On 3G, 4G and LTE

Airtel has become the first telecom service provider to launch 4G-LTE services in India.

As expected of any 'early bird', the company has been aggresively promoting this with a tagline - "If your network is faster, we will pay your mobile bills for life.". This, coupled with a free offer to switch to a 4G SIM and avail higher network speeds at 3G rates, has been attracting customers in droves.

The process is quite simple for mobile phones. You just slip in a new SIM, send a text message to designated number and you are hooked to the 4G networks, wherever available. For devices that cannot sent text messages to Airtel (eg. iPads), the activation process takes a couple of hours.

I liked the simplicity of the process. On top of this, the new SIM cards do not have to be clipped to fit into a smartphone or tab. It now comes pre-punched in three sizes - normal, mini and micro. All you need to do is to push out the size that fits your device -- no more of those crude clipping and crimping tools.

Physical processes apart, the Airtel 4G campaign has one glaring omission -- none of the adverts put a number to their claims. Instead of clearly stating that connection speeds are above a certain threshold, they just rely on the general sloth in internet speeds that we have now come to take for granted in India.

So what exactly is '4G speed' supposed to be?

The benchmarks set by UN-ITU clearly states that 4G should have speeds ranging from 100 Mbps to 1Gbps. Actual speeds are anything but dazzling. In the Airtel showroom, the maximum speed I could get was 11 Mbps. Back home, the maxmum speeds dropped to 5Mbps. Then again the 4G connections were tenuous at best. The signals received by the mobiles seemed to keep changing, making the devices switch frequently between 3G and 4G

No wonder the wireless pipedream is also called Long Term Evolution (LTE). We still have a long-long way to go!

Speeds across the Gs (Source - https://sudhakarreddymr.files.wordpress.com) 

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LINKS

* Airtel 4G - http://www.airtel.in/4g/index
* 4G-LTE Status in India - https://www.thehdtimes.com/4g-lte-status-in-india/
* ITU paves way for 4G technologies - http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2010/40.aspx#.Ve3OBhGqqko
* TechAdvisor - difference between 4G and LTE - http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/feature/mobile-phone/whats-difference-between-4g-lte-3605656/

Dying Gasps on Broadband

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Within days of getting a broadband connection from BSNL I find myself trying to decipher the secret language of LEDs, to understand why my internet connection keeps tripping every few minutes.

'Customer Care' at BSNL, unfortunately, continues to be an oxymoron. The helpline has a ready, pre-recorded explanation for all wobbly connections - 'technical work is in progress'. And this has been on for the past three days.

In hindsight, the broadband-guy did a smart thing by giving me some troubleshooting notes. It has already come in handy while trying to understand why the links are so erratic and unreliable. Everytime there is a break in the connection, I find myself staring at the array of LEDs on the modem. The only one which is constant is the red one for power supply. The fickle ones are the yellow for DSL and green's for internet and WiFi.

The wireless modem itself ( ADSL2+ CPE/IAD model AN-1020-21 type WT) is manufactured by Vippalamiritha Magnetic Components Ltd., Hyderabad. It comes with a manual which is anything but helpful. Its GUI interface at the default IP address, 192.168.1.1, tosses up a long list of acronyms which give company to common attributes like Dying Gasp, WhipMode and UtopiaInterface.

It is 'Dying Gasp' that first caught my attention. What a appropriate term for an instrument always on the brink of near-death experiences! Somebody out there certainly has a sense of humor.

Dying gasp is apparently a message sent by the customer premises equipment (CPE) DSL device to the digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM) when a power outage occurs. It is listed as one of the 'common attributes' of an Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Link (ADSL).

My wireless modem has been gasping, dying and going through the inevitable cycles of life & death a few hundred times everyday. Nirvana is nowhere in sight. Nor is the possibility of a reliable broadband connection. Until that happens I plod on with my karma of trying to understand more about ADSL  and broadband technology.

Here is an attempt at figuring out the answers (this is, of course, a work-in-progress):

ADSL2+: Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line
ANS:
CPE:
DHCP Server:
DNS: Domain Name Server
MAC spoofing: lets MyDslModem identify itself as another computer or device.
PPPOE LlcBridged Protocol:
PVC Mapping:
SNR:
SSID: Service Set Identifier in wireless computer networking
UBR Category:
VPI/VCI: (0-255)/(32-65535)

The Mobile Broadband Circus

A friend working - rather unhappily - with a telecom company made a number of interesting observations that set me wondering about the telecom industry in India. Before I discuss the industry, let me first list out the observations:

• CDMA is a better technology than GSM. All the talk about 3G being "the best" for mobile internet access is just a lot of hype. Connection speeds are anyday better on a CDMA network.
• Tata Docomo is in serious trouble. Having sunk about R28,000 Cr to build its own transmission infrastructrure (each tower costs Rs80L!) it is now witnessing a serious erosion of revenue streams. So much so that it has recently jumped into the GSM bandwagon to try and make some money. Docomo, meanwhile, is left wondering when - or if - it would be able to recoup its investments in the JV.
• MTS (another JV between Russia's Sistema and Shyam Telecom, India) is using the Tata network to offer high speed wireless internet connections.

It is actually his last point that grabbed my attention. I had purchased an MTS dongle a couple of months back. Manufactured by ZTE-China and branded "MBlaze", the choice was based on the assumption that a new company was less likely to have a congested network, and, hence, higher connection speeds. The salesman also made a strong case against the bigger companies by pointing out that even Vodafone used the MTS network for its data-packages. To drive home the point, he logged on to the Vodafone homepage and showed me the fine print. He was right.

Now my friend tells me that MTS itself is hanging on the Tata network! And like trapeze artists in a circus, the big players seemed to dangling on the smaller players, who in turn, are holding on for dear life to other big players.

When you dig a bit deeper it does make sense and many things fall in place - like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

The Mblaze USB-modems use the CDMA network, which is based on the 800MHz band. The GSM networks, on the other hand, uses the much higher 1800MHz band. Higher frequencies are a lot less efficient in covering distances and many more towers to cover a unit area, and hence, GSM networks are most effective for those living closer to the transmission towers.

Vodafone, Airtel and Idea have all  banded together to share their GSM transmission towers while the CDMA players, Tata and Reliance are on their own. Since CDMA is indeed a better technology - especially for data transmission - the big-three are now trying to offer "Mobile Broadband USB Modems" by tieing up smaller players like MTS who have already obtained spectrum capacity from CDMA players like Tata-Docomo.

So, without owning a single tower, MTS is focusing all its efforts in a marketing blitz and making money on the side by leasing CDMA spectrum to the bigger GSM players. A perfect case of having somebody else's cake and eating it too! :)

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LINKS
Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) Development Group - www.cdg.org
GSM World - www.gsmworld.com