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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.
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.
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
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.
What doesn't these days?
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
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.
Seriously, is this actually an improvement?
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.
Why would you need to "esitmate the source of power"?
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
once again proving that the perfect (or the better) is the enemy of the good. First, you're using the article's unsourced ~15million cars stat, but let's just assume it is accurate.
If CAFE or a gas tax resulted in an emissions reduction of just 6% from registered vehicles in just the US that would offset the CO2 created to power all the cell towers in the entire world. The entire world. That is not an insignificant change.
Obviously a 6% reduction in emissions for coal power plants would be more significant. So you are right. But I don't think people who are concerned about CO2 emissions want to just stop at a gas tax. They're usually also proponents of tighter EPA regulations, cap and trade, and similar top-down programs to reduce emissions across the board.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
So the Internet is now a series of cubes?
Since when can we only work on one issue at a time? What kind of psycho would completely neglect one important "piece of pie" because another "pie slice" is 10% larger? What kind of psycho neglects thermal efficiency when comparing stationary power generation to ICE? or the ease and pace at which we replace ICE technology compared to coal plants? Why should we work on any earthly problems at all, when we all know the sun will die and matter will decay? Please go spend time ranting about things you know more about. Thanks.
Coal fired? They could quite possibly get their power from a coal power plant.
I've also seen many cell towers with diesel generators on them, but I would assume as a backup, because they're always off.
But cutting power usage is great for telcos, because it takes a chunk out of the relatively tiny amount of money they spend to keep their network running, it's a pure profit increase. This can translate directly into more high-class hookers and high-quality cocaine on the executives' megayachts.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.