Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
With next-generation LTE and mobile WiMAX networks now up and running in North America, operators are honing their advertising and messaging to clearly communicate 4G’s benefits to consumers. Specifically, they need to answer this question: “What can I do with 4G that I can’t currently do with 3G?”
Most consumers were only introduced to the term “3G” a few years ago. With LTE now a reality, many consumers might be wondering what happens to 3G. Does 4G replace it?
3G and 4G solutions are derived from different technologies: CDMA and OFDM, respectively. Operators are deploying 4G networks over their 3G networks, not as a replacement but rather operating them both as complementary services.
Due to the interoperable nature of 3G and 4G, operators must also continue to invest in their 3G networks to ensure quality of service, regardless of their 4G plans or timelines. To do this, they’ll need to more efficiently use 3G spectrum and get the most capacity possible out of their 3G networks, even as mobile data usage continues to grow at unprecedented rates.
Creating more touch points
One way to increase capacity is to add smaller and more frequent touch points within the network that can be reached by more devices and, perhaps more importantly, have more access to backhaul.
We’ve seen this happen already with femtocells. Femtocells are a low-cost solution to increase indoor coverage, increase capacity and enhance user experience. According to Informa, there are 350,000 femtocell sites in the United States today and by March 2011, there will be twice as many femtocells as macrocells.
Most of the large operators in North America are now offering femtocell solutions, marketing them as a way to increase cellular coverage in homes or small businesses in bad coverage areas or with weak in-building reception. It’s a win-win situation: the end user gets better, more reliable performance from his chosen carrier, and the operator gets access to the customer’s wireline broadband connection to plug that hole and strengthen the overall coverage and capacity of the network in that sector.
Femtocells are helping network operators meet the consumer expectation that mobile voice and data services should be available wherever potential subscribers live, and that the quality of service should be consistent throughout. Subscribers don’t want to know why they get reception in some places and not in others; they just want it to work so they can have consistent calls and fast data rates.
Going micro and getting smart
Femtocells are one way for operators to close gaps in a network, and are becoming a very popular and inexpensive way to increase capacity without having to increase the primary network footprint.
There are many other hardware options available to extend 3G coverage closer to the user at a micro level. Among these are microcells, pico cells, repeaters and remote radio heads. Like femtocells, these solutions can be dropped into a network where operators see a need, creating an advanced topology that casts a wider net and brings transmitters closer to the user for increased performance and coverage.
In most cases, however, these hardware add-ons don’t have significant analytical intelligence built into them. They create more access points to the network, but don’t know how to analyze network load or usage patterns to identify the cause of network congestion, overloading or interference.
To get the most out of advanced topology networks, there are several “smart techniques” that the CDMA community has been working on, using software to fully utilize existing hardware assets.
These smart techniques address two basic characteristics inherent to mobile networks today: First, that the mobile data traffic across an operator’s network is never uniformly distributed in any given space and time; and second that many of the data sessions are relatively short in duration.
Instead of adding capacity across an entire network, these methods allow an operator to dynamically allocate existing network capacity where and when it is needed the most. For example, users in heavily-loaded cells can utilize unused network capacity of lightly-loaded neighboring cells, increasing network capacity, reducing backhaul bottlenecks and raising data rates for users in both cells. Another feature is designed to increase the number of connections and efficiently manage bursty applications frequently used on smart phones, such as IM, e-mail and Facebook. This feature reduces the impact of heavy signaling on the network to improve the user experience.
In most cases, this intelligence can be added via software changes in the infrastructure, and the increase in network capacity and improvement in user experience can also be realized immediately without requiring new devices. It’s a relatively simple and inexpensive way to increase the performance of 3G networks and more efficiently manage spectrum and capacity.
4G is here, and those networks are going to introduce users to a new era of mobile broadband. But to keep the data flowing and maintain customer satisfaction, 3G networks will also need continuous evolution to handle the capacity load. Devices like femtocells will go a long way to provide better coverage and capacity, but the intelligence to effectively analyze and manage these advanced network topologies will need to be added through smart software.
Perry LaForge is the executive director of the CDMA Development Group.
