Recently, T-Mobile US has announced that they have switched on 4×4 MIMO support in their network and first smartphones are now supporting 4 simultaneous downlink streams. Quite an interesting announcement as most antennas and base station sites currently deployed by most operators do not yet support this. So let’s have a look at what has changed in recent years in base station technology.
Continue reading From Dipole to Active Antenna Systems and 4×4 MIMO
Another NB-IoT number floating around is that very power efficient NB-IoT devices should be capable to be driven from a small battery for more than 10 years without needing a recharge. Again, I wondered where this number comes from and which assumptions were made to declare that this is possible.
Continue reading Cellular IoT – Part 10 – 10 Years Battery Lifetime
There is an interesting number floating around in various whitepapers and articles on IoT: NB-IoT supports 50.000 devices per sector per cell. So where does that number come from and is it realistic?
Continue reading Cellular IoT – Part 9 – 50.000 devices per cell
Back in July, DNA/Elisa of Finland reported that their average user consumes 5 GB of data per month.
Personally I don’t do a lot of video streaming while I’m on LTE so my current data consumption on my smartphone is around 1.5 GB a month these days, so you can imagine how much streaming must be going on in Finland.
Over the past months, 3GPP was quite busy to ensure the NB-IoT made it into Release 13 before time ran out. So far, I’ve been looking into CRs and the Work Item description to get an idea of what is standardized because the Release 13 specification documents themselves did not yet contain NB-IoT content. Fortunately this has no changed in the latest edition of the documents and there and one company even pushed out a whitepaper to give an overview.
Continue reading Cellular IoT – Part 8 – A Whitepaper and 3GPP Spec References
The EU commission has a lot of fun these days to find fair rules to abolish roaming fees from 2017. I’ve written down my thoughts here and here but actually, even if roaming fees go away, we are only halfway there. And that’s because there’s another thing that needs fixing: Rates for mobile calls between EU countries.
Continue reading Nobody Calls Me… Because I Have A Foreign Number… And That’s Expensive
In part 1 I’ve given an overview of the the draft EU legislation on removing roaming charges in 2017. The draft has been quite heavily criticized in a number of online publications. Unfortunately, those articles gave no particular reasons for their attitude other that the proposal does not go far enough as there should be no roaming charges at all anymore no matter who long people are abroad. Yes, it’s mass media so why over complicate things? Anyway, this is not mass media so I thought I’d share with you my personal thoughts.
Continue reading EU Roaming Fees Phase Out News – September 2016 – Part 2
A couple of days ago the EU has published a first draft of how to go forward with removing roaming charges in the EU starting in mid-2017. A number of press reports quickly followed which were mostly negative and which all failed to analyze the issues the proposed compromise wants to address and resolve in an acceptable way for both consumers and network operators. So I thought I’ll fill that gap over here. In this post, I’ve put together an overview of what the draft regulation proposes in some detail. In a follow up post I’ll give you my opinion what the reasons are the different limitations are proposed, which ones I find acceptable, which ones I don’t find acceptable from a consumer point of view and what I think is missing. So here we go, this is how I interpret the draft: Continue reading EU Roaming Fees Phase Out News – September 2016 – Part 1
This is part 7 of my series on Cellular-Internet of Things (CIoT) and NB-IoT. So far I always thought things above layer 2 were simple. There’s IP and that’s it then. But recently I came across an interesting paper by Rhode & Schwarz that suggests that this might not necessarily be the case.
Continue reading Cellular-IoT – Part 7 – To IP or Not to IP – That is the Question!
One of the main requirements of many IoT scenarios is extremely low power consumption of a device in exchange for only sending and receiving very little data and very long intervals in which no data is exchanged at all. If a device does not need to react instantly to incoming requests it doesn’t make sense to keep the radio module powered up all the time. If, for example it is enough to check once every half hour for incoming IP packets, the radio module can be completely switched off for most of this time which saves a lot energy. The downside is, of course, that in the worst case it takes 30 minutes for a device to respond to an incoming IP packet. To cater for such scenarios the 3GPP specifications were extended by a number of features for “High Latency Communication”. Let’s have a quick look at them.
Continue reading Cellular IoT – Part 6 – High Latency Communication