Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but we maintain some editorial control to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
Today’s smartphones and tablets are exponentially more powerful than desktop computers built just a few years ago, and they’re making it possible for consumers to untether, use the Internet, watch streaming videos, share large files and photos and much more from virtually anywhere at any time. To help address this growing demand on their networks, carriers are upgrading to the latest generation of wireless technology and employing standards that will help them achieve ever-faster data speeds and better performance.
Despite advances in wireless networks, consumers still are plagued with numerous problems – including short battery life, mobile devices that are too hot to handle and generally poor performance, which result in the wireless services failing to achieve their full promise. After not seeing improvement with 3G networks, consumers are no doubt wondering whether LTE will live up to such great expectations.
When the wireless industry shifted from 2G to 3G just a few years ago, the HSPA+ standard and others, were introduced to increase data capacity and uplink speeds. This was designed to accommodate the ever-increasing demand for mobile high-speed data services and improve performance. Fast forward to today. The industry is going through a similar evolution, relying widely on the LTE standard to meet the need for even greater capacity and speed.
Yet with these advances in network technologies, the same problems remain with regard to wireless data. Battery life is significantly limited. Mobile devices become excessively hot, even under normal use. Performance can degrade significantly for numerous reasons. Ultimately, to fix these problems, it’s not the network that needs an upgrade, it’s the mobile devices themselves.
To ensure wireless services don’t fall short of their promise, designers must improve the performance of the power amplifier in the mobile device, making it more capable of managing the demands of everyday use for Internet access, music, photos, e-mail, videos and social networking. Today’s PAs simply cannot reliably produce the power required to enable LTE to reach its full potential. LTE signals are more complex than earlier standards. They have higher peak-to-average ratios and contain more information in the same bandwidth, which makes it harder for PAs to output signals at high power without distortion, overheating or excessive battery use.
Enter envelope tracking. This high-speed power supply technology constantly adjusts PA voltage to ensure that it outputs enough power and operates at peak efficiency for the application being used. ET enables voltage to be applied in real-time, adjusting instantaneously to input RF signal.
The impact of ET is dramatic because it can:
–Increase maximum power for LTE high-speed data, providing up to 150% more output power, tripling upload speeds and increasing capacity for high-speed data applications.
–Improve battery life by up to 20%.
–Reduce surface temperature by up to 5 degrees Celsius.
— Enable use of next-gen, higher capacity batteries, down to 2.5 volts.
–Offer more robust operation in common user environments, by reducing problems from antenna blockage or detuning resulting from interaction with the user’s hand, head or body.
All major wireless carriers are taking note of the improvements made possible by ET, since the technology can help address their LTE network capacity and speed issues. As a result, too, most major baseband and transceiver chipset suppliers are already planning to provide reference designs for ET solutions in the coming year.
With ET, mobile device makers and carriers have a cure for what ails high speed mobile data performance. ET can overcome the problems that never seemed to get resolved with each successive new generation of wireless network. ET has been shown to improve data speeds and battery life, eliminate overheating and simply deliver better device performance for today’s most popular applications and happier consumers, who will finally be able to achieve the full promise of LTE.
