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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Evolving evolution

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Further retrospective thoughts on Mobile World Congress. The rapid progress in LTE evolution – if you can have an evolution of an evolution – is notable, no doubt hastened along by the “WiMax or LTE” debate. On the stands of each of the major test houses you could see side-by-side demonstrations of WiMax, and of complete LTE test configurations, for both channel and protocol. Exactly how you can have an end-to-end test set-up for a standard that’s only half-written is an interesting question. As the standards committees are well-populated by delegates from the test houses, you could say that as they are making the rules they are in a good position to say what will be tested and testable. I asked each of them some of the same questions; in fundamental measurement terms, are there any “show stoppers” – really difficult issues – that the LTE spec presents? All seem to agree that there are not – if there are any issues that will slow the standard’s progress through conformance, type acceptance, interoperability testing and all the other stages that lie between where we are now, and deployment, they are not in the measurement space. So, on those stands, pristine constellation diagrams were the order of the day, bit error rates were low, and, look; 100 Mbits/sec to the handset. At a show like MWC your expectations rapidly become recalibrated; 100Mbit? Yes, seen that. High-def video on the handset? Sure, seen that, all over the place.
I continue to wonder exactly what the mass market is going to do with 100 Mbit/sec, if and when it gets it. I don’t mean the business user or the technology enthusiast market, that’s currently exploring the possibilities of its iPhone or N95; I mean the millions of voice-calling and texting subscribers that basically pay for the infrastructure. Can the providers create enough attractive and attractively-priced services to interest those users, or will mobile high-bandwidth remain a high-price, business services sector? So far the providers have been taking the same old line; we’ll build it, and they will come. Vodafone, perhaps whistling in the dark, says that 3G data volumes and revenues are sharply up; to which you might say, anything is sharply up when you start from next-to-nothing.
But it’s interesting to compare the relative rates of 3G deployment with the progress on development of its LTE. Do the lines cross? They might: you might get the situation where, as the 2G licences run their course, some services upgrade directly to high-bandwidth UMTS, and the “average subscriber” finds themselves with a broadband mobile whether they asked for it or not. 100 Mbit/sec SMS, anyone?

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