Month: May 2014

In the past couple of weeks I had a a few posts on what peering is and who pays whom for what. Here's my book review that describes the topic in detail and here's a link to my post on the difference between network neutrality and Internet Service providers (especially in the US) trying to charge the content providers for traffic. Today I came across two posts on Level-3's blog (see here and here) that gives their perspective on the matter. An interesting read and a practical example of the theory I discussed in my previous blogs. Well worth the read!

(via 'I Cringely')

At the end of 2012 I had a post in which I described the results of a speed comparison between notebooks and smartphones. One and a half years later I decided it's time for another look and see if and how the world has moved on.

Again, I've been using the Sunspider test suite that runs in a web browser. Not only hardware has moved on but browsers might have a more optimized Javascript engine in the meantime and the Sunspider test suite has also been updated from version 0.9.8 used in the previous post to version 1.0.2 used in this post. At least on the notebook side it doesn't make any difference, however, as the result of the benchmark on the same Intel i3 2367M, 1.4 GHz driven notebook came in with almost exactly the same result (416 vs. 410 ms) as one and a half years ago.

So here are my 2014 results with current hardware:

178 ms, Macbook Pro, Intel i7, 2.4 GHz, Firefox 28, OS X 10.9.2

260 ms, Lenovo E330, Ubuntu 12.04, Firefox 28, 260ms (Intel i3-2348M CPU @ 2.30GHz)
534 ms, Lenovo E330, Ubuntu 12.04, virtualized Windows 7 running on the Ubuntu host)

416 ms, Lenovo E130, Ubuntu 12.04, Firefox 28, (Intel i3, 2367M, 1.4 GHz)
—> 410 ms, direct comparison to Sun Spider 0.9.8 with Firefox 16.0.2 in the previous test

411 ms, iPhone 5S (€700+), ARM64, native browser, result taken from here.

(1266 ms, Netbook,  Intel Atom N270 (first generation), 1.6 GHz, Firefox 16.0.2, Ubuntu 12.04, (2009))

1376 ms, mid-range Android 4.2.2 based smartphone (€250), Opera Mobile browser

1928 ms, low end Android 4.3 based device (€130)

The direct comparison shows that both the notebook and the smartphone worlds have moved on significantly. The iPhone 5s has twice as much single CPU power than its predecessor and my current notebook based on an i3 processor is twice as fast as the notebook I used one and a half year ago. The mid-range Android phone now has the CPU power a flagship Android smartphone had one and a half years ago. Note that I didn't measure the 2009 Intel Atom based netbook again (hence the line is in brackets) but just put it here for comparison sake to show where fast smartphones sold today are compared to netbooks of the 2009 timeframe. Quite impressive!

LTE networks are up and running for five years now and we have certainly come a long way in terms of speed, stability and usable devices since 2009. The next step in the race for ever faster speeds is Carrier Aggregation (CA), i.e. the simultaneous use of several LTE carriers in different bands. While a lot has been specified to have a lot of flexibility in practice I mainly see the following CA deployments in the field today:

South Korea and the US seem to be the countries with the most pressing need for CA as for various reasons they are limited to 10 MHz carriers. Verizon for example has thus started deploying carrier aggregation of two 10 MHz carrier, one in the 700 MHz band and one in the 1700/2100 AWS for a combined bandwidth of 20 MHz.

In Europe, Germany seems to be the country most interested in Carrier Aggregation. Here, operators already have 20 MHz carriers on air in the 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz band (bands 3 and 7). In addition, three operators have a 10 MHz carrier in the 800 MHz band (band 20). In other words, they use carrier aggregation to go beyond the 20 MHz they already have. One network operator combines spectrum in their 800 MHz and 2600 MHz for a total carrier bandwidth in the downlink direction of 30 MHz. Another operator is about to aggregate resources in the 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz band for a total of 40 MHz, i.e. twice the bandwidth that is aggregated by Verizon in the US.

So far, only few devices support Carrier Aggregation but by the end of 2014 I expect that it will be quite a handful so from my point of view this is the state of the art in deployed networks at the moment. Looking a bit into the future there are a couple of further enhancements in the pipeline. On the one hand, data transmission rates could be increased by using more than the two antennas on the base station and mobile device side. 4×4 MIMO has been trialed already but the difficulty is how to get more than the 2 antennas per sector on rooftops without increasing the size and weight of the antennas unduly. On the mobile device side there's a similar dilemma, perhaps not so much in weight but in available space for even more antennas. Time will tell. And also a bit further down the road is carrier aggregation with three independent component carriers. 3GPP has just recently standardized the new device categories 9 and 10 for the purpose with a theoretical maximum downlink speed of 450 Mbit/s (20 MHz = 150 Mbit/s, 40 MHz = 300 Mbit/s, 60 MHz = 450 Mbit/s). This whitepaper by Nomor research contains some interesting details on this.