2008 was dominated by LTE, backhaul and femtocells, says Keith Dyer, who looks back at some highlights of our network infrastructure coverage
When you look back at a year, it's easier in some years than others to see the defining themes. There is no doubt that in 2008, operators began to shift their focus, in terms of planning and investment, into the backhaul. This was driven, as we heard throughout the year, by great increases in mobile data usage. And although we have heard for a while now that operators are worried about the potential for backhaul costs to spiral, this was the year that they were doing business. It was also the year in which green networks went from being a nice tick box in the CSR document, to something business critical for operators and their suppliers. As for LTE, there wre continued developments at a macro level, as well as a realisation that there were other ways to achieve mobile broadband coverage. Here is our round up of how we addressed the key issues of the year.
FEMTOCELLS
January: "2008 will see a fall out in the femto cell equipment vendor market, as operators begin to hone their strategies, make purchasing decisions, and consign some femto cell hopefuls to the loser pen, according to Paul Callahan, vp business development of one of those hopefuls, Airvana.
Callahan said that with operators beginning to ramp up lab and initial network trials of femto cells, two or three names are beginning to come to the fore, with many of the current 16 hopefuls destined for disappointment.
Callahan rates Huawei as serious contenders, as well as not discounting Alcatel-Lucent "just yet". Then there are the 'start ups', among which he tipped market maker ip.access as a possible candidate for sale, implicitly querying their ability to meet the scale and demands of what will be (it is hoped) a mass consumer market.
"The first point operators need to know is, 'Will it work?'" Callahan said. "And that's really work. Not work for an hour and then overheat and drop out, not be flaky. The second is price, and because we use mass market FPGAs rather than someone else's chipsets, we are already winning that battle. Last April [2007] when we acquired 3Way Networks FPGAs were shipping at $9 each, now that¹s already $5-6 for the same parts. That's a big price drop." Callahan said that he didn't see any more than 150,00 units shipped in all markets throughout 2008, although he thinks that in 2009 the market will be ten times that size.
Callahan's view is that management of the CPE will be key for operators, especially as they will most likely integrate the femto cell with a home access WiFi point, to ensure they have QoS across the DSL line."
February: "Vodafone is carrying out technical trials of 3G femtocells to assess how effectively the technology is able to deliver wireless high-speed data and voice services inside homes and business locations.Vodafone is currently carrying out technical trials in Spain with both Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei to explore the potential of femtocells, which are wireless access points supporting 3G devices and connecting to the core network via broadband DSL."
May: "Qualcomm has made another strategic investment in a UK mobile company – this time pumping anundisclosed amount into pico and femtocell developer ip.access. Qualcomm joins Cisco, Intel Capital, ADC and Motorola Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners, Rothschild Gestion and Amadeus Capital Partners as strategic investors in ip.access.
"We like Qualcomm because as a strategic player in the industry they are very well connected to the carriers. They've go their finger on the pulse and we can tap into that knowledge and judgement," Mallison told Mobile Europe."
June: "Europeans set to adopt femtocells in 2009, says Motorola study."
July: "The Femto Forum, the independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell deployment worldwide, today announces that its members have agreed to implement the Broadband Forum's TR-069 "CPE WAN Management Protocol", a worldwide standard for real-time management of customer premises equipment (CPE), as the basis for the management protocol for femtocells."
September: "As well as the management of the CPE, there is the question of how femtocells will interact with the macro network itself. Michael Flanagan, CTO, Arieso, points out that in most deployment models, femtocells take advantage of a subscriber-provided backhaul path to provide licensed cellular service in a manner analogous to the commonly used WiFi router. However, the interactions between femtocells and the overlay macro network are critical for the success of future femtocell deployments."
December: "The Femto Forum has announced the results of its femtocell radio study. The study found that femtocells have the potential to deliver an order of magnitude more capacity than the macro network alone when used in dense deployments, even when occupying the same radio channel as the macrocells. It also identified numerous technological solutions that mitigate potential interference with the macro network to remove barriers to wide-scale deployment and maximize the capacity benefits."
LTE
January: "LTE standard now approved, says GSA – The Global mobile Suppliers Association, has welcomed confirmation by 3GPP that the LTE Terrestrial Radio Access Network technology specifications have been approved and are now under change control, leading to their inclusion in the forthcoming 3GPP Release 8."
February: Alcatel-Lucent's partnership with NEC to form a joint venture to produce a single product line of LTE products is not a cost-saving move, Paul Larbey, head of Alcatel-Lucent's LTE business, has said.
"Let's be quite clear about this – this is an offensive move on our part, and it's not about a sales channel partnership. By pooling our resources and knowledge we will produce a single product line that each group will then be individually responsible for selling," he said.
Febuary: "Ericsson says it has demonstrated, for the first time, Long Term Evolution (LTE) in both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) mode on the same base station platform." Ericsson will make the 'world's first' demonstration of an end-to-end phone call enabled by Long-Term Evolution – System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE), employing handheld mobile devices, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
April: A group of network infrastructure and device manufacturers have committed to a mutual agreement to sort out the way intellectual property rights for LTE and SAE are costed. The companies say the initiative is intended to stimulate early adoption of mobile broadband technology across the communications and consumer electronic industries. But there's no doubt the industry, and just as importantly its operator and carrier customers, doesn't want to see the same issues that surrounded GSM and W-CDMA IPRs taint LTE/SAE."
"The head of the networks division of Vodafone's group R&D function has said that LTE is currently the most likely candidate technology to meet the operator's needs for 4G, but he added that the operator is still watching WiMax "closely" to see if it might still have something to offer. "
August: "Nortel and LG Electronics have taken LTE from the labs to the streets to complete the world's first mobile LTE live air handover."
October: "Karim Taga, of A D Little, said the NGMN has made better progress than any similar industry body he can think of, and he praises the efforts made to sort out interoperability and IPR issues. Yet although investment decision have already been made and announced in Asia (NTT) and the USA (Verizon), he sees Europe presenting more of a hurdle for operators. "Currently operators are facing an explosion of the traffic in their network, extending their geo-reach, migrating their 2G customer base to 3G etc. This means they are reviewing their access strategies -whether to refarm and deploy UMTS 900 or slow down their deployment and wait for LTE (among many options). So if LTE doesn't deliver on its promise – a 10x better performance than HSPA – or if the delivery is delayed, the risk is substantial that operators will continue to deploy on the HSPA road map and consider LTE in their next investment life cycle.
"This is particularly critical if regulators do not consider the urgency of freeing up spectrum on time (at least 20 MHz per operator to fully leverage the performance of LTE). And this risk is particularly eminent for Europe, where operators may lose a competitive edge due to the delay in spectrum allocation."
November: "Motorola has announced it has completed the industry's first over-the-air Long-Term Evolution (LTE) data sessions in the 700MHz spectrum using its LTE Radio Access Test Network and LTE eNode-B platform with a prototype LTE device."
IN-BUILDING
There could be a hidden problem for mobile broadband – that of providing multi-service indoor coverage. Here is an excerpt from our coverage of the topic.
"In-building wireless systems will also provide the communications infrastructure to serve the needs resulting from other growing trends such as public safety coverage and environmental concerns.
Andrea Casini, Vice President, Europe, Middle East, North Africa Sales and Marketing, Andrew, says that Andrew is seeing increased demand. "As European markets are flattening out as far as new network rollouts are concerned, operators are now seeking new ways to boost revenues. We have seen a number of operators looking towards in-building and special coverage projects as a means to do just this. In fact, this is driven by network optimisation activities by operators trying to address interference, capacity, and dead coverage spots. Improvement in high-speed data performance is also an important factor. In general, we are seeing an accelerated trend in network performance improvements."
HAULING IT BACK
And backhaul?
"We expect to see the Ethernet mobile backhaul revolution really kick off in 2009," said Michael Howard, principal analyst of Infonetics Research.
Infonetics highlights three major factors forcing a migration to packet backhaul: the first is the increasing numbers of mobile subscribers, reaching 4.4 billion worldwide in 2011. The second, as we have mentioned, is an explosion in mobile data and video use, requiring providers to significantly increase bandwidth offerings rapidly. The third is the growth of competition, forcing operators to upgrade their network capacity to improve and add new subscriber services. These upgrades will include IP/Ethernet BTS/NodeBs, WiMAX, and LTE New cell site backhaul connections, which drive equipment spending that will roughly quadruple worldwide from 2007 to 2011.
Crucial to this is the forecast that the IP/Ethernet portion of worldwide mobile backhaul equipment revenue is set to skyrocket, racking up a triple-digit five-year compound annual growth rate from 2007 to 2011."
April: Researchers and developers hoping to catch the head of the networks division of Vodafone's group R&D function's eye would also be advised to concentrate on backhaul. Trevor Gill bemoaned the lack of research and innovation in this area. "Research in the universities and labs is almost exclusively focused on the air interface," he said, "and nobody seems to be talking about backhaul."
November: Steve Dyck, Director of Mobile solutions at Alcatel, says
"Operators that adopt a hybrid approach can really take three main approaches. The first is BTS that have an Ethernet port as well as an ATM port. HSPA traffic can be carried natively over Ethernet and transported to the network. With TDM traffic bring carried over TDM.
"The second option is where you have a BTS with no Ethernet port, possibly where legacy equipment has not yet been upgraded. In this case you need a device at the cell site that can peel the different traffic off and then send it over Ethernet.
"Another option is to carry all traffic directly onto a Carrier Ethernet network, with legacy interfaces supported with an interworking function or circuit emulation service."