Telegeography reports that Telenor Norway's CTO Magnus Zetterberg has recently said during the company's analyst and investor day that they intend to switch-off their UMTS network in 2020 and their GSM network in 2025. While others such as AT&T have already stated their GSM exit in 2017, the rest of the world will likely follow … Continue reading Telenor Says It Will Switch-Off Its UMTS Network in 2020
It's been an exciting year so far with many projects and many great things happening and I'm very excited to announce the completion of one of my bigger projects this year: As of today, the third incarnation of my book (now) titled "From GSM to LTE-Advanced" has been published and is now available in book … Continue reading The Third Incarnation Of My Network Technology Book Now Published!
I'm getting quite a number of questions lately on what Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are all about. Whenever I try to give an elevator pitch style answer, however, I can often see that lots of question marks remain. I guess the problem is that people who haven't seen virtualization in practice so far have difficulties imagining the concept. So I've decided to explain NFV and SDN from a different angle, starting with virtualization on the desktop or notebook PC, i.e. at home, which is what most people can try out themselves, imagine or at least relate to. Once the concept of virtualization at home becomes clear, the next step is to have a look why and how virtualization is used in data centers in the cloud today. From here it's only a tiny step to NFV. And finally, I'll explain how SDN fits into the picture. This is probably one of the longest posts I ever had, so bring some time. As part of the exercise, I'll cover things like Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), OpenStack, OpenFlow, the OpenNetwork Foundation, etc. (Note: Should you have noticed that the order of the terms in the last sentence does not make sense at all, you probably know already everything that I'm going to talk about in this post).
Two years ago I would not have speculated about UMTS being abandoned anytime soon. LTE was still relatively new and in Europe, UMTS was the main air interface technology for high speed mobile Internet access. But things have changed rapidly and LTE has taken over that role by storm. Today, most high-end and even mid-range … Continue reading How Much More Will UMTS Evolve In The Field Now That LTE Is Here?
When the Wideband AMR speech codec was activated in my 3G wireless network of choice a year or two ago I decided to lock my smartphone to 3G-only mode to prevent it being handed over to 2G when on the move and thus being downgraded to a narrowband channel. In the Cologne / Bonn area … Continue reading When Does 3G Get Patchy?
Back in 2011 I ran a post titled "Voice over IP – The Move Away from the Baseband" describing how Over-The-Top Voice over IP clients such as Skype do not run in the modem baseband chip as traditional circuit switched voice today but rather on the application processor as an application of Android or another … Continue reading Voicer over IP: The Move Back Into The Baseband
Let me make a bold assumption: Even in 10 years from now, people will still use their mobile device to call each other. Many other forms of communicating with each other have sprung up over the years, SMS, eMail, instant messaging, Skype video calling, Facebook, etc. etc. And I am a heavy user of most … Continue reading Telephony – 10 Years From Now – A Little Bit Of Everything?
One approach to deploying LTE without packet switched voice call functionality at the beginning is to instruct mobile devices to use a 2G and 3G network when the user makes or receives a voice call and return to LTE afterwards. This solution is referred to as CS fallback and has been specified in 3GPP TS … Continue reading CS-Fallback – An Introduction
Currently there are only three network operators in France but the launch of the fourth network operator ‘Free’ is imminent. Perhaps Free will be the last startup mobile network operator to launch in Europe with a network from scratch for the next decades as the trend in most other European countries is for network operators … Continue reading What Iliad/Free Could Do
With the industry now thinking about multimode/unified GSM, UMTS, LTE base stations (see this post from back in 2008) it is likely that as we go forward there will be little incentive to switch-off UMTS because of LTE becoming more prevalent. But just for the sake of the argument: What would have to happen before … Continue reading Preconditions for Switching UMTS Off