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Surveying New Wireless Technologies
QuentinAxan writes "The Economist has a look at some of the ideas under consideration to advance wireless technology. I thought the concept of ad hoc architecture was especially interesting; the writers suggest briefly that it might encourage the creation of '"mom and pop" network operators, and small community networks.' (Which probably means that the telecom companies will crush it, but it's still a cool idea.)" We've touched on several of the ideas mentioned here before, but the Economist is always a good read.
I wish I could work for the economist ... reshashing the same old stuff over and over
there are several good articles about uwb at UWBPlanet [ultrawidebandplanet.com]. It appears the Economist is quite wrong about UWB.
deaf.
One major reason experienced operators don't go after Smart Antennas is that their gain over regular antennas is only a few dB, usually between 3dB and 7dB. The improvement is easily cancelled out by it raining (-2dB to -4dB) which it does in Europe a great deal, the user changing polarisation by moving the phone from one ear to another (-3dB).
For 3G (Wideband CDMA) the name of the game is controlling interference from adjacent cells. Cell placement was good enough to do this for 2G, but 3G is far more sensitive to poor cell placement, with the effect felt over several cells. The way operators do this in practice is by planning the interference before placing the cell, or controlling it once the cell is built, or if it is built on an existing 2G site. Smart Antennas make simple planning very difficult, as the exact radiation pattern is not known, or more precisely it changes from one instance of the Monte Carlo simulation used for capacity planning a 3G cell to another.
Cell breathing due to high capacity, or high power mobiles are a few more variables that make the problem of planning and then running a 3G network far too complex for operators to take a bet on a few extra dB from Smart Antennas.