[opendtv] Re: Will Femtocells Save LTE?
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 07:58:44 -0400
At 3:38 PM -0500 4/27/11, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
You don't understand, Craig. No one focused on voice. Why do you
even mention voice? The bandwidth crunch is clearly videos and
graphics to smartphones, not voice. So?
So I explained that smartphones already try to move data traffic to
WiFi when it is available.
The primary purpose of the femtocells being sold today is to provide
reliable voice service in locations that are RF challenged. Yes they
can also handle data traffic but this is NOT desirable for any
cellular contract that has data caps, as from a billing standpoint,
they treat the traffic on the femtocell the same as on the cellular
network.
The hierarchy is as follows.
If a location has wired broadband the FIRST step is to install WiFi.
This has already happened in most businesses and a ve3ry large
percentage of homes.
IF RF challenged (either signal strength or capacity issues) install
a femtocell to off load voice traffic to the wired Internet.
Perhaps in the future when the telcos move to VOIP, femtocells will
not be necessary as the voice traffic can use WiFi.
> Yes Bert. You are ignoring the point. Smartphones ALREADY use WiFi
And they will continue to. The best way to fix the problem is to
leverage as much as possible on a network that has no immediate
bandwidth obstacles. Whether it's WiFi or whether it's femtocells,
or a combination.
Well at least you understand why I included WiFi in this discussion.
The main issue is the desire of the telcos to charge by the bit or
time slices for voice when you are using a 3G or 3G radio. It does
not matter that the femtocell is a tiny local RF to wired adapter;
they still charge for its use just like the larger cellular network.
EXACTLY, but only in areas where their low power levels exceed the
levels of the signals from the cell towers.
Come now. That's circular reasoning. The size of cells is always a
variable the cellcos design to. They can deploy femtocells wherever
they want, and of course the power of the adjacent cell towers
becomes a factor. Even at the very start of the femtocells movement,
knowledgeable people were making the case that femtocells were not
JUST for individual households or businesses.
And I'm glad to see you understand that there are limits on the
sharing of any particular frequency. Femtocells are only useful if
they use channels that are not in use by the cellular network, of the
power of the femtocell overwhelms the power from the cell towers. In
most cases, when a telco wants to improve service in an RF challenged
environment (or where there is very high demand, they will move to
microcells, not femtocells. The concept is identical, only the power
levels are different.
You can only push spectral re-use so far. At some point you need more
frequencies to handle more traffic.
Let's put it this way. Increased spectrum reuse, for two-way comms,
will go a LOT further to solve the problem than a mere four
additional LTE bands. And those mere four LTE bands will gut FOTA TV
in a big way.
We disagree.
It is possible to offer the equivalent services that TV broadcasters
are delivering today in half the current spectrum that is allocated.
Don;t trust me on this.
Read the article that Mark and Bob posted yesterday.
Broadcaster now freely admit that ATSC was a poor choice and needs to
be replaced so that they can reach mobile devices.
This was completely predictable; we explained all of this in 1992.
Regards
Craig
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