Slashdot Mirror
London Needs 70,000 Cells For 4G
judgecorp writes "How many cells does it take to cover a city? In London's case, it will take 70,000 cells by 2015 for the next-generation LTE network needed for 4G mobile broadband, according to a calculation from PicoChip. A shame that's too late for 2012, when Mayor Boris Johnson warns that mobile data demands during the Olympics may overload the current 3G network"
Why isn't P2P used in cellphone networks?
A shame that 70000 cells are not rolled out by 2012?
I would call that wise money management, given how many 4G terminals there will be available (i.e. few) sompared to the number of 3G devices.
Better to build WiFi / 3G picocells for the Olympic' hotspots.
... too bad they aren't self replicating. so a-sexual like.
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
FTA: "Femtocell maker Picochip says London needs large numbers of micro cell towers by 2015" and "Dr Pulley’s report also stated that there needs to be in excess of ten million small cells worldwide by end of 2015". Now why would a maker of small cells say that?
The gear exists to create a femto-cell in your home where you reroute your phone over your ADSL/cable. I often wondered, why don't they allow strangers to jump on the unused bandwith? Say I have a 10 MBit subscription, but my modem can handle 20. Why doesn't the telco open the remaining 10 for anybody comming by? Specially in downtown Londo where a lot of buildings must have direct fiber... Anybody can answer this?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
First it was microcells, then nanocells, now femtocells. What's next, QuantumCells? PlanckCells? Eesshh.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Umm ... because microcells, nanocells and femtocells are all different!
"Typically the range of a microcell is less than two kilometers wide, a picocell is 200 meters or less, and a femtocell is on the order of 10 meters"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picocell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocells
I thought this was about living biological cells. "70,000 by 2015" and now I'm really confused. Oh, I get it now. We are talking about cell phones.
Headline is wrong. 70,000 cells are needed if small cells are used rather than traditionally sized cells. This story is based on a report by a company that makes/sells small cells.
2M users and 70K cells for 1500km^2 of London?. I am pretty bad at math but I am not being paid to be bad at math. Sounds like they are projecting inflated costs to justify inflated usage fees. I know I am ready for total market de-regulation.
The London 3G network is already overloaded. Try places like Liverpool street or any other, it is a shame.
Furthermore, GSM, 3G, regulations etc do not allow the mobile to TX in the downlink band. A mobile is incapable of doing so, coz of filters in the TX path.
That actually exists :
http://www.computerwoche.de/netzwerke/mobile-wireless/2363195/
The calculation is probably correct assuming the whole city needs to be covered by small (femto/pico) cells, which is of course something that small cell vendor would like very much. In reality, many areas with relatively low population/phone density can probably be covered by a macro network and high density areas - shopping malls, apartment buildings, university campuses will need to be covered by femto or pico cells.
In reality, many areas with relatively low population/phone density can probably be covered by a macro network and high density areas - shopping malls, apartment buildings, university campuses will need to be covered by femto or pico cells.
Sure - there'll always be a mix of small and large cells. But most of London is "high density areas". And it can be very difficult/expensive to find good sites to put full sized cell towers. If you can put many smaller cells inside buildings etc, just like WiFi stations, then it'll probably save the carriers a lot of money.
The current deployment of BTSs for cell coverage needs a different approach.
Especially because in a crowded city like London, most of the BTSs would be femtocells or picocells.
If only a BTS would cost, say UKP 1,000 each, that coverage would cost UKP 70M, without counting the yearly maintenance costs.
For each non-virtual operator.
Unless we also start pushing for telecom infrastructure sharing.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
A shame that's too late for 2012, when Mayor Boris Johnson warns that mobile data demands during the Olympics may overload the current 3G network.
Gee, ya think?
Although, to be quite honest, there's no such thing as enough preparation/bandwidth/security/anything for an Olympics.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
What do you mean by P2P?
Point to point? That's already how cell phone networks connect - cell phone to cell site.
Peer to peer? That only works if the person you happen to call is very local, cell phones don't have the power to go far.
I think you probably meant to ask why not create a mesh network, and that brings up issues of security and power consumption, without really helping the bandwidth. (Power consumption, because it would require more phones to be actively operating, rather than being idle, to work).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If they disable their monitoring and eavesdropping software they'd save a little bandwidth.
London calling to the faraway towns
Now there's too much traffic and network goes down
London calling to old CGI Perl,
Come texting the shortcodes, all you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look at us
But that silly iPhone mania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no bling
'Cept for the ringtone that sounds like swing.
The tech age is coming, the screen is zooming in
Engines stop running and the bandwidth growing thin
A critical error, but I have no fear
London is lagging and I've spilled all my beer.
I am officially gone from
And you'll get the best wireless broadband coverage in the world
LOfuckingL
Loading...
Or do what I do and start posting more meaningful posts to bury the bad one and hope nobody notices.
Olympic site? I'm betting just a few thousand 4G cells could handle all the Olympic traffic.
In the United States, national carriers tend to have between 30,000 and 54,000 cell sites. While this document (http://www.sprint.com/whitepapers/dbdownload/HeavyReading_Assessment_of_Sprint_s_Network_Vision_Initiative_Dec2010.pdf?table=whp_item_file&blob=item_file&keyname=item_id&keyvalue='25625ay') is mostly about Sprint's network vision, but it also has estimates (page 13) of cell sites for all the national carriers ranging from 30,000 on the low end for Sprint's iDEN network to 54,000 on the high end for AT&T's network. Given that all of the national carriers tend to cover many major cities, it seems unlikely that London would need 70,000 cell sites for 4G.
This is an article from the point of view of a company that sells small cell sites. Putting 70,000 cells in London would mean putting 115.3 cells in every sq mi. That's one cell every 5.5 acres.
In Kansas City (US), I am one of the few people who actually get 4G at home with Sprint. If I'm in a moving car and I need to use the internet, I just turn off the 4G and use 3G because that's the only way to avoid apps saying "data connection lost". So I don't know if we need 70,000 cell towers but I do think what we have now is inadequate.
Oddly enough, Sprint still seems to be the best option because dropping down to 3G is better than being cut off altogether by a bandwidth cap. And keep in mind, this is the United States so when I do bandwidth tests on 4G, I'm getting around 1.9 megabits/second. As soon as I read somebody saying LTE is faster than home broadband, I knew that person was in another country.
+1 but can't moderate with this stupid hard drive.
If we assume that there are about 7 million people in london then that means that each cell serves about 100 people IF they all have 4g cellphones. For some reason this seems a bit off. Lets assume that adoption rates are 50% so that gives us 50 people per cell. 50*100Mb/s = 5Gb/s (assuming all users are mobile otherwise we are looking at 50Gb/s which is quite a load for a single cell but assumes that all the users are pulling the max data all the time). I'm not going to do the math for antenna space and bandwidth, but this [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=number%20of%20simultaneous%20connections%20to%20a%20single%20lte%20cell&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCsQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.motorola.com%2Fweb%2FBusiness%2FSolutions%2FIndustry%2520Solutions%2FService%2520Providers%2FWireless%2520Operators%2FLTE%2F_Document%2FStatic%2520Files%2F6834_MotDoc_New.pdf&ei=7PeETrGmIo24twemp_gu&usg=AFQjCNEQ5Y_VX896_PG2lJPZK3HviwzdDw&sig2=aDM8ApeoCYBEHMbDCqbDJA] PDF white paper seems to suggest that 200 connections per cell is about maximum. So, I'd say that their math is off somewhere even given reasonable QOS requirements and 50 concurrent users. Maybe they are defining London differently?
TL;DR bad math
Depends on what area you define as London. If you are using the area of Greater London, that that figure is more or less correct, but the London Metropolitan Region covers 3236 sq mi which works out to 21.6 cells per sq mi.
Only you don't require that kind of bandwith for talking. You require it for uploading to youtube.
You require heavy bandwidth for talking if you speak a sign language.