The Today programme wakes up to mobile data

Richard Brandon - 21 January 2010

My first waking moment is usually defined by the BBC's John Humphries as my alarm-radio tunes itself into Radio Four's Today programme.

So I'm used to starting the day with news of one disaster or another, either humatarian, military or political. You can imagine my surprise this morning when John put this subjects aside and started telling me about the dire state of the UK's mobile phone networks and their inability to cope with next generation smart-phones and data dongles (John did confess to being a little out of his depth on the subject, but he did a sterling job on the story, as usual).

My esoteric world of mobile networking had suddenly gone mainstream. Was this going to be the start of something big? Would my family begin to understand what I did for a living? Would I suddenly be popular at dinner parties? Would the phrase, 'let me tell you about LTE,' finally become the chat up line it always promised to be. Well, perhaps not if my wife has anything to do with it.

Of course much has already been said about the take-up of the iPhone, the blackberry and now Google's new Nexus One. And if the device take-up isn't dramatic enough for you then the rise of new applications is really amazing. However, 'amazing' isn't really the traffic characteristic you're after if you're a network planner. Network planners are better off with characteristics like predictable, linear or conventional. But we are where we are, mobile networks are creaking under the strain of new usage patterns and Mr. Humphries has touched on an issue more impactful to most of us than the latest party political tiff.

Putting these things aside for one moment perhaps the first thing we should ask ourselves is, 'Is this really a disaster story at all?' It strikes me that a service straining to perform under massive take-up is rather a nice problem to have. Surely the real issue is that revenue growth is nothing like as fast as traffic growth, so how can we scale the networks without breaking the mobile operators' banks? Well it would help if the government didn't see spectrum as a license to print money for themselves, but let's not go there on today's blog.

John doesn't profess to have all the answers but he does have most of the questions and he entered into some discussion about how to scale the air-interface (my words, not his) by using picocells, microcells and cell infill. But of course this is only half the problem. The real elephant in the phone-box is how to scale the backhaul.

It wasn't many years ago that fixed network operators were all talking about their new broadband speeds, promoting themselves with TV adverts showing HDTV arriving down your 2Mbit/s ADSL pipe, but neglecting to mention that your 2Mbits was shared with 50 other people once it hit the network. We don't want to go there again. There's no point investing in higher speed air-interfaces if we just congest the backhaul. Thankfully there are several helpful technologies at hand. We can cache content, applications and offload internet traffic to relieve pressure on backhaul networks. What we need is a more adaptive backhaul architecture that delivers not only high speeds cost-effectively but can also house this new level of intelligence as and when the operators are ready to do it.

We've got a few ideas about how to do that that here at MLL Telecom, but for now I'm just looking forward to tomorrow morning's breakfast show. I hear Chris Evans is launching his new phone-in, 'You say WiMAX, and I say LTE.'

Don't touch that dial...

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