The end of technology-led basestations?
GSM basestations were the crown jewels of their vendors’ product portfolios. Engineered for reliability and performance, vendors spent huge sums on R&D to incorporate every possible performance enhancement. But 3G is late, the dot-com bubble is still a painful memory and the pressure on manufacturers to provide cheaper equipment is fiercer than ever. Are we seeing the beginnings of fundamental changes to the mobile basestation manufacturing industry that will forever change the way that products are developed and sold? We take a look at the way the infrastructure companies are reacting to price pressure, restructuring themselves and the value chain in which they operate. The result may be a fundamental shift in the way key network components are designed and delivered.
The mobile infrastructure industry - looking ahead
This article examines the factors that will decide which of the current crop of 3G infrastructure vendors go on to become world leaders.
Flexible, lightweight solutions
Future infrastructure solutions will need to be much more lightweight and flexible. With a new class of more compact basestations, it will be possible to avoid the large cell sites that are becoming so unpopular with the public and to move instead to much smaller, less conspicuous equipment that blends into the urban environment. Still smaller systems located indoors will be able to overcome the problem of indoor coverage. Basestations will also need to be more flexible to overcome the problem of continual changes in 3G standards.
Picocell and Microcell base stations
Drivers towards smaller basestations include the fact that in urban areas, where users tend to cluster together in offices, stations, shopping malls and conference centres, the situation will quickly arise whereby the overall density of traffic is substantially higher than in 2G networks. Also, there is the need to get good indoor coverage. The most significant factor is that 3G users inside buildings will typically want to make use of higher speed services and these high speed services normally require a higher quality radio link than would be needed for voice alone. And so although it may be possible to achieve reasonable voice coverage inside buildings, it will be much more difficult for the sort of advanced data services that are expected to be needed indoors. Again smaller basestations can address this requirement.
Standards and infrastructure
Standards have been a key factor in the adoption of modern wireless communications systems. The bodies such as IEEE, 3GPP, 3GPP2 and ETSI which create the standards have been fuelled by the success of technologies such as GSM and WiFi. They have been building up a lot of momentum introducing new generations of technologies as well as adding new features and techniques to existing standards. Obviously this is a happy situation for infrastructure equipment vendors – as long as there is a competitive marketplace, operators are under pressure to regularly re-equip their networks to take advantage of improvements in performance, capabilities and efficiencies.
However, operators have been struggling to keep up – the upgrade cycle of their networks has typically been far greater than the cycle of new releases of standards and, in addition, there is a challenge to the conventional cellular operators' business model in the form of IP-orientated technologies such as WiFi and WiMAX. Fortunately for the operators there are several developments which, if realized, could allow them to access the benefits of improvements in wireless standards at a reduced cost. These include:
- improvements in software defined radio (SDR)
- convergence of standards, and
- over-the-air upgrade of terminal equipment.
These developments will better equip network operators to keep up with the seemingly relentless progress within the standards bodies.
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