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eewiz
Should we reuse the old spectrum using newer technologies after some a certain ...
Geoff Thomas
Dear markhahn there was a peer to peer group called the Poisoned Project that ...
Cellular grapples with spectrum scarcity
Rick Merritt
6/20/2012 10:31 PM EDT
Enter smart and ultra-broadband antennas
Equipment vendors are trying to respond to the spectrum crisis in the short term by ramping up support for all the potential LTE frequency bands. But the work poses challenges, especially in antenna design both in handsets and towers, said speakers here.
“Antennas are becoming a really big problem because of space in the handset,” said Joon Hoo Park, a senior vice president of standards and technology at Samsung Electronics. “Lack of space is a problem as is signal coupling interference between bands, especially in band 13,” he said.
“There are no global [base station] antenna standards out there now,” said Kevin Linehan, chief technology officer for antenna systems at Commscope.
Linehan also chairs an NGMN working group drafting a white paper on recommended standards. Mobile data demand is driving an increasingly rapid pace of technology development for antennas some of which cover as much as a GHz in frequencies, he said. “That’s been a real challenge to achieve,” he added.
Beam forming and MIMO techniques are rapidly being adopted in products. Smart antennas that can track a handset signal and null out interference also are in the works. Further out, vendors are studying ways to integrate flexible base station antennas into park benches and lamp posts, he added.
Powerwave has already deployed hundreds of thousands of so-called ultrabroadband base station antennas that cover frequencies from 700 MHz to 2.7 GHz, said Khurram Sheikh, chief technology officer of Powerwave. The company is also testing at its headquarters active antennas that put transceiver electronics behind each antenna element.
“We are seeing an average 2 dB gain and a standard deviation 3.5 dB at the cell edge,” he said. “The uplink results are a 4.3 dB gain and a standard deviation 2 dB,” he reported.
“That can really improve the customer experience, so we think the standard going forward is an active antenna,” he added.
Taking another tack, Huawei engineers described a prototype base station for running LTE over TV white spaces spectrum from 470 to 806 MHz. The approach will require new handset silicon with adaptive filters spanning 300 MHz of spectrum without using SAW filters.
“This year we hope to get the prototype into field trials with carriers,” said a Huawei engineer.
Equipment vendors are trying to respond to the spectrum crisis in the short term by ramping up support for all the potential LTE frequency bands. But the work poses challenges, especially in antenna design both in handsets and towers, said speakers here.
“Antennas are becoming a really big problem because of space in the handset,” said Joon Hoo Park, a senior vice president of standards and technology at Samsung Electronics. “Lack of space is a problem as is signal coupling interference between bands, especially in band 13,” he said.
“There are no global [base station] antenna standards out there now,” said Kevin Linehan, chief technology officer for antenna systems at Commscope.
Linehan also chairs an NGMN working group drafting a white paper on recommended standards. Mobile data demand is driving an increasingly rapid pace of technology development for antennas some of which cover as much as a GHz in frequencies, he said. “That’s been a real challenge to achieve,” he added.
Beam forming and MIMO techniques are rapidly being adopted in products. Smart antennas that can track a handset signal and null out interference also are in the works. Further out, vendors are studying ways to integrate flexible base station antennas into park benches and lamp posts, he added.
Powerwave has already deployed hundreds of thousands of so-called ultrabroadband base station antennas that cover frequencies from 700 MHz to 2.7 GHz, said Khurram Sheikh, chief technology officer of Powerwave. The company is also testing at its headquarters active antennas that put transceiver electronics behind each antenna element.“We are seeing an average 2 dB gain and a standard deviation 3.5 dB at the cell edge,” he said. “The uplink results are a 4.3 dB gain and a standard deviation 2 dB,” he reported.
“That can really improve the customer experience, so we think the standard going forward is an active antenna,” he added.
Taking another tack, Huawei engineers described a prototype base station for running LTE over TV white spaces spectrum from 470 to 806 MHz. The approach will require new handset silicon with adaptive filters spanning 300 MHz of spectrum without using SAW filters.
“This year we hope to get the prototype into field trials with carriers,” said a Huawei engineer.
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markhahn
6/21/2012 12:18 PM EDT
it should be obvious that treating spectrum as property is just wrong, since unlike, say, a toll road, there's no technical reason a device can't switch among 100 different providers and/or frequencies in the space of a minute. suppose phones simply conducted a reverse action when they needed service. (let the government tax the transaction, rather than obtain an inherently less efficient one-time payment for spectrum.) in other words, whoever uses the spectrum pays for it. can you imagine how customer-friendly this would be? it wouldn't necessarily preclude long-term service plans, but would inherently lessen the reliance on lockin. it would also improve coverage, literally exponentially, since your chances of getting service from _someone_ would the product of the probability of single-carrier coverage. this would also be much friendlier to the internet-of-things concept, since devices could obtain coverage without significant overheads. it would also create vast and numerous incentives for coverage where the big carriers do a poor job - perhaps there would even be arbitrage-like enterprises that simply provided patchwork-like coverage in the weak spots of bigger carriers. absurdities like arguing about micro-sim formats would disappear, since identities would simply be tied to billing, rather than requiring a separately maintained uniqueid.
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Geoff Thomas
6/22/2012 2:54 AM EDT
Dear markhahn there was a peer to peer group called the Poisoned Project that did something like that, - they hooked up all their members so each one having a particular song contributed proportionally the data for that song to a downloader, - fantastic download times, but unfortunately sabotaged by a deep packet inspection program from the rich boys called Sandmine.
Whatever your own feelings about that, from another side the Broadband Rollout in Australia, with it's huge capacities, may also be a way for overcoming the frequencies jam?
Cheers,
Geoff Thomas.
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eewiz
6/25/2012 9:54 AM EDT
Should we reuse the old spectrum using newer technologies after some a certain period of time?? ie. now 2G/3G/4G devices co exists. and within a few years 5G will be coming. If at any point of time, we decide we will stop using/making only 2G devices anymore, then after a few years(say 5), we can reuse the spectrum using newer technologies. The 5 years will be enough time for everyone to dispose their legacy devices :)
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