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Today I read an article about how for many years many countries have had plans to replace FM radio with a digital replacement such as DAB. There has been some success in some countries such as the UK, but by and large everyone admits that FM is here to stay for another decade at least. It's not that the digital systems aren't better or deliver advanced audio quality but it's difficult to beat that FM radio that only costs a couple of cents and is built into everything from cars to mobile phones with technology that still costs an order of a magnitude more. This left me wondering if things will be similar with GSM!? We are soon going to celebrate it's 20th anniversary in the wild and still, this technology shows no signs of being replaced and being made redundant anytime soon. My predictions for GSM I made back in 2007 still hold.

"We are killing the base station" was the title of a post over at Light Reading about Alcatel Lucent's recent announcement about a new base station and radio network design. A strong statement that caught my attention and so I had a closer looking while being in Barcelona. You can get the full story on the Alcatel Lucent website via this link so I just focus on the things in this post that particularly stand out for me.

The first thing is the new antenna design, if you can call it that. Instead of today's flat panned containing one or more antennas for different frequency bands and technologies, ALU has developed small radio cubes with the antenna in front and three small power amplifiers behind it for different frequency bands for an output power of two watts and different concurrent radio technologies (GSM, UMTS and LTE). Good enough for very small cells but not for a typical macro cell. For macro cells, many of the small cubes are put together and then used as a single antenna. The design then leaves the choice to have the base band unit (the digital part of a traditional base station if you will) close beside like today and connect the resulting cell back to higher layer nodes via an IP connection.

The second concept foresees the use of fiber links and an enhancement of today's CPRI radio interface between the baseband (the digital part) and the radio component (the analog unit, part of the antenna cubes) which then runs over a fiber connection to a centralized location that homes an array of base band units. That array can then be flexibly assigned as needed to provide processing power for the different cells, presumably as traffic demands. Reminds me of "cloud services" but it's probably a bit difficult to pull off due to the very high data rates required on the CPRI fiber interface between the centralized base band cluster and the antenna / radio head equipment.

As always, the devil is in the detail and so it will take some time to see if it's a concept that delivers significant advantages over the traditional radio infrastructure in place today. In any case a refreshingly different thing!

MWC 2011 and I just figured out yesterday that it's indeed my 10th anniversary at the show. 2002 was the year I first attended when it was freshly and cleverly renamed from GSM World Congress to 3GSM World Congress to include UMTS as a technology as well. Today, it's the Mobile World Congress and it's not only the name that has changed over the years. I still remember quite well that in those earlier years when the fair was still in Cannes the main theme were advances in networks, network equipment and very much voice call centered. Yes, new phones were presented as well but it was not the main thing.

Today, the show has gone with the times, it has gone to Barcelona and the networking guys have moved from the main hall 8 at the beginning up the Fira hill so you have to make a physical effort now to go and see them. What used to be 'mega booths' in hall 8 are now 'mega mega booths' that take up complete exhibition halls. And on the left side in a couple of big halls are those smaller companies that sell everything from embedded processors, to network testers, to specialized software to running networks to antenna casings. That has remained fairly constant over the years in Barcelona.

Hall 8 seems to me like it says it all. While in the past the hall was packed with booths of network vendors and then later with booths of mobile device vendors it now contains a bit of everything. Samsung and LG show their latest Android phones in a big way, Motorola is a bit away and seems to simulate a dark counter spot to the bright Asian stands. And in between you can find a myriad of different companies from SIM card vendors, flash memory companies, Cisco has a wall booth near the entrance, ZTE hasn't yet gone with the times and moved up the hill just like NSN who are tucked away in a far away corner of the booth.

The show is changing and so do I. After 10 years the meeting slots are no longer only 30 minutes, the list of must-do's is notably shorter than in previous years, less is sometimes more and talking to friends working for the different companies exhibiting there is worth more than 10 superficial tech talks. And with that I leave you with the pictures on the left from 2002 and I'm looking forward to the next 10 years in mobile.

There have been years when Apple with their iPhone, despite never having been to MWC themselves was the buzz of the show. But this year, with Nokia shooting themselves out of the competition and WP7 being demonstrated more in corners of booths rather than up front, Android is the buzzword of the show. Android demos and products are everywhere, Samsung is pushing their Android based Galaxy S II throughout their stand, LG showing their 3D screen on their new android phone, Sony Ericsson doing their own thing, Android based pads at Motorola, etc. etc. Quite impressive.

Base station antennas might look like a pretty simple thing from the outside and at one point that might even have been the case. However, with ever more frequency bands being used by network operators simultaneously at a single site, antenna casings that actually contain more than just a single antenna, or single sets of antennas due to diversity and MIMO, are becoming more common.

The picture on the left for example shows a quad-band base station antenna for simultaneous use of the 800-900 MHZ band (GSM, LTE), 1800 MHz (GSM, LTE), 2100 (UMTS) and 2600 (LTE), UMTS in 2100 and LTE in 2600. And another thing I've seen being presented at MWC right in front rather than in the back is 6-sector antennas with 65 degrees opening angle per sector instead of the 120 degrees three sector antenna configurations used today. Quite an impressive array of feeder cables at the bottom… Very good if that goes hand in hand with base station miniaturization as each sector requires its own "cell" and dedicated resources down in the base station.

There are a couple of companies at this year's MWC who are proclaiming "war" on others. A war of platforms, a war of tablets, etc. etc. Quite frankly, I find such wording totally inappropriate. Here's what Wikipedia says on the term:

"War is a behavior pattern of organized violent conflict, typified by extreme aggression, societal disruption, and high mortality."

I can't get rid of the feeling that those proclaiming "war" are in reality afraid that they are not the winning team, they are not getting enough attention and thus have to use such extreme terms to create attention. In war there might be a winner and a looser, perhaps just losers so I don't think such an analogy makes sense.

In the mobile industry there can be more than one winner and competitive coexistence and competition is something to strive for as a single platform dominance means stagnation.

It's been interesting to read the commentary on Nokia's recent decision to abandon its own OS strategy and deliver itself into the hands of Microsoft. It might work out for Nokia or it might not but what I find quite astounding is that the discussion pretty much stops there. But what about the larger scope? After all, it's not that Nokia has replaced A for B, no, they have done much more than that.

Last week, they were all about open source and open ecosystem, a concept that I fully embrace because I don't like to be put in a walled garden, cage, or whatever people call it. The cage might be golden but it is still a cage. I want to make my own choices and I want to decide myself what I do with a device I buy. Also, my personal data is mine, so cloud services around my personal data are also not my cup of tea.

So with Nokia turning to Microsoft, they turn away from "open" and towards "closed walled garden ecosystem". How much that will help to boost Windows Phone is up for anyone to guess at this point and I am happy for WP to succeed but I am quite unhappy that in the same instant, an "open" ecosystem goes away. That leaves the smartphone arena with at least three closed and one open operating system, a balance that I don't quite find comfortable.

Agreed, Nokia said they will keep Meego as an experimental platform which could mean anything from killing it in a month or so or keeping something in the back hand just in case their current strategy (once again) does not work out. But I think that keeping something in the back of your hand won't work with the rest of the industry working feverishly at their products.

I can live very well with niche products, I run Ubuntu on my netbook for example. But on mobiles I am not sure the same thing will work, things are just moving too quickly  on mainstream mobile products for niche products with a limited amount of effort put into them to keep up for the moment.

Which will make my choice for my next mobile device rather obvious. Yes, it will be an Android device then. When I first wrote about Android it was to inflexible and too cloud oriented for me. By now I think I can customize it to my liking with a bit of effort, i.e. to work outside the Google cloud for email, calendar and contacts without making too many sacrifices. And with OperaMini now available on Android it is perhaps also possible to keep data roaming costs down as well depending on how much other chatter there is from other applications. I will report.

 

Great, I even have my own MWC announcement this year! Quite a number of people have asked me in the past if my books are available in e-book format as well. So far that has not been the case but I can understand those wishing to read it in an electronic format as it does have it's advantages. But here is good news for you, my latest book "From GSM to LTE" is now available in Apple's e-book store and a PDF version is available via the publisher as well. It admittedly looks, feels and reads nice on a pad 🙂

This year, there's free Wi-Fi at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at a couple of places and I couldn't of course resist to see if the company attaching it's name to the offer is any better at providing connectivity in this form and shape than those who have tried in the past. Unfortunately and not quite unexpected its not. The connection runs at a couple of kbyte/s and often there are interruptions of several seconds. Perhaps suited for the desperados but not for serious use. In contrast to that my 3G connection is running fine in the same crowded space. As in the previous years, the network operator I am using has deployed three carriers. On all three the signal is very strong and EcNo ranges are in the high -9 to -12's. But still, I get instantaneous and sustained data rates of 1.5-2 MBit/s. Refreshingly usable.

I’ve been using Skype for many years now for voice and video calls and occasionally both I and the called party are connected via UMTS to the network and things are working very well. The problem with such connections usually is that both ends are behind a Network Address Translation (NAT) router, so direct connections between two PCs, for example for screen sharing via VNC, does not work. As the NAT gateway is on the network operator’s side on both ends, neither party can configure port forwarding to establish a direct connection. But recently I found at least a partial solution. Unknown to me for many years, Skype includes a screen sharing option that lets a user share the full screen or individual windows. Works great in practice even over two UMTS links. The only thing that is missing is the possibility to not only watch what the other side is doing but to be able to use the mouse and keyboard as well. That can’t be to difficult to implement but Skype hasn’t done that yet. So I hope we’ll see it in the future.