Richard Hanscott, vice president of NEC Europe's Network Solutions, talks to Electronics Weekly about how the explosion in mobile data traffic is moving the market to LTE deployment.
1. What are the growth areas in wireless in 2010?
In 2010, Google's entry into the smartphone market will no doubt fuel demand for smartphone access to ubiquitous but bandwidth-hungry content services such as YouTube and Facebook.
However, exponential data usage has not translated into greater revenues for mobile operators. They face the perfect storm of competitive market pressures on prices, the global economic downturn and high expectations from users.
Savvy mobile operators will continue to transform their networks into a packet-based infrastructure that is capable of delivering a huge growth in capacity at lower incremental cost.
2. Can you comment on the state of the emerging femtocell market?
Throughout 2010, the industry will see more and more operators deploying residential and enterprise femtocell networks.
To date, femtocells have been largely dedicated devices attached to existing access networks. As the market develops, femtocells will be integrated into residential and business gateways as a standard feature.
One of the main concerns of operators has been to understand the business case. As volumes increase, the overall cost of femtocell is aligning with requirements, strengthening the business case for high-performance indoor coverage.
3. What is the significance of femtocells for LTE?
It is imperative to the success of LTE that femtocell is at the heart of the operator strategy, even to the point of advocating femtocell-only LTE networks. Deploying LTE as a micro/pico/femto network would make it simpler, cheaper and faster to deploy than a macro network.
Given the high cost of outdoor/macro, one plausible deployment option is LTE Femtocell, which also offers benefits such as "pay as you grow" and will reduce backhaul and operational expenditure costs associated with managing large
macro cells.
4. How important will WiMax be?
In western Europe, WiMax as a technology has been somewhat muted. It still has a place for the developing markets where infrastructure is thinner on the ground - and in the air.
5. What impact did the 2009 downturn have on the industry?
The 2009 downturn coincided with and fuelled the relentless competition for mobile broadband. Web 2.0 and content services such as Facebook and YouTube created high expectations among consumers for fast upload and download services.
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