Bandwidth is our friend
17 January 2011
Italian high-speed trains are now capable of supporting all of the passengers’ communications needs – from simple phone calls to downloading movies to the laptop.
Nothing ground-breaking in this, but Bob Saffern, Chief Technology Officer of CommScope – who worked with Italian train and telecom companies to fulfil the project – assured me that it is no mean feat either. Regulating the signal as (what is effectively) an RF cage, rattles through the countryside from one base station to another at 300km per hour takes a blend of sophisticated hardware and software combined with considerable experience. CommScope, through its Andrew Solutions division, has specialised in such projects over recent years.
Projects that CommScope are involved with are those where there is a huge density of people – large buildings for example, or sports and concert arenas – where a single base station will not provide the necessary bandwidth, particularly when there are spikes of activity. By distributing antennae around the site, linked to a central ‘hub of base stations’, it is possible to create far higher capacity.
This demonstrates the changed emphasis that the telecom operators now have. Whereas previously it was ‘coverage’ it is now ‘capacity’. Coverage, on my network in the UK at least, is not perfect. I still lose signal in railway tunnels – another application incidentally for CommScope’s specialisation – but on the whole I can use my phone anywhere in the UK. On New Year’s Eve, in London, there wasn’t a hope of trying to get a text message through to friends or family at the stroke of midnight, so I gave up until the following day. While this was an understandable surge in capacity, we, as users of mobile electronics, are becoming less understanding when our gadgets don’t work and so the operators have to respond. It is not surprising that Bob Saffern commented: “Bandwidth is our friend!”
On top of this we do of course have more devices that we need to communicate, too. It wasn’t that long ago that the telecom operators could look at market penetration of 70, 80, or 90%. But now that many of us have more than one device, indeed many have more than one phone, the penetration has reached an intuitively impossible 200 or 300%.
What will place an even greater load on capacity will be the rise of machine to machine (M2M) communications. This includes any device that automatically extracts data or has control over any other device and the applications cover every sector of the electronics market. Current predictions are that this will triple to 200 million units by 2014 (according to ABI research). Mats Norin, Head of Mobile Broadband Modules at Ericsson recently went much further when he predicted: “Ericsson envisions 50 billion connected devices by 2020. Everything that benefits from a network connection will have one.”
My point this week is that the work of the electronics manufacturing industry will never be done. I looked at the ‘exciting’ announcements from last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and was slightly underwhelmed. Some great (and undeniably desirable) 3D TVs, smartphones and tablet PCs etc, but the products themselves seemed derivative and their markets were replacement rather than new. But a broader look at the M2M market and the infrastructure requirements it will bring demonstrate that there is plenty for electronics manufacturers to aim for in the coming years.
Contact Details and Archive...
Most Viewed Articles...