The above retort, often uttered by engineers when presented with a laundry list of requirements and an aggressive timetable by product managers, has a wireless equivalent: “bandwidth, coverage, battery life.”
Consider two examples. Mobitex networks have excellent terminal battery life and very good base station coverage radii but the airlink data rate is relatively low. WiFi networks feature excellent airlink data rates and reasonable terminal power consumption but have dismal coverage footprints.
A new research note from Mako Analysis points out that cell breathing, a technique used by CDMA (and WCDMA) networks to maintain bandwidth to individual customers as more users enter a cell, also causes the coverage footprint of a given base station to shrink and can lead to network unreliability. This Web site defines cell breathing as “the constant change of the range of the geographical area covered by a cellular telephone [base station] based on the amount of traffic currently using that [base station]. When a cell becomes heavily loaded, it shrinks.” Before a cell contracts its coverage footprint it is supposed to force terminals on the edges of the cell to roam to a presumably less-busy adjacent cell; but if there is no cell next door, or if it has no available channels, the cell will contract anyway, and calls can drop.
Mako uses this point to bash UK UMTS operator 3, noting that since 3 doesn’t have its own GSM network to which to hand off calls its reliability will be substandard until it has a considerably denser network; as Mako correctly points out,
“Since 3 are not able to seamlessly hand a call off from their 3G network to O2’s 2G network (O2 UK are currently allowing 3UK to use their network where they lack 3G coverage) the call drops.”
Fair enough, but 3 is hardly the only system with this problem. WCDMA-GSM handoffs don’t work reliably anywhere yet, regardless of who owns the networks. The network operators blame the handset manufacturers for not being able to get the roaming software right; the handset companies turn right around and blame the operators for deploying networks which do not conform to acceptable standards.
What strikes me as unusual is that the 3G boosters such as 3GNewsroom.com have heretofore ignored chink-in-the-armor stories like this, preferring instead to cheerlead. What’s changed? Could it be that the market’s collective yawn at UMTS has them edgy?
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