Business Line Meaningful use of Internet is key challenge. Photo by Bijoy Ghosh

Pressure of 4G Consumption has Operators Redesigning Unlimited Data Offerings

It could be considered a sign of the times – 4G times – where the demand for bandwidth has finally exhausted supply.  It may also be an indication that the time has come for mobile network operators to take a deeper look at ways to monetize in a 4G world.  Regardless of perspective, the reality is that the days of “unlimited” mobile data plans are numbered.

AT&T recently announced that it would be implementing bandwidth throttling for “grandfathered” unlimited mobile data customers who exceed usage limits within a billing cycle.  While throttling is not a new concept for AT&T, which began to throttle back its top 5% of bandwidth consumers in 2011, the new policy it has adopted is much less ambiguous and is likely to be better understood by customers.  The change will see customers of AT&T’s unlimited data plans having their throughput reduced if their data consumption exceeds 3GB for 3G/4G smartphones or 5 GB for 4G LTE smartphones.  Customers will be notified by text message the first time they exceed these limits.  AT&T stopped offering unlimited data plans to new customers in 2010.

Cavium will demonstrate a line-rate LTE ... Gateways, WiMax base stations and ASN Gateways. Providers of next-generation mobile networks are being challenged to handle the explosive increase in traffic because of the fast adoption of mobile broadband ...

AT&T is urging New York metro area customers with phones that run on its 2G network to upgrade their devices as it prepares to repurpose its spectrum for newer services.

De Lange spoke with Wireless Week about the company's turnaround strategy, network intelligence technology and net neutrality regulations. Here's an edited transcript of their discussion.

This year’s key infrastructure theme is the move towards far smaller cells for LTE, and the deconstruction of the RAN. Alcatel-Lucent stole the thunder at Mobile World Congress last month with its lightRadio launch, while Nokia Siemens has now detailed its own response, Liquid Radio. Both address the trends to small cells, integrated radio/antenna units and virtualized baseband processing. Yet their vision is not being met with excitement in all quarters.Huawei and Ericsson have not yet unveiled such advanced roadmaps, so it is predictable that they would dismiss the ALU and NSN platforms as “concepts”, and push less radical small cell solutions that can be deployed now. But their concerns are echoed by some carriers too, notably Sprint’s SVP Bob Azzi and Verizon’s CTO Tony Melone, both speaking on a panel at last week’s CTIA Wireless show. They agreed that the ‘lightweight radio’ idea was interesting but, at this stage, overhyped, especially the notion that cell towers might be made redundant any time soon. "It will evolve, but I don't see it as transformational. I see it as evolutionary," Melone said. And while his counterpart at AT&T, John Donovan, praised the concept of a centralized ‘Cloud RAN’, he said the technology was not ready yet. “I don't have any of them in my plan for this year. I'm not retiring cell towers," he said.Nonetheless, the cloud RAN idea is being embraced more enthusiastically by some major carriers such as Orange and China Mobile, and so far the new 4G network is being driven strongly by ALU and NSN, both of which badly need to make up ground on Ericsson’s leadership and Huawei’s rapid expansion. While lightRadio was the most prominent infrastructure launch of Mobile World Congress, Nokia ...

LTE-Advanced managed to take a prominent role at last week’s Mobile World Congress, even though it is not yet officially a standard, and its predecessor is only deployed in a dozen places. The wireless community took a significant step to putting the first of these right last Friday, when it agreed on the final specs for the purportedly 1Gbps system. After five days of talks in Taipei, about 800 representatives from vendors, carriers and other mobile players agreed on the technical details of the standard – officially 3GPP Release 10 - which will now be submitted to the body for final approval, hopefully in late March at a US-based meeting. “Despite some hopefully minor exceptions, the freeze date is therefore March 2011,” said the 3GPP. There were also discussions about patents and cross-licensing, though harmony on those subjects may be more elusive than on specs. Companies like ZTE, Huawei and Ericsson, and institutions like Korean research body ETRI, have already claimed significant IPR. And despite high profile demonstrations, most carriers will not deploy the new platform until towards the end of the decade, and for now, are preoccupied with ensuring a return on their investment in the first round of LTE. The next LTE specification has already been accepted by the ITU as an official IMT-Advanced platform, along with WiMAX2. These technologies are supposed to achieve 1Gbps on the downlink when stationary and 100Mbps when mobile, plus 200Mbps on the uplink. Of course, it remains to be seen just how ideal the conditions need to be to make that happen in real life. To deliver 1Gbps speeds, an operator would need 40MHz of spectrum and 8×8 MIMO antenna arrays (or about 100MHz of spectrum without MIMO). It is clear, however, that the appetite for ‘true 4G’ (as opposed to the ...

Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom-Orange to explore potential areas of cooperation for customer benefit.

New switching options help service providers meet growing demand for wireless data services while reducing network ... to wireless backhaul. * “LTE will soon become the mobile industry technology standard for mobile devices and mobile broadband ...

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Bright Side of News* (blog)Guide: Why LTE is Better Than GSM and CDMABright Side of News* (blog)BSN* evaluated the Samsung Craft on a MetroPCS 4G network in California and we'll be pushing out a detailed analysis shortly.and more »

Bouygues Telecom’s mobile network covers 99% of the population. Its 3G+ network provides mobile Internet ... broadband internet (ADSL, FTTH) customers worldwide. Orange is one of the main European operators for mobile and broadband internet services and ...

Feb. 3, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Thanks to the explosive demand for iPads and smartphones, the mobile Internet, video and cloud computing are today's fastest-growing telecom services ... backhaul networks and support thousands of 2G, 3G or LTE cell ...

OTTAWA – February 2, 2011 – Bridgewater Systems (TSX: BWC), the leader in intelligent broadband ... only virtual network operator that provides M2M services to leading Tier 1 operators worldwide; Convergent Quota Management Across 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi and ...

Bridgewater Announces 15 New Policy Wins in 2010Trading Markets (press release)... by a leading M2M mobile data-only virtual network operator that provides M2M services to leading Tier 1 operators worldwide; o Transformation to 4G LTE: ...and more »