Wi-Fi, satellite break into cells

Wi-Fi, satellite break into cells
GENEVA — Frustrated by 3G's failure to deliver on its promise of a truly universal mobile-telecom system (UMTS), cellular operators are conceding the likelihood that 3G will need to be supplemented by other technologies to enable the services that consumers want at prices they can afford. Toward that end, developers are looking to integrate such alternatives as mobile satellite radio and Wi-Fi capability into mobile handsets and infrastructure.

Equating third-generation cellular with UMTS is "pure arrogance," wireless pioneer Martin Cooper, chief executive officer of ArrayComm (San Jose, Calif.), asserted here last week at the ITU Telecom World 2003 conference. Cooper, who invented the portable cell phone at Motorola in 1973, scolded the industry for entertaining the notion of a "one size fits all" solution. In fact, he said, "there are no applications that can be economically served by 3G today. We are still caught up in the hype."

Granted, hype is tough to avoid at ITU Telecom, a quadrennial International Telecommunication Union conference that has historically coalesced around a procession of hot ideas that, to varying degrees, quickly flamed out: ATM (1987), HDTV (1991), the Information Highway (1995), convergence (1999). This year, the buzz word is "ubiquitous," with an emphasis on multimode, multiradio mobile phones capable of intelligently navigating a seamless, universal network.

While the industry is clinging to that utopian goal, few now believe that 3G alone can realize it.

Consensus is emerging, for example, that Wi-Fi wireless LANs are not a competitor but a companion to 3G. Qualcomm Inc. CEO Irwin Mark Jacobs last week described the technologies as "complementary" and WLAN as "a supplement" to 3G wireless. Tadashi Onodera, president of Japanese mobile operator KDDI Corp., said WLAN is key to the company's "overlay approach to cover both fixed and mobile service."

And UMTS Forum chairman Jean-Pierre Bienaime, while insisting that UMTS offers more advantages over a large network of interconnected WLAN hotspots in terms of costs, area coverage and overall mobility, acknowledged that "many mobile operators are examining WLAN as a part of their service portfolio."

Shunning one-size-fits-all solutions, operators are augmenting their mobile nets to support multiband, multistandard services.

ArrayComm's proprietary i-Burst portable wireless data system is based on its own smart-antenna technology. ArrayComm successfully bid for 5 MHz of unpaired spectrum in Australia and subsequently signed up Vodafone Australia and OzEmail Australia to field commercial i-Burst services in that country starting next year. The company claims i-Burst can send data at 1 Mbit/second at a distance up to 5 km for a cost equivalent to digital subscriber lines. Designed for wireless Internet access on a PC, i-Burst will respond to the "needs of consumers frustrated with Internet access," Cooper said.

Chip support is coming for the initiatives. Qualcomm's Jacobs said his company began developing a Wi-Fi chip core a year ago and is working to cut the power and optimize the standby time. Wi-Fi integration is not a cost issue for handsets, Jacobs said; rather, it's a question of the cost of service-building access points and maintaining the network-and of who foots the bill.

A few mobile operators, meanwhile, are looking to mobile broadcast satellites to augment their cellular networks for delivering TV and music programs to handsets. South Korea's SK Telecom is unable on its own to deliver the cost its subscribers expect in streaming video to mobile-phone users, acknowledged chief technology officer Myung-sung Lee. Thus, it has teamed with Toshiba Corp., co-founder of Japan's Mobile Broadcasting Co. consortium and architect of the mobile satellite system MBC is promoting. MBC will share the satellite infrastructure cost with SK Telecom, and both entities will independently field subscription-based mobile TV and audio services built on the technology starting next spring.

Some in the European and U.S. industries don't share SK's ardor for adding TV reception to mobile handsets, calling TV-on-mobile a gimmick application that no self-respecting road warrior would want. Even some leading Asian mobile operators, notably Japan's NTT Docomo, aren't sure how one-way broadcasting fits their two-way cellular communication model.

TV-on-mobile will "surely trigger a battle over battery life and a battle over talk time," Docomo president and CEO Keiji Tachikawa told EE Times. "If customers get hooked on viewing TV on their handsets, they will make fewer phone calls and drain precious batteries on their phone."

In the opposing camp is NEC Corp., which last week announced a mobile handset with an analog TV receiver/tuner for Vodafone Japan. NEC did an extensive consumer study before developing a TV-equipped phone, said Akio Ogawa, senior manager of NEC's mobile-terminal operations unit in Tokyo. "We found TV at the top of the list of the consumers' most-wanted features," he said.

Vodafone Japan, which had a runaway success with its camera phones, has been looking for yet another handset feature to boost its customer base. For now, the company is betting on TV-on-mobile. Operators worldwide will be closely watching its results in coming months.

Shigekazu Hori, vice president and general manager of Toshiba Corp., believes TV on mobile phones is long overdue. "With telephones having gone mobile, audio systems having become Walkmans and PCs having turned into laptops, TV is the only device that hasn't gone outside the home," Hori said.

Hori acknowledged that camera phones are not generating much nonvoice traffic revenue for operators, since it's far too expensive for users to send digital photos over a cellular network. But many operators are driven by fear that if they miss a beat in the newest trend, they could lose their subscribers to others.

SK Telecom called the addition of mobile satellite broadcasting services the company's strategy for going "beyond 3G." Painting a future of diverse access networks and terminals, Lee said SK has "opted for delivering multimedia streams via broadcast, while using cell as a return path to basestations." SK Telecom learned through its experiences with 2.5G and 3G, he said, that "people will want to watch even five or 10 minutes of TV on their handset when they cannot be [home] in front of a TV."

A few chip companies are scrambling to support the trend. Leon Husson, executive vice president for consumer businesses at Philips Semiconductors, has called TV-on-mobile "one heck of a time killer application on a cell phone."

And Luis Pineda, vice president for marketing and product management at Qualcomm, said the company's chip division is investigating broadcasting applications and that its engineers are developing an architecture called "media flow," though he declined to provide details of the technology.

A few mobile handsets capable of receiving free-to-air analog terrestrial TV broadcasts are already popping up. Samsung announced a GSM/TV mobile handset at the conference.

But most Japanese consumer electronics companies are counting on terrestrial digital TV, scheduled for launch by year's end in Japan, to be the catalyst for TV-on-mobile. As a part of the terrestrial DTV standard, the Japanese industry agreed to set aside a 13th of the digital TV transmission band for mobile broadcasting to automobiles and mobile handsets. The industry projects that both mobile-TV service and DTV/mobile handsets will emerge in 2005.

At the conference, Sony showed off a miniature digital tuner module that measures 20 x 16 x 2 mm and draws 150 milliwatts. It integrates RF circuitry for the DTV tuner with an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing demodulation chip.

Similarly, Panasonic demonstrated a working prototype of a "chip-size mobile digital TV tuner." Drawing 200 mW, the device measures 20 x 28 x 2 mm-small enough to slip into an SD card, according to the company.

Matsushita, meanwhile, demonstrated a small, 50-mm antenna for receiving terrestrial mobile digital TV signals.

Even Docomo does not entirely dismiss the TV-on-mobile idea. "I don't think it would be too interesting to receive analog TV signals," Tachikawa said, "but mobile digital terrestrial TV is another story. We are more interested in delivering only snippets, or highlights, of what our customers may find interesting, rather than broadcasting everything."

Once mobile handsets are tailored to receiving digital TV signals, partitioning the digital processing task and reducing the power consumption within the handset will get easier, said Terence Dodgson, technology manager for advanced technology and standards at Samsung Electronics Research Institute (Middlesex, England). Today's GSM/TV phones are essentially two separate systems in one housing. But several R&D projects are under way in Europe to develop systems for bridging Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) and UMTS, Dodgson said.

A good example is the upcoming DVB-H (handheld) standard. Calling the project "quite a big development," Dodgson predicted that it would be at least four or five years before good commercial devices reach the market.