The heterogenous network will eventually allow our devices to connect to Wi-Fi and cellular networks simultaneously, but first those networks need to coordinate with one another. Read more »
The Swedish networking firm and China Mobile have launched a commercial trial of Ericsson’s City Site package. It provides a good hint of the sort of street furniture ‘network densification’ may require. Read more »
AT&T will invest $14 billion in its networks as it tries to maximize the use of LTE in combination with small cells. By the end of 2014, the carrier expects to blanket 300 million people with this approach, which includes more than 1,000 distributed antenna systems. Read more »
The demand for mobile data is increasing at an amazing rate. A challenge of this magnitude needs more resources and, more importantly, radically new ways of acquiring, deploying, managing and optimizing these resources. Qualcomm’s Prakash Sangam looks at what’s needed to keep up. Read more »
Sprint is selected two of its small cell manufacturers, Samsung and Alcatel-Lucent, which happen to be the same suppliers building its big macro networks. If vendor number three Ericsson also scores a win, Sprint’s heterogenous network will be very vendor homogenous. Read more »
The U.K.’s O2 has launched a 100-hotspot Wi-Fi network just in time for the Olympics, offering up its capacity to all takers gratis. But there’s something else under the hood of these Ruckus access points: a slot waiting for a future O2 small cell. Read more »
You don’t make the decision to wind down a 130-year-old business without a little bit of angst, said Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson, reflecting on his company’s decision to end a joint partnership with Sony last year in a GigaOM interview Tuesday. Read more »
Sprint plans to make an aggressive use of small cells in its future LTE network, launching tens of thousands of tiny high-capacity base stations in high-traffic indoor and outdoor areas in 2013 and 2014.The end goal of Sprint’s small cell efforts is a heterogeneous network. Read more »
The mobile industry is counting on future wireless networks being heterogeneous: complex multi-layered systems of overlapping big and small cells, pumping out cheap bandwidth. But to arrive at hetnet we first need to figure out how to link all of those small cells together. Read more »
ABI Research estimates there will be more LTE microcells in place than actual LTE base stations by 2014. There’s good reason to believe the forecast: For a heterogeneous network with wide coverage, the number of microcells will have to far outweigh the number of base stations. Read more »
The industry has moved beyond starry-eyed soothsaying about a world of 50 billion connected devices to start talking about how these mammoth networks of objects and appliances would actually work and how they would be managed. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Verizon has seen the future of cellular networking — and it doesn’t look much different from today. In an FCC filing, Verizon dismissed a bevy of new wireless technologies and claimed the only way it can grow capacity is to layer more airwaves onto its current networks. Read more »
At MWC, Nokia Siemens Networks plans its most ambitious mobile network design yet: a system of 100 small cells that behaves like a single cell site. This has huge implications for the heterogeneous networks of the future, which aim to create a sea of cheap bandwidth. Read more »
At this year’s Mobile World Congress, you would expect LTE to hog the spotlight, but LTE might find itself overshadowed by a less sexy technology: Wi-Fi. As telecom vendors prep their new porfolios for MWC in two weeks, there is a preponderance of Wi-Fi products. Read more »
