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Alcatel-Lucent Shrinks Mobile Cell Tower To Small Cube
pbahra writes "French mobile telephone infrastructure manufacturer Alcatel-Lucent today unveiled technology that shrinks a mobile cell tower to a box the size of a Rubik's cube, potentially changing the structure of the cellular network, reducing greenhouse emissions and bringing mobile broadband into new areas. According to Wim Sweldens, president of wireless activities for Alcatel-Lucent, by reducing the technology from something the size of a filing cabinet, networks would reduce the total cost of ownership by half, as well as halving the global CO2 emissions from the mobile industry — currently equivalent of 15 million cars a year."
You have 30 minutes to move your cube.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
They have a microcell, one about the same size as everybody else's microcells. Big deal.
And I thought it was smoke AND mirrors....
Now if you could just take one of those cubes, attach a battery, and make it mobile... you'd have a mobile phone!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The title says they reduced a cell TOWER to the size of a cube, then they show a picture of a guy holding a cube and say it replaces the filing cabinet behind him. Is the tower still required or no? Because I'm fairly sure than most of the cost in a cell tower is the land required by the tower and feeder trunks. If this doesn't replace either then it's pretty much worthless.
Is that what they were wearing on their heads during the halftime show?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
From TFA:
Also, elsewhere in TFA they talk (without much detail) about how these devices scale from just two in small usage cases or can be stacked somehow to have the same number of connections as a full cell tower. Most microcells I've seen are only connecting double-digit subscribers, at best.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Oh my god! They're off course! Quick! Find a moron who can't tell OF from OFF!!!!
Perhaps the guy holding the cube is the replacement for the tower.
Say the reception is not so good on a rainy day. With a tower, there's nothing you can do, the tower is bolted to the ground.
But the guy holding the cube, you can tell him "Turn a little bit more to the right ... sorry, I meant my right, not your right ... okay, that's better."
-kgj
How would you secure something that small? Seems like it has the potential to be damaged/stolen.
from the mobile industry???
What do they run the towers on diesel generators? Are they coal fired?
Or are they trying to justify this by saying it will use half the electricity of previous and thus has half the CO2 emissions? Then trying to estimate the source of power and calculate actual average emissions? Pretty weak sauce.
I believe they are talking about a carbon "footprint" not "emissions". Of course I didn't RTFA, so who knows, perhaps cell towers are currently dirty technology, but that would be news to me.
tfa is worded poorly, this is a smaller radio and base-station, not a smaller tower.
HAHA I was just preparing to post this:
Shown here Wim Sweldens, president of wireless activities for Alcatel-Lucent, hold the new Cell Tower:
http://horrorcrush.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/hellraiser_pinhead-300x300.jpg
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I think the reason they have cellphone 'towers' is to get the antenna up high so it covers a wider area and is less affected by buildings and stuff blocking the signal. They are still going to need towers unless they find some way of elevating those cubes above the surroundings. Maybe tethered balloons would work in some areas which don't have wind.
Finally, a real-life Arc-Reactor! Better hope the insurgents don't get a hold of that thing...our ground-troops will be cut to shreds by Iron-Jihad-Man...
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What doesn't these days?
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
I saw this movie. Opening that cube is a bad thing!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
Jen: [Moss has a small plastic box with a flashing light] What is it?
Moss: This, Jen, is the Internet.
Jen: What?
Moss: That's right.
Jen: This is the Internet? The whole Internet?
Moss: Yep. I asked for a loan of it so that you could use it in your speech.
Jen: It's so small.
Moss: That's one of the surprising things about it.
Jen: Hang on, it doesn't have any wires or anything.
Moss: It's wireless.
Jen: Oh, yes, everything's wireless nowadays, isn't it... yeah. So, I can really use it in my speech? What if someone needs it?
Moss: Oh, no, no, people will still be able to go online and everything. It will still work.
Jen: Oh, good, good...
Moss: I tell you, you present this to the shareholders and you will get quite the response.
Jen: Can I touch it? It's so light!
Moss: Of course it is, Jen. The Internet doesn't weigh anything.
Jen: No, of course it doesn't.
[laughs nervously]
Roy: Hey! What is Jen doing with the Internet?
Jen: Moss said I could use it for my speech.
Roy: Are you insane? What if she drops it?
Jen: I won't drop it, I'll look after it.
Roy: No. No, no, no, no, Jen. No, this needs to go straight back to Big Ben.
Jen: Big Ben?
Moss: Yep. It goes on top of Big Ben. That's where you get the best reception.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I don't know about anyone else, but it looked more like a hellraiser puzzle box than a rubiks cube.
This is an important highlight because it confirms once again that power generation is a larger portion of the CO2 emission "pie" than that emitted by vehicles. So when folks talk about our need to implement CAFE or gas taxes etc in order to reduce CO2 emissions, I will continue to call it mis-direction and/or flat-out mindless drivel. Focus on the coal plants before you come after automobiles on this issue.
I'll still listen you folks about OTHER reasons such as sending flaws inherent in sending cash to despotic regions for oil... or other pollutants... but CO2-crazies: STFU.
One more reason to keep an eye on your money.
Seriously, is this actually an improvement?
Perhaps a goofy question, but could the Alcatel-Lucent device in TFA be used to establish cellular coverage in an disaster area?
Seems like small cube + antenna + battery bank + solar panels || generators would be portable enough for, say, a red cross disaster response team...
A Human Right
Is this related to something they found on the dark side of the moon? I think I just saw my phone move. That's it I'm going to buy a yellow Chevy Camaro!
What's the point of Mod points over a long weekend?
Good one! Made me laugh.
-kgj
So the Internet is now a series of cubes?
Unless the cell tower runs on nuclear, solar, wind or hydro, it's more than just a marketing argument.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Might this kinda thing be hackable? And what kind of price? What kind of protocols could this do? Are there others like it out there that do a similar or better job but almost as small? Software radio? Might this fit in some new kind of communication stack paradigm?
MilkMiruku
currently equivalent of 15 million cars a year
Goddamn metric standards. Can someone please convert this to fully laden Boeing 787s per fortnight? I know I should be able to do this in my head by now, but I can never remember whether to divide or multiply by the conversion factor when going from Nonsensius to Ridiculii.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
lucent spokesman wim sweldens was asked what the purpose of the new cell "box" was, to which he replied "You solved the box, we came. Now you must come with us, taste our pleasures."
Good people go to bed earlier.
KDDI's predecessors started something like this in the 20th century, using 2G with tiny sites on street corners mostly in urban areas. PDC was phased out a years ago. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Digital_Cellular.
"Your life as it has been, is over. From this time forward, you will service us,"
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
This is going to complicate things for the orgonite "gifting" guys isn't it?
The first thing this brings to mind is, how do you keep people from stealing them and holding them for ransom now that you've made them so portable?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://videosift.com/video/This-Is-the-Internet-The-IT-Crowd and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUyaELfwBo ...
Longer version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSGT6SSI0lA
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Put Linux on it and make your own cell tower/server?
You can already do that with a laptop, a GNU radio, and open source "soft cell tower" software.
(I haven't checked whether a Shiva Plug has enough crunch to replace the laptop. But if it doesn't the 1.2G version from the UK should.)
Now if somebody would just build a GNU radio in a USB thumb drive form factor ...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Better article here. One of the biggest advantages is that there is no signal processing on site and therefore no need for a hut at the bottom of the tower. The processing is done at data centres and signal sent to tower via fibre optics. Clustering the baseband units makes it easier for maintenance and also makes it easier to do load balancing across a region. When commuters are driving into work, for instance, the baseband cluster can turn its combined energy to handling the signal load coming from towers along the highways and train lines. During the day, processing could handle heavy downtown traffic, while it shifts focus to the suburbs in the evening. Such load-balancing doesn't produce any additional spectrum or data throughput, but it does mean that a carrier can operate fewer baseband processors, saving the carrier cash.
The connections are fast enough to support a standard called CoMP, or Co-ordinated Multipoint. CoMP, which is currently moving through standardization, relies on the fact that, in many locations, a user's wireless gadget is in range of multiple towers (the closer one comes to the edge of each cell, the more towers can typically see the device). This is usually a waste, since multiple towers spend bandwidth contacting the gadget but can't independently deliver different data. CoMP turns it into a bonus by dividing up requested download data and using all cells in the area to deliver a different slice of it at once—akin to the way BitTorrent operates. The phone then combines the data from all the towers in the proper order. This additive approach to using different towers means that a user's total throughput can go up substantially, but it requires centralized baseband to function.
Finally, the new lightRadio baseband bear can do software-defined protocols. Upgrading to LTE? Just upgrade the software on the baseband processor. (Traditional rack-mounted baseband processors required dedicated units for each protocol.) A new baseband chip from Freescale makes it possible, but it gets even cooler when used in conjunction with the new wideband antennas. LightRadio uses a new antenna that, in Alcatel-Lucent's words, collapses three radios into one. The radios are tiny cubes of 2.5 inches square, and each can operate between 1.8GHz and 2.6GHz. They use tiny amps that can be located atop the tower, built into the antenna enclosure, which keeps the amp size down and dramatically cuts down on the power loss.
These radio cubes are stacked in groups of 8 to 10 in order to make an antenna element, and when one cube in the array goes down, the others remain unaffected. (In a traditional system, the whole antenna unit would fail.) The amps cover enough different frequencies that, in many cases, simply changing the software configuration on the baseband unit can control whether each antenna offers a 2G, 3G, or 4G signal.
The antennas also do "beam forming"—fine-grained directional control over the radio signal—in both the horizontal and vertical dimension to better connect with local wireless devices. Alcatel-Lucent claims capacity improvements of 30 percent through the use of vertical beam-forming alone.
The end result of the system: lightRadio cell towers don't need huts, they don't need air conditioners and heaters, big amps, fans, or even local processing gear. Baseband processing moves closer to the data center model and gets cool new capabilities like CoMP and load-balancing. The system's cost savings come from power (Alcatel-Lucent claims a 50 percent reduction), along with lower construction and site rental fees. The total macro capacity of the system should double while cutting operator costs dramatically.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Was it invented by Tony Stark?
Look I had dental work today, I am very tired, and anxious and you come and piss on my extra F ?
The unmentioned advantage. Lower number of signals running across any one RF front end/antenna combo. In a large cell tower, the objective is to carry as many calls as possible from one site, this creates quite a few problems. High transmit powers combined with multiple signals generates intermodulation products that interfere with the performance of the RF front end. Designing to minimize the intermods is costly and difficult to test in production.
Switching to a smaller package that carries fewer calls per antenna at lower transmit powers, exponentially reduces the cost of the equipment.
My home has internet but really poor mobile phone coverage. It'd be nice to be able to buy a small cheap mobile phone "tower" that I could connect to my router, giving me and my neighbours better mobile phone coverage. I'd accept that it would be locked to some mobile phone provider or other, but I'm sure the provider wouldn't mind as I would be paying with my own money to extend their network coverage to fill in mobile phone shadow pockets that are too small for them to consider.
I figure that such a small, cheap device could be very useful in the outback. Especially, if they could relay connections in an ad-hoc network (it would be fairly static) and be solar powered. Being in the outback, it would be unlikely that they'd be overloaded by usage, but could help save stranded people.
It would also be a cheaper solution to add to commercial aeroplanes. I'm sure they'd come in handy in many other situations too.
Like some other commenters, I have a problem with these units.
The most obvious interpretation of the sentence would be to look at how much CO2 a car produces per year. But since the mobile industry has an equivalent CO2 output equal to a number of cars per year, this ends up being an amount of CO2/year/year. Should I interpret this as the rate at which the Co2 emissions are growing then?
Alternatively, it could be the total CO2 output of a car during its lifetime, or the amount of CO2 produced in making a car. In these cases. Any way, either the sentence is wrong, or ambiguous. Now which is the right interpretation?
Mod this guy up! This is why we come to /.
This technology is superior to microcell because Wim Sweldens and his team are working on it. Sweldens is the premier world authority on compression technologies. Bank it!