Design World

  • Home
  • Technologies
    • ELECTRONICS • ELECTRICAL
    • Fastening • joining
    • FLUID POWER
    • LINEAR MOTION
    • MOTION CONTROL
    • SENSORS
    • TEST & MEASUREMENT
    • Factory automation
    • Warehouse automation
    • DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
  • Learn
    • Tech Toolboxes
    • Learning center
    • eBooks • Tech Tips
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
    • Webinars • general engineering
    • Webinars • Automated warehousing
    • Voices
  • LEAP Awards
  • 2025 Leadership
    • 2024 Winners
    • 2023 Winners
    • 2022 Winners
    • 2021 Winners
  • Design Guides
  • Resources
    • Subscribe
    • 3D Cad Models
      • PARTsolutions
      • TraceParts
    • Digital Issues
      • Design World
      • EE World
    • Engineering diversity
    • Trends
  • Supplier Listings
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe

Shaping the Future of Mobile Broadband

By atesmeh | October 21, 2009

Still less than four years old, HSPA Mobile Broadband, embedded in smartphones, netbooks and dongles, has brought about a mobile data revolution around the world. Nokia Siemens Networks estimates that mobile data traffic grew fourfold in 2008 and will rise a staggering  300-fold in the next five years. Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann has also said that mobile data traffic is up several hundred percent year-on-year and that he expects that trend to continue.

Now mobile operators have to figure out how to deal with this extraordinary growth in data traffic on their capacity-constrained networks. In the U.S., in particular, raising the capacity issue often leads to the emotive and political debate around the pros and cons of net neutrality – the concept that all data traffic is equal and should be treated as such. But regardless of how that debate is ultimately resolved, mobile operators have a more mundane technical issue to contend with – the need to ensure that real-time services, such as telephone calls and video streaming, have the bandwidth to provide the user with a good quality of experience.

Dan WarrenHSPA users are watching videos on YouTube and its rivals just as they would on a fixed-line broadband connection. Unlike opening a Web page or downloading a picture message, which can be completed in bursts, streaming video requires a consistently high data throughput for the duration of the clip – potentially five minutes or more. The growing popularity of streaming music, as opposed to downloading tracks, via services such as Spotify, will further exacerbate the shift away from bursty applications toward services requiring continual access to plenty of bandwidth.

Operators are responding by upgrading their radio access network, moving through the various iterations of HSPA to take their networks from a peak downlink rate of 3.6Mbps up to 14.4Mbps. From there, operators can move to HSPA+, which makes use of MIMO (Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output) capabilities and higher order modulation enhancements to enable greater throughput speeds and higher performance.

By the end of 2009, Telstra in Australia is aiming to raise the peak speed of its HSPA+ network to 42Mbps. Compared to the first iterations of HSPA, HSPA+ can double the data and voice capacity available to the operator. If they have access to the right spectrum, operators will be able to increase the data capacity in their radio network further still by deploying LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology.

But operators also need to ensure the links between their base stations and their core network, known as backhaul, don’t become a bottleneck. Up to now, they have tended to install fatter and fatter pipes, over-provisioning these backhaul links, so they have enough capacity even at peak times. But with the exponential growth in mobile data traffic, operators are finding this approach increasingly expensive.

As they grapple with the rapidly rising levels of mobile data traffic, operators are also seeking to make the transition to “all-IP” networks. In the long term, moving entirely to IP could reduce their costs significantly, because they will no longer have to own, operate and maintain multiple, parallel networks.

To make this transition work, mobile operators will eventually need to take the radical step of moving their voice traffic onto IP as well. Radical because their customers have grown accustomed to the reliability, availability and good quality of experience (meaning that you can actually hold a conversation with the person you’re calling) provided by today’s circuit-switched mobile voice services.

In moving to all-IP, voice traffic has to share the same pipes with all the other IP-based services, including video and music streaming. And voice is fundamentally different from many other real-time services. Technically speaking, it is relatively tolerant of glitches on the line (Bit Error Rate or BER), but is highly sensitive to excessive delay. By contrast, a service like video-on-demand is not sensitive to delay in the same way, but highly sensitive to glitches (which result in screen blocking).

One solution is deep packet inspection (DPI) – the ability to look inside the traffic crossing the edge of the operator network in order to determine, at a fine level of detail, the characteristics of each packet and to which application or service it belongs.  This information enables the operator to shape the traffic, giving priority to voice calls and other real-time applications, such as video and music streaming, while reducing the network capacity allocated to Web browsing, downloads, e-mails and other messaging applications.

Whatever you think about net neutrality, there is no escaping the fact that many mobile networks have or will soon reach a point where the quantity of data traffic exceeds the available capacity to transport it.  Operators have to be allowed, and be trusted, to implement technologies to ensure users can have high-quality voice calls, without degrading the quality of service provided to other applications.

Dan Warren is director of technology at GSMA.

You Might Also Like


Filed Under: Infrastructure

 

LEARNING CENTER

Design World Learning Center
“dw
EXPAND YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND STAY CONNECTED
Get the latest info on technologies, tools and strategies for Design Engineering Professionals.
Motor University

Design World Digital Edition

cover

Browse the most current issue of Design World and back issues in an easy to use high quality format. Clip, share and download with the leading design engineering magazine today.

EDABoard the Forum for Electronics

Top global problem solving EE forum covering Microcontrollers, DSP, Networking, Analog and Digital Design, RF, Power Electronics, PCB Routing and much more

EDABoard: Forum for electronics

Sponsored Content

  • Sustainability, Innovation and Safety, Central to Our Approach
  • Why off-highway is the sweet spot for AC electrification technology
  • Looking to 2025: Past Success Guides Future Achievements
  • North American Companies Seek Stronger Ties with Italian OEMs
  • Adapt and Evolve
  • Sustainable Practices for a Sustainable World
View More >>
Engineering Exchange

The Engineering Exchange is a global educational networking community for engineers.

Connect, share, and learn today »

Design World
  • About us
  • Contact
  • Manage your Design World Subscription
  • Subscribe
  • Design World Digital Network
  • Control Engineering
  • Consulting-Specifying Engineer
  • Plant Engineering
  • Engineering White Papers
  • Leap Awards

Copyright © 2025 WTWH Media LLC. All Rights Reserved. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of WTWH Media
Privacy Policy | Advertising | About Us

Search Design World

  • Home
  • Technologies
    • ELECTRONICS • ELECTRICAL
    • Fastening • joining
    • FLUID POWER
    • LINEAR MOTION
    • MOTION CONTROL
    • SENSORS
    • TEST & MEASUREMENT
    • Factory automation
    • Warehouse automation
    • DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
  • Learn
    • Tech Toolboxes
    • Learning center
    • eBooks • Tech Tips
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
    • Webinars • general engineering
    • Webinars • Automated warehousing
    • Voices
  • LEAP Awards
  • 2025 Leadership
    • 2024 Winners
    • 2023 Winners
    • 2022 Winners
    • 2021 Winners
  • Design Guides
  • Resources
    • Subscribe
    • 3D Cad Models
      • PARTsolutions
      • TraceParts
    • Digital Issues
      • Design World
      • EE World
    • Engineering diversity
    • Trends
  • Supplier Listings
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
We use cookies to personalize content and ads, to provide social media features, and to analyze our traffic. We share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising, and analytics partners who may combine it with other information you’ve provided to them or that they’ve collected from your use of their services. You consent to our cookies if you continue to use this website.OkNoRead more