If we are all to enjoy really high performing mobile networks in the future various forms of spectrum sharing between mobile operators will become essential. Spectrum trading offers the most profitable route to spectrum sharing. But in spite of the enabling legislation being over 10 years old and Ofcom passing the necessary supporting regulations over [...]
Read more →Ofcom are consulting on their proposal for re-allocating the 700 MHz band exclusively for mobile services. They claim it could save the mobile operators £480m-£770m’s worth of new base stations. A much better outcome could be achieved by using the 700 MHz band auction to incentivise the mobile industry towards more base stations not less. [...]
Read more →The Net Neutrality debate has always been as passionate as it has been polarised. Yet there remains a problem to be solved. One set of enterprises, like Netflix and U-Tube, are driving up video traffic across the Internet and another set of enterprises, the ISP’s, are being expected to pick up the extra investment cost to carry their traffic.
Read more →Vodafone has being buying cable TV assets in several European countries and in France the cable TV group Altice has bought the French mobile operator SFR. Delivering TV programmes to a TV set appears to have nothing in common with delivering a telephone call to a mobile. So what is the commercial or strategic logic of a mobile network operator getting together with a cable TV network operator?
Read more →People may have forgotten the film “All the President’s Men” starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redgrave but everyone knows the expression coined in that film…that if you want to find the answer “follow the money”. The answer we want to know today, as we set our research objectives for 5G, is what the market drivers are going to be for 5G. We need to finish with a globally harmonised technology that mobile network operators (who comprise “the market” for 5G networks) will want to buy.
Read more →LTE is a triumph of standardisation at the silicon chip level. Never has the world been so converged on a common mobile technology future. But LTE has been much less successful at the Radio Frequency level. LTE has been specified in too many frequency bands. There are in 30 different frequency bands for the FDD version of LTE and 14 for the TDD version. Just what problems are we storing up in the future by this alarming proliferation of 4G frequency bands?
Read more →The battle lines are drawn between the broadcasting and mobile radio industries over the future of the precious UHF spectrum. The mobile industry case appears to be winning. But there are clear dangers in overlooking important issues that may well come back and cause an upset later. One of those issues is the long term future of free-to-air public service TV broadcasting in a wireless broadband Internet age.
Read more →The “single frequency” networks we use today have changed the landscape of mobile coverage – literally! If one stands in any place and plots the total day-time mobile data capacity available as a height above the ground – the resulting national contour map looks like the hills of Yunnan Province in Southern China. A poorly conceived 5G network could make this disparity of capacity performance a whole lot worse and take “the mobility” out of mobile radio for much higher data speeds.
Read more →Policy makers and industry leaders are waking-up to the growing stresses on the investment side of the mobile network operator balance sheets. There are now three policy options aimed at addressing this issue: the EU Commission proposal, Network Consolidation favoured by the mobile operators and the most challenging of all…the IET’s DAN (Demand Attentive Network) philosophy.
Read more →
