Telecoms Tech

Those of us who have been in the wireless space for years take for granted that there is a spectrum shortage but the New York Times had a compelling story discussing how spectrum sharing and smart antennas will help alleviate the problem.

Wireless and WiFi network capacity is evolving too slowly to accommodate the surge in enterprise mobility, leading to declining user satisfaction levels, according to a new report.

The adoption of LTE networks will be rapid over the five years, driven largely by enterprise subscribers, but will only 6% of global subscribers by 2016, according to new research from the analyst firm Juniper Research. Subscriber numbers will reach 428m in the next five years, with rapid uptake beginning next year, it said. Many operators are already making preparations to hit their roll out targets.

Computing giant Hewlett Packard (HP) has reported a staggering dive in Q4 profits of 91% following a tough year that saw the manufacturer sack its CEO, then ditch its WebOS business in favour of a focus on software and cloud computing infrastructure. So where does the world’s largest technology company see itself heading now after a confusing twelve months?

Owing to the high peak and average speedsof LTE, high-speed backhaul links are essential to ensure that the capabilitiesof the LTE air interface can be fully utilized. A three sector eNode-B with a channelbandwidth of 20MHz in each sector can easily achieve peak datarates that arethree times 100 Mbit/s, that is, 300 Mbit/s in total.

UK households with home broadband connections download an average of 17 gigabytes of data a month. This is equivalent to watching 11 movies or 12 hours of pre-recorded television content.

In a speech yesterday, EU commissioner for information society Neelie Kroes announced some new proposals to boost investment in Next-Generation Networks. What the plan tries to do really is to reduce what the commission perceives as an excessive gap in short-term profitability between copper and fiber. Kroes seems to believe that this incentive will be enough for incumbents to make the jump and finally invest in their own future.

BT Broadband customers were left without internet access for over two hours yesterday after a "power failure" at a major exchange in Birmingham caused disruptions to its service.