Connectivity Technology Blog

With the 5G and NB-IoT hype in full swing, people can be forgiven when they think that NB-IoT is the dominant technology for the Internet of Things. More shocking for some people is the fact that there are no 50 billion IoT devices yet , even when non-cellular IoT technologies are included. At the recently concluded 5G Techritory conference, Jans Jelinskis, Technical Director, 1NCE highlighted the fact that finally, customers are coming round to the idea that there will be no 2G network in the future, so the future of cellular IoT will be 4G. While many of the existing IoT requirements are still getting satisfied by the 2G simplicity, plan B also includes other non-cellular LPWA IoT technologies like LoRaWAN & Sigfox. Time will tell which of these will succeed and which of them will disappear into oblivion. Here is the video of the talk Related Posts :  The 3G4G Blog: Are there 50 Billion IoT Devices yet? Connectivity Technology Blog: The Potential of Connectivity Technologies ...

For a very long time, Internet of Things or IoT has been promised to revolutionise the world and solve many of the issues with ARPU and Monetization that many operators are facing. Many of the predictions have yet to come pass but nevertheless, IoT is a promising technology.  While we are now conditioned to just think about 4G & 5G for everything, IoT is a very wide topic and there are a variety of technologies that help solve some or the other issue. While NB-IoT and LTE-M are catching on, the majority of Cellular IoT is still based on 2G / GSM. It is increasingly looking like a 2G+4G+5G world as IoT will ensure 2G is not shut off everywhere #2G3Gshutdown https://t.co/3hegU4AzPw — Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) February 12, 2021 This is a misleading title @Telecomwaring - China Mobile had 884 million IoT customers at the end of 2019. According to @CounterPointTR some 95 million were on NB-IoT ( https://t.co/KS9ilaA23h ) so nearly 750 million+ on GSM / 2G - migration will take a ...

Last year we wrote about how Rakuten and Vodafone have joined forces by becoming lead investors in a venture to extend mobile coverage to more people and devices across the planet, using the first mobile broadband network that will be broadcast directly from space .  In our earlier blog post , we mentioned how AST & Science's SpaceMobile will beam 4G / 5G directly to devices. In the recent investor presentation deck, they claim that the satellites will be able to provide all generations of mobile cellular technology; 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G and even NB-IoT.  The Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, when launched, will be at 700km altitude which will allow them to offer a far lower latency as compared to MEO/GEO satellites. The low and mid-band spectrum would be shared with wireless partners on non-interference basis. Put simply, the satellites would use the spectrum from the operator as it is the most expensive resource otherwise. Back in December, Reuters reported : Satellite network...

Satellite connectivity is an interesting topic that I have covered in this and other blogs. It becomes quite useful in mobile cellular communications when it is used as backhaul from bringing connectivity to rural & remote locations, in addition to serving as an alternative backhaul for emergency and mission critical communications. YadaCenter has an in-depth tutorial on Satellite Cellular Backhaul which is embedded below. While the video below is very much 2G centric, the fundamentals remain the same when we move to 4G & 5G. My slides on "A very short introduction to Satellite Communications" from @net_mcr are available to download from: https://t.co/K2AOPOI8II #4G #LTE #5G #satellites #satellitecommunications #missioncriticalcommunications — Andy Sutton (@960sutton) August 13, 2020 Prof. Andy Sutton recently shared a short introduction to satellite communications. While I was not able to find the video, the slides are available here . Rela...

We have seen on this blog many different companies working to beam ordinary 4G/5G from satellites to space. One new company that came to my attention is Lynk Global (Lynk) that plans to do something similar using nano satellites from the space. To their credit, they have just transmitted an SMS from a LEO satellite to a normal, unmodified mobile phone. Their website says : Lynk’s business is to provide everywhere connectivity directly to the existing 5.2 billion mobile phone users on the planet, and to billions more who will now have a compelling reason to buy a mobile phone. Today’s mobile phone users pay more than $1 trillion a year in total for service. Yet on average, at any given moment, about 750 million phone owners have no connectivity because they live, work or travel outside the range of a ground-based cell tower. Another 2.5 billion people don’t have phones, many because they lack affordable connectivity. The economics of ground-based cell towers make it cost prohi...

GSMA published their global Mobile Economy report recently. While there were not many surprises for me as I have used it over the years for various presentations and reports, others may be a bit surprised, especially with all the hype around 5G. Before we jump into the numbers, the chart that caught my eye is as shown above. Coverage gap is easy to understand because these are the people / areas that have no coverage. The usage gap defines people who are in a region covered by some or the other technology but are not connected. There could be various factors in play because of affordability or no need, etc. The report states that there were 8.0 billion cellular connections (excluding IoT) in 2019 and this will increase to 8.8 billion by 2025. Looking at the mobile connections worldwide, we see that in 2025, there will still be around 5% of the users using 2G (mainly GSM) technology. While this may sound like a small number, this is still roughly 440 millions users worldwide. ...

In the recent Telecom Infra Project Summit 2019, there was an announcement about the launch of Non-Terrestrial Connectivity Solutions Group that will explore how Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) will co-exist with Terrestrial Networks and what is required for it to work just out of the box. This group is being led by Vodafone and Telefónica. The group will be working on 2 initial use cases: Connecting the Unconnected Emergency Relief There are some very aggressive timelines for the project as lab trials are proposed for Q4 2020 and live pilots by Q2 2021. There are many challenges that need to be overcome as a part of this project to have a solution that is portable and available in a box that could be easily transported and be set-up in a very short time. One of the solutions I was involved in, with UK MNO EE is described here . Another thing worth remembering, especially as one of the goals of this group is to connect the unconnected, a legacy technology like 2G or 3...

Here is an old tutorial explaining high level mobile network architecture, starting from GSM and then looking at GPRS, UMTS, LTE & 5G. Slides and video below High-level architecture of Mobile Cellular Networks from 2G to 5G from 3G4G Related links : Free 2G, 3G, 4G & 5G Training Videos 5G (IMT-2020) Wireless 5G vs 4G: what is the difference?

In January 1985 the UK launched its first mobile networks. Now, thirty years on, many people and companies in the UK have been celebrating this enormous achievements and advances that have been made since then and which have seen the mobile evolve from a humble telephone into the multimedia pocket computer which has become such an essential part of modern life. It was simply not possible in 1985 to envisage a country that would be able to boast more active mobile phones than people or to have along the way clocked up several world firsts, and be now leading on the deployment of 4G and shaping the future 5G technologies. Back in 2015, University of Salford organised a seminar to mark 30 years of mobile networks in the UK. Speakers from the 4 UK MNOs, EE, Vodafone, Three, O2 and other contributors pieced together a ‘phenomenal story’ of the mobile phone at MediaCity campus on Saturday, September 12, to mark three decades of the technological revolution in the UK. The talks are em...

GSMA recently released couple of reports on Sub-Saharan Africa. The Mobile Economy Report (including the Infographic above) and  5G: laying the foundations report . The interesting bit was the technology popularity in the region. This can be seen in the picture below. 2019 is the year when 3G overtakes 2G and in 2023, 4G will overtake 2G. What should be remembered here is that in 2025, there will roughly be 1.04 billion connections. So in 2025, nearly 620 million 3G connection, 120 million 2G connections, 230 million 4G connections but only 30 million 5G connections. The 5G report details the number of IoT connections. There will be 332 million connections, 130 million in the consumer segment while 202 million in the enterprise. My guess will be that the majority will still be 2G in 2025, with LTE-M and NB-IoT just starting to become noticable. The final chart that is interesting is the backhaul that is used in different parts of the world. In SSA there is hardly a...