Wireless Technology

Short Term Weakness in Macro

2012-01-23T10:57:00.001-08:00

The macro market is showing signs of vulnerability....despite the strength of end-user data demand. Component vendors, as always, are the canary in the coal mine here. A few component vendors (ranging from switches to isolators and filters) are reporting a slowdown in shipments over the past 2 months, which we expect to see in the announced results by public companies in the next few weeks.

Stay tuned. Overall we expect a minor adjustment with less than 5% decline in some areas during 1H2012, with strong growth continuing in LTE and a few areas of HSPA.

The Chips are Ready

2011-12-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

Mobile operators would like to deploy small cells, but their reaction to some of the early products has been lukewarm. Picocells that are simply low-power versions of a high-performance macrocell are far too expensive. Femtocells designed for autonomous consumer use are suited to a coverage application, and do not play well in a dense urban network. Small cells mounted on a streetlight need expensive backhaul, which is generally not available.

These negatives are beginning to evaporate.

Recently, several SoC suppliers have introduced multi-core processors which are highly suited to work as a “base station on a chip”. The level of integration is awesome, with dozens of processor cores operating at high speed, with programmable DSP elements and hardware accelerators to handle high-speed computation while remaining very flexible.

The multi-core architecture is the key to success now. Simple reliance on Moore’s law to increase speed continuously is not enough: to make a small cell work, dozens of operations need to take place simultaneously, and each processor core must be suited to the tasks assigned. Several IC suppliers have recognized this need, resulting in strong products from Texas Instruments, Freescale, Mindspeed, Cavium, Picochip, Broadcom, and others. Each company has its strengths, but all of these “Base Station on a Chip” products utilizes a large number of high-performance processor cores and an internal interconnection fabric. Many of these alternatives can run the software from traditional macrocell or microcell products, making the integration with the macro network much easier.

The existence of 5-6 strong IC alternatives on the market will drive cost down quickly, and mobile operators will quickly start to see product offerings at acceptable cost levels….a few thousand dollars for a high-performance picocell or carrier femtocell.

The next question will quickly arise: What about backhaul? Depending on the capacity and bandwidth involved, some of the new ICs on the market can actually handle baseband processing for both radio access and backhaul….taking a major expense out of the equation. Mobile Experts is predicting a future where the “Base Station on a Chip” handles both datastreams, with RF transceivers branching in multiple directions. The result: Inexpensive, highly integrated small cells with multiple antennas, which can be deployed easily with licensed LTE operation to end users, and licensed TDD OFDM backhaul. The chips are coming together. Mobile operators need to start getting their backhaul spectrum licenses in order.

Mobile Transceivers

2011-12-05T11:09:00.001-08:00

Transceivers for macro base stations are changing, as MIMO comes into the market. AAS will also have an impact in the 2013 timeframe.....but the overall trend between these two drivers is the reduction in power of a typical macro transceiver.

A 30W transmitter was the standard power level for GSM systems for 20+ years, and with CDMA and WCDMA systems there was a lengthy period of time where 40-50W was normal. Nowadays, however, the focus has shifted from coverage to capacity.....which means that operators are NOT looking to blast as much power as possible from a tall tower. Instead they are looking to transmit a measured amount of power, to place small cells and macro cells as closely as possible and re-use spectrum effectively.

This shift is apparent in the new Mobile Experts forecast which has come out in Excel form....see http://mobile-experts.net/product_info.php?products_id=33

Two Separate Small Cell Ecosystems

2011-09-23T12:21:00.001-07:00

Looks like the small cell universe is splitting into two distinct ecosystems.

On one hand, we have Picochip and Broadcom, with their respective software stacks and APIs for femtocell vendors to develop consumer small cells. Taiwanese ODMs are jumping into this market because it looks a lot like the PC market or the smartphone game, where there are one or two dominant chipset vendors and an ODM can quickly wrap some plastic around it. In this market, the solution is a best-effort femtocell which can improve coverage in your home. If it doesn't interoperate with the network well (e.g. handoffs), that's ok! The fact is that you bought yourself a femtocell because you didn't have coverage at home.

On the other hand, we have Mindspeed, TI, Freescale, Cavium, DesignArt Networks, and the Tier One mobile infrastructure OEMs, all of whom are more focused on carrier-grade solutions. The silicon and the rest of the hardware will support the same software that runs on macrocell platforms, which allows the carriers to deploy a bunch of small cells with the level of service quality they already understand in a macro network. This ecosystem is NOT focused on coverage in the home. Instead they are focused on the more lucrative target: high capacity mobile networks used by thousands or millions of people instead of a few people at home.

Backhaul for Small Cells

2011-09-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

The multi-core processors for small cells are coming to market....Freescale has introduced a great product, and Mindspeed has an excellent solution in customer hands already. But now the big question is: What about the backhaul? We can make a metro-femtocell for a few hundred dollars but do we have to spend $5,000 for a microwave backhaul link?

Dr. Jonathan Wells has joined Mobile Experts to investigate non-line of sight (NLOS) backhaul and its applicability to both femtocells and picocells. Our initial view is that NLOS will be perfect for some applications, but may not have the performance for advanced HetNet coordination.

What latency do you need in your application? What throughput do you need?

Weigh in on this topic with us....we are interested in inputs from our readers. Contact joe@mobile-experts.net or jonathan.wells@mobile-experts.net.

AT&T slows down on femtocells

2011-08-18T10:34:00.000-07:00

AT&T has pulled back on deployment of femtocells, citing interference problems in areas with relatively high signal strength.

This is no surprise! Mobile Experts published a study in 2009 that indicated severe interference problems, even with femtocells that were "optimized" to avoid interference. So AT&T should not be so surprised that there are RF interference problems...

Our sources indicate that over the past six months, the AT&T deployment has dropped by more than 50% compared to the previous six months. They are now reserving their "Microcell" (femtocell) deployments to customers that have one-bar coverage in their homes. This is EXACTLY what we predicted and it shows that the consumer femto is truly a coverage solution only, and does not help in a congested network.

Femtocell shipments

2011-08-12T12:05:00.001-07:00

Mobile Experts has just coordinated a worldwide survey to update our estimates for small-cell shipments. Looks like our February 2011 predictions were pretty close for this year so far...consumer femtos are shipping well, and we are seeing the beginning of the enterprise and operator markets.

Picocells are taking a little longer than expected to come to market...we will be looking into what's going on with the Tier 1 OEMs on this subject at the end of August.

2011-06-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a funny picture of how a handset might look for 4x4 MIMO....

www.mobile-experts.net has a forecast for what is really going to happen.

MIMO

2011-06-20T13:00:00.001-07:00

It's tough to write standards 10 years in the future, and expect the market to automatically follow the path that you envision. But in the case of MIMO, you would think that an engineer would have seen the path a bit more clearly.

3GPP projects a future roadmap of 2x2 MIMO leading to 4x4 and 8x8 MIMO. This is NOT going to happen because there is little benefit to moving into higher order modes, and there are better ways for operators to spend their money and effort.

Mobile Experts has published a new report on this topic, showing some alternatives to higher order MIMO (especially for the uplink) where higher complexity, handset cost, and battery drain are not necessary. Check it out here .

Smart Antennas

2011-05-02T16:51:00.000-07:00

What is a smart antenna? People use the terminology too loosely...beamforming, beam steering, beamtilt, active antenna system, active antenna array, integrated antenna radio

After two months of research here is our view of "smart antennas":

--Beamforming: The type of full-blown beamforming done at baseband can adjust beamwidth, beam azimuth, beam tilt, or the color of your socks.

--Beam steering: This more generic term often refers to simpler beam steering without beamwidth adjustment...or can simply mean all kinds of beam adjustment

--Beamtilt: Adjusting only the vertical direction of the lobes in a mobile communications tower.

--Active antenna array: Who knows what this is supposed to mean. Let's assume that it means an array which is actively adjusted for beam steering.

--Active antenna system: Sometimes this refers to an integrated antenna radio, where a radio is placed in 1:1 correlation to a dipole antenna element. Other times this term means a beam steering array.

This area is messy because too many companies have invested in trade names that use the same words. Mobile Experts will be publishing some clarifications soon in a report which forecasts adoption of integrated antenna radios and beamsteering/beamforming arrays...

Wind and Solar Power

2011-03-10T16:45:00.001-08:00

Green base stations, for the past 20 years, have normally meant big base stations with some incremental savings in power consumption. However things are starting to change. China Mobile has now deployed more than 8500 base stations in rural provinces with solar panels. A few Indian tower operators are also deploying large numbers....Bharti Infratel is a prime example.

Solar power for GSM base stations seems to be possible nowadays due to the efficiency gained with simple implementation of a GMSK amplifier, with a stripped-down, low capacity baseband processor and very simple, low-cost masts (instead of major-league towers).

Companies such as VNL are now deploying low-power GSM base stations in India, with less than 50 mW power consumption total, including a microwave backhaul link.

We're starting to predict steady growth of the solar power approach, moving up from GSM to more advanced base stations as the cost of solar panels comes down and the cost of diesel fuel rises.

MIMO

2011-02-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

With 2x2 MIMO coming on board and 4x2 MIMO in the wings, the number of antennas, amplifiers, LNAs, and filters used for mobile infrastructure will start to accelerate through 2016.

Mobile Experts predicts that more than 75 million small-cell antennas will be deployed per year in 2016. Check it out at www.mobile-experts.net

Small Cells

2011-02-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

Mobile Experts has interviewed more than 26 different mobile operators around the world, to gain a thorough understanding of demand for Heterogeneous Networks. It's clear that small cells will be one of the primary ways that mobile operators cover mobile data.

Microcells: Will grow with cell splitting

Picocells: A wide variety are coming to market, still using traditional (Iub) interfaces

Femtocells: The Iuh and IMS back end and SoC baseband processing will be applied to a large range of power levels....making the term "femtocell" inaccurate for many of them. Whatever you call them, we predict more usage by network operators than by end users themselves.

DAS: Indoor and Outdoor DAS systems will not go away; this is still the right answer for multimode coverage of an enterprise

Repeaters: Not usually a good idea from a performance point of view...but there is a surprising consumer segment which is growing and there are some interesting new products out there

Relays: This is a gimmick which is not likely to grow much.

Check out our detailed forecast on these topics: http://mobile-experts.net/product_info.php?products_id=41

Spectral Efficiency Doesn't Cut It Anymore

2011-01-04T15:02:00.001-08:00

When the industry transitioned from AMPS to 2G, the improvement in spectral efficiency was a factor of 5 to 10. (5 for GSM, up to 10 for CDMA).

The transition from 2G to 3G involved a spectral efficiency improvement of 2x to 5x.

HSPA to LTE will only be about a 1.5x to 2.5x improvement in spectral efficiency. We are getting close to Shannon's Limit!

At this point, we are looking at a 50-fold increase in mobile data demand, and we need at least a 10-20x improvement in throughput from our networks. Spectral efficiency will NOT be enough to satisfy the expected mobile demand curve. That's why Mobile Experts is predicting a 10x increase in the number of radio nodes deployed, as we move into LTE and LTE-Advanced networks.

See our upcoming Heterogeneous Networks forecast for a more detailed view.

African Market

2011-01-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

The African market for mobile infrastructure is heating up....over 25% growth last year and there is significant movement toward innovative business models. Look for ongoing growth in base station hardware for both 2G and 3G during 2011.

Operator-controlled femtocells

2010-12-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

In the upcoming Mobile Experts HetNet forecast, we expect bigger numbers for femtocells which are deployed and operated by mobile operators than for "consumer femtocells" which are deployed at random by end users.

In Asia, as an example, Mobile Experts expects more than 50% of femtocells to be controlled by the operators themselves.

What is a femtocell?

2010-12-14T14:38:00.001-08:00

Mobile Experts has interviewed over 30 different mobile operators recently on the topic of Het Nets. One problem the industry has: We cannot agree on a definition for a "femtocell". Why is it so hard? Because the original concept of a low-power femto has been hijacked by the idea of higher power, higher capacity cells with a collapsed RNC structure.

We propose a new definition: A femtocell can have any power level but the key is that it involves a collapsed RNC/nodeB architecture. There can be all levels of capacity and power levels involved.

Indoor deployment in Latin America

2010-11-29T09:54:00.000-08:00

Recent interviews with Latin American wireless operators indicate that Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru remain focused on voice communications and "tower and power" base stations. Less than 3% of the deployment installed by operators in these countries can be tied to low-power indoor installations.

Wi-Fi battery life

2010-11-19T16:52:00.001-08:00

Mobile Experts has conducted some testing of Wi-Fi capable handsets recently. Here are the results, with a typical "business user" profile equivalent to 120 minutes talk time, 10 SMS, 40 email, and 5 minutes of menu/interface usage per day, in a suburban RF setting:

RIM smartphone: 46% longer battery life with Wi-Fi disabled

Apple iPhone: 53% longer battery life with Wi-Fi disabled

TD-SCDMA numbers

2010-11-15T11:38:00.001-08:00

Here's an update on a "niche" market: China Mobile has deployed nearly 5 million TD-SCDMA transceivers over the past four years, with their unique 8-way phased arrays in three-sector configuration.

This number represents a quarter of the entire market for mobile transceivers, for a group of only 15 million 3G subscribers so far. The investment is staggering: Roughly one transceiver, costing roughly $1000 or more, for every three subscribers.

China Mobile needs to increase their subscriber figures by 100 fold within 12 months, if they want to see any return on their 3G investment at all....

TD-LTE

2010-11-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

A lot of people are asking me what the forecast for WiMAX looks like, and where TD-LTE is going. The answer on WiMAX is easy since a dying market is easy to spot. But the forecast for TD-LTE growth depends heavily on political decisions in China, which is utterly unpredictable. In other countries, economic considerations dictate what gets deployed and when the market will grow...so I can project the TD-LTE forecast for Yota in Russia.

But for the Chinese government, deployment of TD-SCDMA over such a broad scale has already exceeded all logic. The system doesn't work and they still deployed hundreds of thousands of base stations.....for only 15 million subscribers so far! It's a ridiculous waste of money, which would not be tolerated in a free market. But the real question is whether they will continue spending so heavily on TD-LTE, before they have even developed a 3G customer base. Who knows?

DAS systems

2010-11-10T11:51:00.000-08:00

In the American market, operators only use Outdoor DAS systems as a last resort. But in other countries, where fiber does not get installed underground, the cost to deploy an Outdoor DAS system is FAR LOWER. In fact, in India the cost of an O-DAS system could actually be lower than a "tower and power" system because there's no need for a $30K tower at all.

I predict that the O-DAS business will see international growth that will surprise a lot of people, including industry insiders.

Battery Life Prediction

2010-07-27T16:44:00.000-07:00

New applications on iPhone, Android, and other platforms are driving the platforms to use up the battery's power in unexpected ways. As an example, ScoreMobile is an application on iPhone which checks sports scores every 2 minutes. (!)

Now, consider the battery impact of turning on the 3G radio (or the WiFi radio) every 2 minutes. Developers will quickly find that users are not stupid...they will notice that their phones are dying and they will know that the apps are responsible for driving the phone systems.

Mobile Experts is developing a model to predict battery life for handsets, and welcomes input from semiconductor, OS, and app developers to accurately predict the consumption of battery power. Contact joe@mobile-experts.net to get involved with the project.

Tower and Power....those days are over!

2010-06-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

The problems that AT&T has seen in signaling traffic and limited bandwidth for mobile data are now seen in other operators as well....mostly those with iPhones and other similar web-hungry devices.

Looking at the network topology to fix the problem, it seems that the only true solution will be to do away with the "Tower and Power" mentality of achieving widespread coverage with wideband signals. There may be an overlay of GSM, HSPA, or LTE over wide areas with high-power, high-tower deployments, but the true capacity is going to come from smaller, lower power indoor installations.

Renewable Energy!

2010-05-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

The government of India is heavily subsidizing the implementation of solar power for base stations....but a traditional mobile base station needs 1.5 to 2 kW of power, and therefore a 5-6kW solar panel is necessary to create enough power for 24 hour operation. That's bigger than the space normally allocated to a site....and more expensive than the base station itself.

I expect a new type of base station to emerge in India, burning only about 100-200W and operating completely off the grid with solar power. It won't be a truly mobile service but who cares?

The Decline of the Hardware Empire

2010-01-27T16:46:00.001-08:00

Software is becoming the "Center of Gravity" when it comes to value in the handset, as consumers are starting to care about applications and the media has begun to focus there.

Maybe this is a good thing for the hardware geeks out there....with less hype we can all do a better job

Antenna tuning

2009-07-14T15:29:00.000-07:00

It's taking a long time for tuning elements to come to market for mobile handsets. (They've been considered as a part of the antenna, for "tuning" the antenna match to 50 ohms). I wonder whether they will truly be integrated with antennas.

It would make more sense to integrate an impedance-match adjustment into the front end module (FEM) along with switches, filters, or amplifiers. These devices are the beneficiaries of an improved match, and they are sold differently than antennas. The FEM is designed for a year before it goes to production...but an antenna designer only gets about 6 weeks to hammer out a metal shape, before SAR testing must proceed.

This technology can go either way. For now, it seems clear that tuning elements like digital tuning capacitors (DTCs) will be implemented discretely but in the future I'm sure they will be absorbed by either the antenna or the FEM.

Femtocells

2009-05-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

In looking over some field trial data for femtocells recently, it seems clear that there are still some bugs to be worked out. Ubiquisys is ahead of the pack with some true stress-testing in a dense environment...using as many as 20 femtocells on a single floor of an office building.

There are pros and cons with femtocells....the user that is on the femto gets better service but it seems that other users (on the macro layer) will suffer from pilot degradation and battery impacts. In the end, most companies don't have things working yet.

Doherty and Envelope Tracking

2009-05-11T12:38:00.001-07:00

Back up and look at the big picture in base station power amplifiers...most of the big OEMs have placed their bets on Doherty amplifiers and digital predistortion. And they will continue to squeeze performance in this direction until they run out of headroom.

The question for anyone developing an envelope-tracking amplifier is: How much longer can a reasonable benefit be squeezed out of Doherty PAs? When will designers run out of headroom and need to turn to a new approach? My bet is that we have another turning point coming in the industry, about 3-4 years from now.

http://panasonic.co.jp/corp/news/official.data/data.dir/en060404-3/en060404-3.html

http://www.nujira.com/

http://www.rfdesignline.com/howto/206901197

http://www.citeulike.org/user/hoverste/article/2754999

Teardown projects

2009-04-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

I've recently been involved in teardown analysis of a W-CDMA node B. The rate of change in the architecture is staggering---from the first generation to today's generation, the RF design has shrunk from multiple boards and cable assemblies to a very clean, integrated design. The cost in a base station today lives in a few big CMOS chips and a few big LDMOS chips!

The rise of China

2009-03-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

Huawei and ZTE are gaining market share quickly...and although NSN and Ericsson are coming out with great products, it seems hard to stop the low cost and fast movement of the Chinese OEMs. As the industry moves to reconfigurable or "SDR" technology in the base station, the top-tier Chinese OEMs are really not that far behind on technology. Maybe they will struggle with quality and reliability for a while but they seem to have the wideband digital transceivers working with efficient amplifier linearization and a nice, low cost integrated assembly.

Watch out as they finance new networks and challenge Ericsson/NSN in Europe. It will be a battle of the footprint vs. the financing...

M2M communications

2009-03-11T16:33:00.000-07:00

The industry is just starting to wake up to M2M possibilities. A few operators such as Verizon are pushing this, but in my opinion the operators will not have the bandwidth to develop new applications at an industry-changing scale. The true growth will come from a grassroots demand for data in non-wireless devices.

Cars. ATM machines. Medical devices. Gaming devices. And a thousand different devices that don't exist today. In my interactions with clients in the medical field recently, I am seeing smart people (doctors) coming up with ideas that use wireless datalinks as an inherent part of their new techniques. We needed for cellular handsets and wireless LANs to become such a natural part of our environment that these non-engineers could begin to assume the existence of a good wireless link.

We're getting there in highly developed countries...I would not be surprised to see "penetration" of cellular technology reach 300% or more in about five years.

Multi-standard base stations

2009-03-04T12:37:00.001-08:00

Why do the typical industry analysts miss the big picture on this? The change to a multi-mode, multi-RAT, multi-standard radio (MSR) base station is a movement away from the traditional hardware-based business model. The OEMs understand this; they will sell a base station at XXX frequency, then they will make money through software changes over time as new features are invented and added.

The radio hardware is no longer a path to profit. This changes everything! The players with the biggest footprint, including Ericsson, NSN, and Alcatel-Lucent, will be able to capture contracts through leverage. But they won't be shipping multiple generations of radios to the field anymore. They'll be focusing their R&D and sales on software and optimization.

Huawei and ZTE will succeed by having simple, cheap solutions for new network deployments. They're well on their way. But it's not different for them; they will deploy SDR-based radios and then their business will center on software upgrades and optimization.

GaAs capacity

2009-02-26T15:24:00.000-08:00

I've heard some people saying recently that second-tier handset OEMs are nervous about GaAs capacity. I don't understand why anyone would be nervous about this....the big GaAs MMIC suppliers for handsets are nowhere near full capacity, and if the market takes off quickly there is room to grow there.

Frankly I think it's the right call for RFMD and TriQuint and others to hold back on CAPEX investment this year

CMOS power amplifiers

2009-02-24T17:51:00.000-08:00

For 10 years the CMOS RF community has been working on handset power amplifiers to rival the GaAs analog MMIC designs...without really achieving adequate performance to replace GaAs despite the cost advantages. However that may soon change, as multi-mode PA designs will be pushing down the performance of GaAs and giving CMOS a chance to compete.

Seems like the tradeoffs in a multi-mode PA design will be severe (linearity vs efficiency vs. max power) so in a very complex multiband case the CMOS guys may have an advantage with multiple PAs in a small CMOS block

SDR

2009-02-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

People have lots of different definitions of SDR. We saw a lot of differences in the announcements last week in Barcelona...some companies have software-upgradeable radios in the field now, and others will say that only a multi-protocol, multi-band radio qualifies as a software-definable radio. What horse pucky!

Let's be clear about this: There are literally millions of base stations deployed already which can be reconfigured through software to handle different air interface standards. Take GSM and EDGE as the most common example. The radios in the base station (and also in the handset) can be reconfigured to handle either protocol. Ten years ago, we called that an SDR.

So, in the market today there is a movement toward a reconfigurable radio that handles multiple carriers simultaneously, where the carriers can be GSM, EDGE, W-CDMA, or LTE. When you see a press release claiming an "SDR base station", nowadays that is referring to something that can carry multiple carriers simultaneously and also can be reconfigured for a combination of air interfaces.

Check out the latest report published by EJL Wireless Research on Multi-standard Radio Base Stations to see a forecast of how "SDR" will be adopted in half of base station shipments by 2012.

China's Advantage

2009-02-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

How will Ericsson, NSN, and Alcatel-Lucent finance a multi-billion dollar roll-out of an LTE system or an HSPA network for the next two years? For big, profitable operators like Verizon, it seems clear that the bankers will support financing.

But what about marginal operators and emerging countries? It seems that Huawei has an advantage in their ability to draw financing from the Chinese trade surplus through the government. As India licenses 3G, I wonder whether the Western OEMs will be able to compete on financing terms...

Who's making money?

2009-02-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

For many years, it seemed that the network operators were struggling to make a profit...it was a 10-15 year period of investment in many forms for Verizon and Cingular and Vodafone and Telefonica. They put in the capital investment, sure. But they also were investing heavily in operations staff, climbing towers, adjusting the network, fixing bugs, and taking care of problems in general.

Nowadays, it seems that the operators are making money while everyone else is struggling to break even. You can hear vendors at all levels of the supply chain complaining about how the operators are sitting on a fat revenue stream, but not buying enough to keep the industry afloat. Who says that the operators have an obligation to keep buying literal tons of equipment for every site?

In most Western countries, competition will surely guide the operators' profit levels to a proper level, and while the investments will continue to flow for HSPA+ and LTE and other new high-throughput technologies, we should not expect the operators to invest in massive country-wide buildouts that send them into the red. We should expect them to make incremental investments, keeping their existing customers happy and working to find new ones.

HSPA+??

2009-02-13T06:17:00.000-08:00

What is HSPA+? If you believe the hype in the industry, it's all about 40 Mbps from MIMO links and 64-QAM. But the reality of the situation is very different.

First of all, operators are not ready for 40 Mbps on the backhaul side. Operators like AT&T are limiting the peak data rate available to any one individual, because they don't want to spend big bucks on backhaul. So even HSDPA and HSUPA have not reached their full potential in terms of data rate with many operators.

In the end, the operators will do the cheapest possible upgrades to improve spectral efficiency...but don't expect the operators to implement all of the features of 3GPP Release 7.

Auction Results at 2600 MHz

2009-02-12T16:08:00.001-08:00

If you read the press announcements regarding the Hong Kong spectrum auction at 2600 MHz, you would think that Telstra/CSL paid dearly for the spectrum.

But do the math. CSL paid US$0.31 per MHz per pop, which is about half of the prices paid in Europe for 3G spectrum in 2001 (after the dot-com bubble). It's puny compared to the $7/MHz/pop or more that was paid in the USA for the 700MHz spectrum.

Overall, the 2600 MHz band is not very attractive for LTE services due to the low propagation. It's simply a wide block of spectrum which would allow for good capacity in a very dense urban environment. I expect that 2600 MHz spectrum auctions will go ahead in Europe, but the prices are not going to be equal to the 3G spectrum. Wait for the UHF spectrum to become available.

Inventory

2009-02-12T14:48:00.000-08:00

Semiconductor suppliers have been swimming in inventory for the past three months. It seems that, on average, the handset semiconductor vendors were sitting on 18 weeks of inventory at the end of December....with a run-rate that was still decelerating.

Now, we have new handset models coming out at MWC next week and we can expect some of the older models to be obsoleted. Will Qualcomm and Infineon get stuck with millions of chipsets? Unlikely...but the RF vendors and PMIC vendors might.

Opening

2009-02-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

Hi folks, this is the "grand opening" of our blog on RF technology trends. We will be throwing out insight into the mobile and wireless market periodically...and would love to get your comments.