extra wireless bandwidth. Next step would be roaming from high-speed WLAN networks to larger coverage 3G networks, and finally to The everywhere covering satellite network. The obstacles are mostly commercial, as everyone want's start billing everyone else for the roaming.
Re:Number of Users? (Score:1)
TDD promises 2mbps but there are a lot of catches to it... limited cell range much smaller than FDD, no handover and best of all, afaik, the standards are not finalized yet. Which makes it too late and too little compared to 802.11x
Lets come back to FDD mode. As you know CDMA theory which WCDMA is based on says that the cell radius depends on the number of users and bitrate required. Which means if you use the max 384kbps, you probably can't get such a big cell radius. Not sure the range, but somewhere at a few km max.
If last mile broadband is what they're looking for they might as well go for technologies such as LMDS or 802.11... at least they're much more mature/cheaper than 3G.
IMHO WCDMA is a technology in search of an application... problem is... no one can come out with something better than the usual data content on the mobile BS...
The China story (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason I bring the story up, is because once you are in a rural area it becomes increasingly more expensive to connect to homes. The problem is that you get less inhabitants per length of telephone cable, thus making it extremely more expensive short and long term. The long term cost is the inspection of such a coverage of phone lines. The wireless approach allows a much larger area to be covered, and it ends up being cheaper as there is there are less inspection points. It also provides the advantage that the phone company also gets money from visitors to the area and not just the inhabitants. Additionaly, for a farmer, this is great as it allows him/her to phone home when they are somewhere in the middle of their land. This sort of solution could be easily applied to other countries with the last 100 miles problem, not just the last mile.
The only question I ask myself, is whether there are any solutions for solar powered transmission towers?
Re:The China story (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The China story (Score:1)
Australia's main telecommunications carrier, Telstra, makes extensive use of solar powered microwave and optical fibre repeaters in 'the outback' (rural areas).
3G in a nutshell (Score:1, Funny)
I'm glad to see someone filling in step 3 at last.
Re:3G in a nutshell (Score:4, Insightful)
3G is just a faster mobile data pipe. What services someone wants to run on it is up to them.
You're right that there are more masts required.
You may well be able to get a mobile always-on net link with a 3G service provider. You may well find that some licence holders don't offer this sort of service at all.
3G will be a profit-making technology but not tomorrow and not next year. It's a long-term investment which so many analysts seem to forget.
The Australian auctions were different. (Score:2, Informative)
When the Europeans were deciding what their 3G telco standards would be, there was a division between Siemens (who wanted to use a Time Division Duplexing System called TD-CDMA) and Nokia and Ericsson (who wanted to use an Frequency Division Duplexing system called W-CDMA). Rather than choosing a winner, the European Telecommunications Standards Institude (ETSI) adopted both standards, and technically UMTS supports both, although W-CDMA has got all the publicity. Spectrum bands were allocated for both, paired (for W-CDMA) and unpaired (for TD-CDMA). In Europe, telcos are required to use these standards, but there certainly have been allocations of unpaired spectrum. Australia decided to auction the same spectrum bands that were auctioned in Europe, but put no restrictions on the technology they were used for. 3G licences were sold in Australia for not much money, as the number of licences and number of players were the same. Arraycom bought some unpaired spectrum for not much money, and always said that it would use the spectrum for its i-Burst technology. This is now happening. (The article is false when it said that Australia uniquely allocated unpaired spectrum. Most of the world did. Australia merely put uncommonly few restrictions on its use. This was not unique either, as other countries (eg New Zealand) did the same.
I don't think i-Bust is technically '3G', but it does use '3G' spectrum.
Michael.
This has been brewing for a while. (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway interesting concept.
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i need a ciggie bbl [wallpaperscoverings.com]
Re:Whirlpool : Mouthpiece of the Telcos (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Whirlpool : Mouthpiece of the Telcos (Score:1)
Yes, you must have registered the day before I did. This is deeply irritating.
Will premium prices follow? (Score:5, Interesting)
Journalistic assumptions (Score:4, Interesting)
While it may take a lot longer to get a payback than people planned, it's mainly a question of pricing and services. The real issue is delivering, at reasonable price points, services that are of interest, e.g. multimedia messaging (zap a photo to your friends/family), location-based services (where's the closest garage/ATM, and how do I get there?), multiplayer gaming (already happening with text messaging, one game lets you zap combatants who are in the same part of the physical world as you are), and much more. An open market for 3G services is critical, the idea being that anyone with a bright idea can put together their own service.
Of course, it doesn't make such a good story if telcos aren't 'scrambling' to fix 3G - in any case, these are all post-3G developments and will be competing with next-generation WiFi as well.
ArrayComm is more than fixed last-mile (Score:2)
I-Burst, at least in Australia, is focused on giving city areas (and perhaps suburban areas), pervasive, roaming wireless Internet access for mobile devices across every major city in the country. And doing it at 1Mbps per connection.
For more information, see this article: http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/iburst.asp [atomicmpc.com.au]
Re:ArrayComm is more than fixed last-mile (Score:2)
Why ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why ? (Score:1)
Looks good till you see the price (Score:5, Informative)
Cable is severely restricted to the highest areas of population density in the south-east of the country, ADSL is available in a high percentage of exchanges(both metropolitan and regional), and satellite is used for those areas where copper doesn't reach and can afford it($$$$$).
A 3G infrastructure depends on a good underlying data network - which basically describes ADSL(plus ISDN, ATM, etc).
As far as I can see, the areas which have that infrastructure, but where 3G is the only solution are extremely limited. Add that to the very limited market of high-speed-mobile-data users, and you have a solution which has an extremely small number of users for a high development and setup/intrastructure cost.
I doubt it will be a competitive or affrodable "last mile" solution for the forseeable future, outside of a few PR "success stories".
This is good news for 1 million customers (Score:2)
It was recently revealed that nine per cent of connections [katelundy.com.au] (affecting over one million customers [readytorun.com.au]) are supplied by using pair-gain [ozetechnology.com] technology to provide multiple virtual telephone lines over one physical copper line. These virtual lines can not be used for broadband internet services such as ADSL.
If "third-generation" wireless technology can be used to provide the "last mile" of the connection (instead of relying on copper wires), this means ADSL can possibly be provided to the substantial number of customers whose telephone lines are pair-gain. For most of these customers, the only high speed internet access option previously available to them was satellite internet, which (as you said previously) is well beyond most people's budgets, and offers none of the benefits of ADSL connectivity [bigpond.com].
Re:Looks good till you see the price (Score:1)
(offically, 2.2cents / kilobyte)
This is ridiculous.
If it does happen... (Score:2, Informative)
Over the next 12 months, Australia (or at least the main cities) is going to see many 802.11b ISPs set up shop. With Australia's low population density (making it expensive to have cables running to every home) and Telstra's reluctance to provide even semi-decent infrastructure, I think this sort of thing will be the future of Australian telecommunications.
In the end, this should be a good thing, since competition will be greater. Compared to a cable-based (telephone, fibre optic, etc.) market, there are far fewer barriers to enter a wireless market (the hardest part is getting a spectrum license). Scores of smaller companies will enter, and we will no longer be as subject to a predatory, uncompetitive monopolist (read: Telstra) as we are now. Only time will tell if that situation will last, though.
I'm pinning my hopes on ultrawide broadband (UWB) communications. Bob Cringely wrote earlier this year that it has the potential to be simultaneously ultra-fast, secure and frequency-neutral (i.e. since it uses the whole spectrum, a virtually unlimited number of UWB signals can be running concurrently). The only problem is the range (about 1km, I believe), but 802.11b has this problem, too.
so they've finally found a use for 3G then (Score:5, Interesting)
It's obvious that doing the last mile wireless is going to be cheaper than via copper. What baffles me though, is why making calls on my mobile is so much more expensive than a landline when the implementation/maintenance of wireless networks is so much cheaper than copper or fibre. It costs far less to stick a mast up than to start digging the road up.
Re:so they've finally found a use for 3G then (Score:1)
I would settle... (Score:1)
Zilch
Users per cell for W-CDMA (Score:4, Informative)
resulting in connection speeds of
2000 kbps for 194 subs
384 kbps for 1013 subs
144 kbps for 2700 subs
64 kbps per 6075 subs
Note cell size is > 1Km but I don't have a figure for max cell size.
Source was from a industry report from an investment house.
384Kbps would probably be the most cost efficient and marketable solution giving a similar user experience as ADSL. However cost per Kbs will be hard to get as low as the monthly connection charges and unlimited connection time we see in most ADSL contracts these days.
Still, any to get money back into telco's cant be bad for the industry as a whole.
Re:Users per cell for W-CDMA (Score:1)
Also as users move around the cell the cell radius also changes, so cell areas need to be very small in order to match the customers' expectation of coverage, which is more in the traditional mould of fixed cell sizes rather than today I have coverage, tomorrow I don't.
Also if one power user requests all the bandwidth available it will bump off other users, or degrade everyone else down to accommodate this user, (dependant on the vendors' algorithm admittedly)
Basically a very poor user experience all round, especially if they have to pay a high premium for a new handset that offsets all the handset vendors development costs.
However, if you fix the mobiles in one place, and limit the bandwidth (ie take all the mobility out of it) 3G could be viable.
3G may die a quick death here in Australia (Score:5, Informative)
What does this mean? Well, it means that if you've got I-Burst capable NIC's, you'll have a 1Mbps Internet connection at any point across all our major cities (as long as you're not moving too fast) on your laptop, PDA or even your phone (assuming there is phones to take advantage of the tech - doubtful perhaps).
This is beyond what any of the 3G's (W-CDMA, CDMA2000 etc) can offer. The only reason Australian telco's are pimping 3G is because they all spent small fortunes purchasing spectrum to run it on. Considering that these 3G solutions are a long way off, and that we should have a working commercial I-Burst service here in Oz sometime next year, 3G may just die a very quick death.
We conducted an in-depth breakdown of the technology behind I-Burst, including the special directional antennas that make it possible. You can check it out here [atomicmpc.com.au] if you're interested.
G3s (Score:2)
satellite cheaper (Score:1)