[opendtv] The view from the other side...
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 07:43:47 -0500
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/technology/17static.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha26
Data Seen Overwhelming Cell Networks
By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
Published: February 16, 2011
BARCELONA - At the Mobile World Congress, the industry's largest
annual gathering being held here this week, the corporate visionaries
of the business agreed that a challenge they all would face was
managing the avalanche of demand for mobile data services fueled by
the growth in smartphones.
And some of the 50,000 attendees at the event got a firsthand taste
of how daunting that challenge might be. Mobile service was at times
spotty, and while reception was generally steady, calling volumes
tended to be low and some people strained to hear their mobile
conversations. Sometimes, calls simply did not go through.
As the popularity of smartphones continues to grow, the challenge, on
a global scale, may only get greater. The European network equipment
makers Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent expect data traffic on the world's
mobile networks to increase 30 times through 2015. Huawei, a Chinese
competitor, expects the traffic level to rise 500 times by 2020.
The number of mobile broadband subscribers, which was 600 million at
the end of 2010, is expected to almost double this year to a billion
and climb to five billion in 2016. Mobile network capacity will need
to increase 20 to 25 times to handle that growing load, said Hans
Vestberg, the Ericsson chief executive.
"In the future, we are going to live in a truly networked society,"
Mr. Vestberg said. "This is going to have a tremendous influence on
us and our lives."
In Barcelona, Ericsson announced an alliance with Akamai, a company
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose software and global network of
83,000 computer servers provides a deluxe, accelerated path through
the Internet clutter for the Web traffic of the world's largest
businesses, to integrate the company's software into Ericsson network
equipment.
Once the gear is installed in phone networks, the general public
should experience a faster mobile Web, said David Kenny, the
president of Akamai. But that, he added, may take three to four years.
Huawei, the world's second-largest equipment maker, after Ericsson,
introduced a new cellphone base station that transmits in all five
commonly used frequency bands. Previously, operators had to use five
times as much equipment.
In 2009, Huawei was the first to sell a base station that could
transmit calls in the three commonly used technical standards for
cellphones: GSM, 3G, and Long Term Evolution, the latest technology.
Its SingleRAN station, short for Single Radio Access Network, has
fueled the company's rapid growth.
But this year, Alcatel-Lucent, which has gone through a wrenching
reorganization after the 2006 trans-Atlantic merger that created it,
may have grabbed the spotlight. The company introduced a cellphone
base station the size of a Rubik's cube, weighing only 300 grams, or
10.6 ounces, that mimics the capability of a standard base station. A
matrix of eight such cubes laid side by side, roughly the size of a
small stereo speaker, can transmit more than two miles, or 3.2
kilometers.
Jean-Pierre Lartigue, vice president for wireless marketing and
strategy at Alcatel-Lucent, said the tiny base station consumed 50
percent less electricity than conventional base stations. Developed
at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs, the cube is made of a plastic compound
and contains 200 patented innovations.
At the Alcatel-Lucent exhibition booth, which was adjacent to
Huawei's, engineers and operator executives were jostling to get a
view of the cube, peppering Alcatel-Lucent representatives with
questions about the technology. Three big operators, Verizon
Wireless, the U.S. market leader; Orange, the mobile brand of France
Télécom; and China Mobile have already entered into agreements with
Alcatel-Lucent to test the cubes.
Ben Verwaayen, the Alcatel-Lucent chief executive whose emphasis on
research and development helped bring the company back to profit in
the fourth quarter, said the pace of innovation would stay ahead of a
wireless data crunch. Any reception problems at the industry event,
which he said he had not experienced, were not caused by shortcomings
in the technology, he added.
"Living in a connected society has become a global political issue,"
Mr. Verwaayen said, pointing to the recent uprisings in Egypt and
Tunisia, fueled in part by wireless networks and social networking
technology. "We are coming to the point where society is seeing an
actual need to stay connected."
At the Barcelona show, Claire Cranton, a spokeswoman for the GSM
Association, the industry sponsor of the event, said that she had
received no complaints regarding phone service.
Matt Henkes, the editor in chief of AppsTech, a Web site based in
Bristol, England, that is set to go live next month with coverage of
the mobile applications industry, said he and his colleagues
experienced weak calling volumes using their iPhones. "I think it is
because there are so many smartphone users competing for a cell," Mr.
Henkes said. "This illustrates the potential problem the industry is
facing."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.
Other related posts:
- » [opendtv] The view from the other side... - Craig Birkmaier
