Day 4 – ending with the Network Evolution

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

After my morning of a lackluster LTE session, and hopeless bargaining for an LG 3D tablet, I headed to lunch.

Lunch was of the liquid variety today to match the weather; soup, that is. I did not want to eat any crunchy bread even though it tastes great. After this sustenance, I decided to return to the afternoon session of the Network Evolution workshop things. Hopefully topics will stay on track.

This was billed as a panel session with an opening expectation-setting presentation by Vodafone. This had the usual themes that have been running through the conference. The features identified early for LTE development were: Voice must still be supported (hmm, seems they missed that one since VoLTE is realistically still 12 months away), All-IP, QOS support, Roaming, Ease of Implementation and the Use of HD codecs for the video/voice delivery.

The nice quote here was that the killer app was the internet itself, which for LTE will be the case. The usual facts and figures were thrown out by the panelists who came from CSL, Samsung, Cisco, Google and Ericsson. The one not heard before is that 35% of internet users will be mobile-only by 2015.

One of the biggest things seems to be how voice will be carried, and with Google present, the drive seems to have been trying to understand whether or not voice would be over the top as in Google voice, or more traditional VoIP or even back to circuit-switched devices. In practice, all types will be used depending on the operators requirements and service agreements. This session was only about 1 hour but it could have been made longer to cover all the aspects related to next gen networks. Although again the focus was on LTE.

The final session of the conference was supposed to address future architectures. Interesting you might think – see where things are going and what will I be doing in 2020?

The first presentation by Qualcomm highlighted the fact that silicon processing technology had so far kept pace with the demands made on it by the wireless industry. The actual die size going from 2G to 4G (sorry) has remained about the same, however the line widths on that die surface have not. The next gen LTE chips due at the end of this year will move to an even denser technology and reduce the power footprint by quite a bit. They will also consolidate the integration of LTE FDD and TDD into one chip. Now you can really roam between different types of LTE networks – the first time this has ever been possible in a single chipset.

Then followed a presentation on IPv4 and migration to IPv6. In case anyone is unaware of the fact, IANA officially handed over the last block of IPv4 address this month (Feb 2011). From about 2012, we will have to start offering IPv6 addresses. No need to worry about exhausting IPv6 addresses, unless they are maintained badly, as IPv6 can be used to address just about every grain of sand on planet earth. This is similar to the Y2K problem a decade ago. If your equipment is relatively new then switching to IPv6 should not be a problem.

It is the older machines that may not be able to support IPv6. Although LTE is written for IPv6, a lot of the units it will interconnect are still IPv4. This may cause problems unless step are taken to reduce the risk and plan ahead when deploying IPv6 and LTE. At this point, the big hand was on 12 and the little hand was on 4 and I called it a day. I headed out into the rain and towards the underground station for the last time, only to be met by a crowd of protesting Movistar (Spanish mobile operator) employees, no idea what they were protesting – they were loud but peaceful.

Stay tuned for my summary and more pictures.

Previous posts:
Day 4 at MWC – Less LTE, but that LG 3D Android tablet!
More on Day 3
Long Live LTE!
Pictures: Mobile World Congress exhibits
Street pics and schwag from MWC
Day 2 p.m., device liability and putting the cloud to work
Day 2, a.m. – No-Kill Apps and a totally mobile company
Video from Gemalto about Wi-Fi roaming
All about Android – Exhibits at MWC
Getting to Mobile World Congress
Morning of Day 1 at the Mobile World Congress

 

Tags: LTE, mobile device, mobile workforce