Ofcom ploughs up UK spectrum fields, reseeds them with 4G Ofcom has published plans to refarm mobile radio spectrum into 4G goodness, letting operators deploy whatever technology they like in their existing holdings as well as the bands on which they're currently bidding. The proposals aren't surprising: Ofcom has made it clear that restricting bands to specific technologies is …
The coverage requirements for the UK will become so much simpler to achieve if Alex Salmond can find enough suckers to vote for his hair-brained independence scheme - one third of the area of the UK would no longer need service with the loss of less than 10% of the potential customer population.
Expect tariffs to go through the roof with fewer telcos and less profit per square mile.
I have two masts exactly a mile away each side of my house. I get patchy voice coverage and no data whatsoever. That is on Three, however the O2 mast is closer and I only get GPRS.
P.S. I am beside a large industrial estate in the "Oil Capital of Europe" .......
There are huge black holes all over the place that need fixed ASAP.
Probably... If the cell is dimensioned for the number of peak users expected in the current cell footprint, increasing the size of the cell will give congestion problems. That may or may not be solvable - in some cases you'll find that a bigger cell can't support the number of users it will attract.
El Reg: "The increase in transmission power is 3dB, which is marginally more exciting when one remembers that decibels are logarithmic (so a 3dB increase is eight times the power) but it's still well within safe margins and more about increasing coverage than microwaving locals..."
I think you'll find that 3dB is a power doubling ...
dB = 10 x log(p1/p2) [log to the base 10]
So if we go from say 10 watts to 20 watts:
dB = 10 x log(20/10)
dB = 10 x log(2)
dB = 10 x 0.3010
dB = 3.01
commonly known as 3dB.
Incidentally, due to the inverse-squared power law this will increase the range by the square root of 2, for example 5Km -> 7km or 10Km -> 14Km which is a modest amount.
Mike
Yes but there are also those of us who own extremely capable multi core smartphones who happen to spend a great deal of our working lives in buildings that magically evaporate any 3G signal, so we choose to switch over to 2G to both ensure we retain a signal and save battery life. Aside from that there are some more rural areas near me that have never had 3G at all. They couldn't possibly switch off GSM altogether, it'd be like switching off analogue TV... oh wait...
The amount of M2M devices installed will ensure that networks keep some 2G services active for a good while longer. Vodafone New Zealand have announced at least 7 years of 2G support for instance (well their vendors are offering it now). Should voice over LTE be widely implemented (and they get the 3GPP standards going), there could be slight change of dropping 3G services, using 2G for M2M and fall back voice, while LTE taking the bulk of packets what ever information they contain.
So masts might increase in power by 3 DB.
At a given borderline reception point, does not mean that the handset will need to transmit 100% more power to be heard by the mast? So heating the phone up and halving battery life?
Or is TX/RX 4g power asynchronous, so if a phone us uploading far less data t than it's receiving,. at least it's power consumption will be correspondingly lower than the mast's?
All other factors remaining equal then yes, the mobile would have to transmit twice as much power to maintain a balanced link. Seldom that straightforward in practice, but upping the base station maximum transmit power by 3dB isn't the 'easy win' it might first appear to be.
This post has been deleted by its author
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
