LOS. There is a misnomer anymore. PCS is LOS at 1.9 GHz. MMDS is 2.4 GHz. Cellular at 800 MHz is still LOS. IF I cellularize MMDS, it will function the same as PCS. The buzz about the big three's gobbling up the MMDS license is it for competing with the ROBC's. Two, it is in response to the potential of Skybridge and Teledesic High Bandwidth Death Stars. LMDS is limit, at 38 GHz, to around 3 miles already.
Now, what to say that the license holders petition the FCC in further sectorizing (cellularizing if you wish. The industry just loves buzzwords) the license? Nothing. It may not be mobile in the driving down the road manner, but it definitely can be design to be transportable for business users and even consumers to the store and restaurants, airports,etc. The B/W makes cellular and PCS look puny. The thing about 3G, the Europeans are already allocating 2-15 Mhz bands for it. Not sure what Japans strategy is, but the US doesn't seem to have a plan.
As the WSJ about AT&T "problem" of flat rate in the cellular band proves, cellular and PCS are bandwidth limited in the US. The problem with WSJ report, America's NEtwork magazine carry this aobut a month before they did and they cited both AT&T and Bell Atlantic had capacity problems in high use area's. GTE is having it problems in Houston in the traditional high use area's. Cellular is still placating the inefficent analog market, CDPD customers and migrating to digital. Bandwidth is still bandwidth. There are some magic bullets, such as multicoded modulation schemes such as OFDM, but they are only a incremental increase of efficency. It's still finite and not infinite.
Wireless will have to keep expanding into other freq. ranges to keep pace with consumer demand. Don't believe that, look at fiber optics. They keep pushing the envelope of what they can transmit over a single fiber and still they have to install more fiber to keep pace with the demand.
In Europe, and forgive me for not having the company's name, but a German company out of Munchen is deploying fixed wireless using freg in the 3.5 GHZ and higher range with a fiber backbone to compete with Duetche Telecom. This with all the yapping about cellular, PCS 3G noise. The consumer drives the demand and as long as the demands follows Moore's law, solutions will have to keep pace rapidly. However, Moore's law is also applicable to bandwidth. AS demand doubles, so does bandwidth....
AS to QCOM strategy? I don't really know what they have, but I didn't see one at the recent SuperComm convention where MMDS and LMDS was the show stopper. |
