Finland, Finland, Finland, it's the country for me...

eircomtribunal

HELSINKI, Finland (Reuters) -- Finland will select a new wireless network technology from the United States next week in a move being watched by other European governments that are opening radio spectrum for mobile broadband Internet.

New wireless mobile broadband is in the pipeline for Finland, it seems. Full article on CNN here

P.

damien

Qualcomm have a serious mountain of cash to push this but I think it'll just be like the hype for 3G and Wimax.

bminish

eircomtribunal wrote:

New wireless mobile broadband is in the pipeline for Finland, it seems. Full article on CNN here

P.

interesting.

The main reason that the 450 Mhz analog Mobile phone system lived on for so long in Finland is that they have some seriously remote bits that the 450 Mhz system could reach that 900 or 1800 Mhz GSM could not. This is because 450 Mhz has lower path loss, far better tree penetration and much better Non-los properties

In addition to this GSM has a distance limitation due to the timeslotting. this distance limit is 35 Km although 70 Km is possible by double timeslotting if you throw away half the capacity of the cell

Double time-slotting is not an attractive solution for GSM at 450 Mhz where there isn't a whole lot of spectrum avalable in the first place. Double slotted 900 Mhz GSM really only works well over clear paths (out to sea for example..) with higher powered (8W class) carphones . Portable handsets don't have the welly to get back to the base station much past 35 Km even with a clear radio path.

Whilst CDMA (particularly Qualcom's implementation of CDMA) has lots of issues in a cellular environment, especially with heavy network load, there are no distance limitations which is why it is appearing as a good replacement for the old analog NMT-450 networks in Scandinavia and also explains it's popularity when combined with carphones in the Australian outback.

The talk of fast data in the CNN article is all hype, there is not enough spectrum there to deliver fast data to very many users, expect to see GPRS class speeds (with GRPS class pricing to keep the congestion down..)

In Ireland we have no need for 450mhz phones and the recent offer of spectrum from comreg in this area would probably only suit a national mid-bandwidth data network for, say telemetrics.
There is little evidence of demand for such a network in Ireland and I suspect that Comreg's recent announcements of spectrum in this frequency range may be yet more evidence of comreg looking for solutions in all the wrong places whilst completely ignoring it's inability to get to grips with some of the real issues.

.Brendan

SkepticOne

I think any talk of mobile companies getting into broadband is bad news; they have too much lucrative voice minutes to protect. What happens if people get into VoIP (which they will) over these systems? The mobile firms will need to charge heavily for IP traffic just like they do with 3G to protect this revenue. This, I believe, is the main reason that 3G has not really lived up to its true potential. Regulatory authorities need to take this into account when allocating frequencies.

The likes of 02 and Vodafone's greatest fear must be that true affordable mobile broadband will become available. To prevent this they need to grab whatever allocations are going and sit on them or provide unattractively priced services that no one will want.

We have seen this (and continue to see it) with Eircom and their antics.

jwt

I thought all that stuff was already locked up, no nomadic broadband ever?


John

SkepticOne

There was a consultation document a while back where ComReg (it might have been ODTR) seemed to argue against the licencing of mobile spectrum for broadband on the basis that it would undermine the revenue of 3G licence holders. I will try and find it. I'm not sure there's any permanent ruling on it though. My opinion for what it's worth is that the regulator didn't want to upset the 3G licencees.

Unlike other countries, Ireland did not hold auctions for 3G licences but rather awarded them on the basis of a 'beauty contest'. This was apparently against the wishes of the Dept. of Finance. Consequently, it is likely that the regulator would have wanted to show that the beauty contest was the correct approach; hence the not upsetting the 3G licence holders.

As it turned out, 3G has turned out to be a damp squib anyway. Whatever the technical reasons, I don't think mobile companies would ever have allowed cheap bandwidth over 3G due to the likelihood of VoIP cannibalising lucrative voice revenue.

This is the same reason why I don't think it is good news when mobile companies grab spectrum for broadband. There purpose is more likely to be to ensure that non-phone companies can't get hold of it than to offer services that people want.

Sponge Bob

jwt wrote:

I thought all that stuff was already locked up, no nomadic broadband ever

Its still on offer but only Meteor have showed any interest in it.

The chunk on offer for nomadic is around 1800Mhz though and is only on offer to a mobile licencee. As most of them have 3g licences they do not wish to 'confuse' the punters witha myriad of offerings.

Meteor did approach the ODTR about it. The ODTR had gushed in a public doc about 1xEVDO or (evdo or 1evdo if you google) but when put up to it they realised that evdo is the data bit of US 3G and ran and hid at the prospect of Meteor (with no 3G licence) offering 3G in effect. It was all their own fault for showing such public enthusiasm for a standard which is not within the ETSI family of standards .

A shame, it apparently works much better than European 3g as a data medium.

bealtine

eircomtribunal wrote:

New wireless mobile broadband is in the pipeline for Finland, it seems. Full article on CNN here

P.

On a somewhat related note:

WiMAX Telecom to invest EUR 70 mln in Austria-wide network

Austrian WiMAX service provider WiMAX Telecom plans to invest EUR 70 million in the roll-out of an Austrian-wide WiMAX network until 2008. During 2005, the company will invest EUR 2.5 million to roll-out 60 base stations that will lead to 70 percent coverage among Austrian households in 2008. WiMAX Telecom will first deploy WiMAX in areas with a weak broadband coverage

eircomtribunal

bealtine wrote:

On a somewhat related note:
... Austria.
WiMAX Telecom will first deploy WiMAX in areas with a weak broadband coverage

As you mention Austria. The regulator has currently a consultation out about using the 450 MHz frequency for amongst other things "wireless broadband access in rural areas".
See note from the "Telecoms Regulatory Expertise Europe" website here

Austria: RTR opens consultation on use of the 450 MHz frequency band

31 May 2005

The Austrian regulatory authority RTR has opened a public consultation on the utilisation of the 450 MHz band. This frequency band is currently designated to be used for the provision of mobile services and is unused in Austria.

RTR is conducting this public consultation in order to establish what the best use would be for this particular frequency band. The consultation document asks questions as to which application the frequencies should be used for (mobile or fixed – such as backhaul) and whether it should be used for narrowband, broadband, the transmission of speech, trunking, etc.

RTR seems particularly keen on using the frequencies to improve the possibility for users to have wireless broadband access in rural areas, and suggests dividing up the spectrum in channels of 1,25 MHz, although other solutions are also proposed further on in the consultation document.

The deadline for responding to this public consultation is 30 June 2005.

The consultation document (in German only) can be accessed by clicking here.

P.

bminish

Anybody (regulators included) who thinks that broadband can be delivered to more than a few users on the basis of 1.25 Mhz wide allocations needs to start on a course of reality tablets.

Even the Flash OFDM people (who are offering kit for 1.25 Mhz wide channels) are claiming a per sector sustainable bandwidth of 2.5 Mbs. not exactly exciting but at least the marketing department is in line with Shannon's theorem
http://www.flarion.com/products/flexband.asp

450 Mhz has in it's favour better N-LOS properties than the Ghz bands but this works against operators too in that it has a negative impact on their ability to reuse frequencies in any given area

It's not likely to translate in the real world into un-metered broadband for rural areas

450 Mhz is an interesting piece of spectrum but I doubt very much that it will lead to better rural broadband availability (at least not rural broadband based on a flat rate model)

Expect to see niche market cellular data type products (for which there does not appear to be massive demand for.)

.Brendan

Sponge Bob

I expect logistics type companies will show interest.

DemonOfTheFall

EVDO sounds great, u can get fully wireless 1.5 meg roaming broadband in the states. Saw a guy who had a setup in his car that turned it into a mobile hotspot

bminish

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

EVDO sounds great, u can get fully wireless 1.5 meg roaming broadband in the states. Saw a guy who had a setup in his car that turned it into a mobile hotspot

There is no reason that 3G can't be used in this manner except for the current per Kb pricing model.

.Brendan