What does O2’s CTO make of UMTS TDD, mobile TV, 3G femto cells and WiMax?
As O2 assembled media and analysts on Wednesday to tell the world that it, too, was going to be a converged fixed/mobile broadband operator, cto Dave Williams gave some good insights into his thinking about some of the hot technology around the industry at the moment. Williams said his job had always been to guide his company in backing winners or losers when it came to technology. There’d been a few hiccups, but generally Williams backed his track record in picking winners. So what are set to be Williams’ winners and losers of the future?
In-building
There was good news for ip.access and its backers as Williams was enthusiastically waving around one of ip.access’ 3G femto cells, which contains the PicoChip multi-core DSP hardware and modem software. Williams thinks there is great potential in in-home and in-building 2G and 2G coverage, integrated with a WLAN router, to provide free or very cheap mobile coverage for voice and data when within the home. The other upside for an operator is that it can of course effectively get its customers to pay for building out its own network.
Williams said the FemtoCell would auto-discover other neighboring cell sites, making sure the radio plans didn’t interfere with eachother, and registers directly back to the MSC over a DSL connection. Users can effectively be offered within the home using their existing handset.
With O2 having recently bought fast DSL provider Be, and looking to have more than half the population accessible through next year, the potential to create mini mobile hubs within the home clearly has Williams’ interest. He liked the fact that in-home 2G or 3G would be one way the operator could provide a fixed/mobile subsitution technology with existing handsets and networks, without having to invest in UMA, dual-mode solutions and handsets.
Although O2 has had success with the Genion home zone tariff in Germany, O2 execs don’t think there is enough of a differential in call costs to justify such a model in the UK – hence the attraction of the in-home hub.
We contacted ip.access to get their side of the story but they told us they are in a NDA with O2 and can’t say anything. Not that it appeared to stop Williams – although to be fair he didn’t go into any specifics about implementation or roll out.
UMTS 900
Another way to increase 3G coverage for less cost is to carry UMTS at the 900MHz band. Mobile Europe readers will know that O2 has been trialling this in its Isle of Man site, and Williams said that technically the trial is going very well. His concern, though, is freeing up sufficient capacity within its fully loaded 900MHz network to create room for the 5MHz carriers required for the 3G technology. But he said that stats coming off the edge of the cell sites showed the technology does work, and maps well to the GSM link budget at 900MHz. It will be capacity and regulatory issues that decide whether O2 can make use of the technology. The other issue is handsets, and Williams intimated that ideally handset manufacturers would be integrating UMTS 900MHZ chips within the handsets now, in order to be compatible when and if an operator wanted to turn on the technology.
Other things on the Williams tick list are HSDPA, which he likes a lot, and described as the “best, most cost efficient wide area wireless broadband technology” available at the moment. WiMax, he said, costs about the same but requires more spectrum, and is in his “watch but do not currently progress” column.
TV and TDD
Also under the watching brief are all the non DVB-H broadcasting options, including MediaFlo and T-DMB, which were mainly castigated for having no widespread handset or device support. Even further down the list, Williams doesn’t like UMTS-TDD because he thinks that it must inevitably interfere with the FDD spectrum at the handset level. It also suffers from a lack of vendor support, in his opinion. This is despite the fact that O2 parent company Telefonica is committed to a TDtv trial with three other operators.
O2 is pushing ahead with its Oxford-based DVB-H trial, however. Specifically, in the next stage the company will be looking at how it can add interactivity by blending broadcast TV with streamed video over 3G, possibly to support an enhanced advertising model. Ceo Peter Erskine admitted that advertising would fail unless advertisers saw direct response to their ads. Clearly there’s more chance of interactivity in the 3G space than broadcast, because ads can be more personally targeted. Erskine also said that the industry needs to lobby hard to free up UHF spectrum, without which DVB-H cannot work. He also said that he doubted that there would be room for more than a couple of networks using DVB-H to broadcast mobile TV.
Remember i-mode?
Conspicuous by its absence, at least until the Q&A session, was i-mode. Erskine intimated that it has been tougher to sign up subscribers than he thought, and said that the lack of a wide handset range had been the hardest thing, although with Samsung added to the range, he now has some non-Japanese handsets to sell. He did say that once users have an i-mode handset the subsequent revenue uplift is decent. But there was no further indication whether the i-mode bet would eventually be one of Williams’ winners or losers.