MWC: Seeking US, European harmony on 700 MHz

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The GSM Association today used the sizable pulpit of his organization’s Mobile World Congress to plead with regulators in Europe to make 700 MHz spectrum available for wireless use. While the GSMA is looking to free up a particularly tasty frequency band for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks, a worldwide move toward 700 MHz would bring another consequence: the first harmonization of spectrum between North America and Europe.

There are already 80 million subscribers using mobile broadband services globally, said Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer for the GSMA. Though an impressive number, it’s still a tiny percentage of the 4 billion mobile connections around the world. To turn mobile users into mobile broadband users, the industry will need gobs of spectral resources, O’Hara said. As Europe prepares for its own DTV transition, similar to the one engulfing the US today, 400 MHz of prime high-propagation spectrum will be freed up. Carriers aren’t greedy, O’Hara said; they’ll just take a quarter of it.

“We’re looking for 100 MHz of that spectrum,” O’Hara said. “We want to send a message that if you make that spectrum available, the industry will invest.”

The US has already completed its 700 MHz auctions, and AT&T and Verizon Wireless have both revealed their intentions to rollout LTE, the global 4G standard, over the former analog TV airwaves. Upon announcing its plans for LTE, Verizon’s Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch said the operator was abandoning the CDMA evolution path and siding with the GSM standard in an effort to harmonize its networks with the rest of the world. At the time, Lynch was only part right.

While LTE would put Verizon on the same standards path as its partial parent Vodafone and its main competitor AT&T—not to mention hundreds of other global operators—Verizon and AT&T would still be isolated by frequency. European operators are looking at almost every frequency available to them for LTE, including 2G and 3G spectrum as well as new licenses being auctioned off at 2.6 MHz, but none of them are anywhere near the band over which Verizon and AT&T will deploy their networks.

From an infrastructure perspective, there is little impact; vendors can simply retune their base stations for the frequency discrepancy. But on the device side, the band differences become more pronounced. GSM and UMTS handset makers are forced to embed multiple radios into their devices, raising the cost of materials, if they want to target both North America and the rest of the world. As 4G drives wireless into more consumer electronics devices, the problem becomes exacerbated as margins shrink and wireless connectivity becomes only part of the value of the device. If the GSMA can convince European regulators to open up 700 MHz, it would create the first pan-Atlantic harmonization of a mobile frequency band. While device makers would likely still have to make dual-band devices to account for the differences at 3G, there would be one less 4G radio to embed.

The GSMA is probably less concerned about Verizon and AT&T joining the global club than it is about getting access to the unique characteristics of 700 MHz. At such a low frequency, signals propagate further and punch through pesky walls, making it particularly attractive for non-urban deployments. The GSMA goes so far as to estimate that an LTE network at 700 MHz would be 70% cheaper to deploy than an LTE network at 2.1 GHz, the current global 3G band.

While Lynch will take the stage at MWC tomorrow to reveal Verizon’s LTE vendors and global harmonization plans, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega was in the spotlight in Barcelona today speaking on a different kind of harmonization. He decried not only the fragmentation in the market around operating systems and handsets but also in application development and distribution, as demonstrated at the Congress itself with the proliferation of platform-specific application stores. De la Vega said the industry, instead of innovating as a whole, is producing pockets of innovation that will ultimately check the industry’s growth. His advice was for the industry to standardize around a few common application programming interfaces (APIs) that would allow developers to design a product once and have it work across multiple platforms.

Related stories:

What the ITU means to you

The 700 MHz Waiting Game