Small cells out in the open

As mentioned in previous posts I am a big fan of small cells/femto cells, so it was great to see Vodafone in the UK using the product in a novel way. Essentially they are deploying these in small rural communities with no existing macro coverage, but rather that the more typical operator led installation, they are asking rural communities to contact them and also provide the physical locations for installation and the necessary broadband connectivity. So all Vodafone have to do, is turn up mount the product on a chimney/wall/post and off you go. There is lots more detail here.

These small cells typically radiate around 1W, as compared to the 20-30W of a typical macro base station and can handle around 32 connected users. They are also self configuring (cell ID, PSC, neighbour detection) so require very little or no planning.

Small cells become a lot more interesting (and complicated) when they are deployed in the presence of a macro (so called HetNets), but even so the above story is still very interesting and encouraging to see.

XLTE & the marketing side of technology

I was recently reading about Verizon's "XLTE" and it got me thinking about the marketing side of technology and specifically mobile technology.

Essentially XLTE is not a new technology, it is just Verizon's deployment of LTE over 20MHz of spectrum. This is something many other countries have deployed from day one, but in the US it has become a big marketing deal. I imagine Verizon paid a lot of money for that additional spectrum and quite a lot to upgrade eNodeBs and antennas, so in order to get a return of investment a big marketing campaign was put into place. But how do you market 20MHz of spectrum? Here in the UK, EE has marketed it as "double speed" (double as their initial deployment was over 10MHz). But I guess that is quite boring. "XLTE" sounds much better.

All this of course is not new. To my recollection, it started with HSDPA. How do you market HSDPA? Surely not as High Speed Downlink Packet Access. A few terms appeared, there was 3G+, 3.5G, Super 3G, Turbo 3G. As HSDPA evolved, we also had HSDPA+ and some operators even called it 4G!

What about WB-AMR? "Do you want a phone that supports Wide Band Adaptive Multi Rate Sir?" Probably not. HD Voice however sounds great.

Needless to say, this will continue. LTE Advanced with Carrier Aggregation is just around the corner (actually launched already in Korea). So, XXXLTE maybe? 4.5G? 5G even? Let's see..