Daria

Mobile Market in Sub Saharan Africa

2009-01-30T21:24:14+01:00

With a population of 650 million people in 43 countries and only 163 million mobile subscribers, Sub Saharan is one of the interesting markets for mobile network vendors. However the main reason for why only 25% of population have a cell phone is poverty as 51% of population live bellow poverty line. About 300 million people earn less than 1 dollar per day and 200 million less than 2 dollars per day.

Main 3G vendors in Sub Saharan are Ericsson and NSN. For 2G networks, Ericsson has the biggest market share and Moto, ALU, NSN and Huawei (and ZTE) share the rest.

MTN, Vodafone, Celtel, Etisalat, Orange and Millicom are all carriers in Sub Saharan.

Some of the countries have 3G networks and some only 2G. Some of countries with 3G networks are; Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, Namibia and Kenya.

Landline or cell phone?

2008-12-18T00:09:37+01:00

Today an article in cellular news says that the percentage of only cell phone households in US has increased to 18%.

The same trend is obvious in Europe as well. Many people specially young people and high educated singles prefer to have only cell phones. For youngs the main reason is the economy. Many high educated singles do not use landline phones much and eventually these devices become useless.

Also just like many developing countries there people with low income usually own cell phones instead of landline (due to bringing cable to the area is costly), people with low income in developed countries prefer to have only cell phones and cut the cost for landline.

Not strange that landline is on its way out. Today people are carrying their cellphones everywhere. It is not expansive to call and it is very easy to get a subscription. Along with the fact that a cell phone is much more than a phone; it is your (video) camera, your watch, your calender, your calculator, your photo album, your address book, your internet browser, your notebook and more.

Thanks to handsfree devices, using cell phones has become very comfortable and talking on the phone is not an obstacle for doing something else(like driving) at the same time.

Mobile users have become so attached to their cell phones that it is not a surprise if mobile industry will fare in this hard economic times much better than other industries.

How long will WCDMA live?

2008-11-27T09:47:36+01:00

I had an interesting discussion for a couple of days ago about the future of WCDMA/HSPA/HSPA+. Will the technology live a long life or be pushed out by other RF technologies?

There are operators (specially in emerging countries) who believe that the future belongs to GSM and LTE. They believe that GSM will survive because it is the best option for speech, both when it comes to quality and cost. Most of the mobile operators have wide GSM installed base and can use it for many years ahead. However GSM technology does not fulfill the requirements for today's advanced data applications. LTE and LTE advanced with data speed over 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps are the best options here.

If this scenario becomes a reality then vendors must not only have SDR units in the base station but also RNC must be reconfigurable to BSC and/or eNB when the time is in. Big challenge!

LTE Physical Layer

2008-10-19T20:31:49+02:00

LTE is estimated to be commercially available in end of 2009/ beginning of 2010. Qualcomm pushes for UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband), Intel for WiMax and Ericsson for LTE. Some believe vendors are pressing operators for new technologies like LTE just to earn more money. But many of today's end-users have high demand on quality and latency when using mobile applications. LTE offers 100 Mbps in downlink and 50 Mbps in downlink. End user Latency is bellow 10 ms. These are very good figures for applications like online interactive gaming and VoIP.

LTE Physical Layer:

Transmission bandwidth: It can vary between 1.4 to 20 MHz with sub-carrier spacing of 15 KHz.

Duplexing Techniques: To support transmission on paired and unpaired spectrum, FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) and TDD (Time Division Duplex) are supported.

Multiple Access Schemes: MSC for LTE in Downlink is OFDMA (Orhogonal Frequency Multiple Access) and for Uplink is SC_FDMA (Single Carrier Frequency Division Multi Carrier).

Modulation and Coding: Like HSPA, LTE uses AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding). Examples are QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM, Zadoff-chu.

Poverty

2008-10-16T07:42:40+02:00

It is difficult for me to write about poverty and mobile wireless in the same post so I decided to focus on poverty in this one.

I ask myself many questions everytime I think about poverty and how life can be so unfair to some people. Most of the time I can not find any answer but still keep asking myself same questions again and again. What is good about it is that by asking these questions I do not allow myself to become indifferent.

Knowing how life can be difficult for some people, does not remind me about how lucky I am, it makes me sad and disappointed. Of course I am thankful for what I have but I don't want to forget about those who have to survive everyday.

When I see kids growing up at streets, I ask myself what these little angels have done for wrong to grow up like this? Nothing,it is just their destiny. They just don't know anything better. what are their chances to get a better future? Not much, isn't it obvious? They never get a chance to go to school. Who is willing to give them a job when they have grown up? How can they get out of the situation they was born in and never asked for?

I wonder how they can go to sleep at nights when they are hungry and how their beautiful faces can smile when they are carrying so much pain inside? How they get strength to start a new day when there is not much hope around.

Let's do more than thinking and take one step further. Being a "father" to kids who need one is an effort which does not take much of our time and resources. By helping at lest one kid, we can make a better world.