Excellent post. We've been talking about harmonization between LTE and Wimax in whatever "4G" becomes.
Message 24780968
There are many hurdles; operators and what they want are important.
IMO what they want is to preserve their revenue streams, keep those walls up around their garden. They've got a lot of expensive spectrum to monetize; that was a primary motivation for IMS (no matter how dodgy it's getting). At present, it's true that operators are dropping rates on data plans, but that's happening in the context of low usage: there's not a lot of demand yet.
When networks are loaded by demand, pricing will climb: has to. It's the only way to control low-revenue traffic.
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There's a whole lot of related talk on mobile sites, and some of it doesn't add up. Browser-based mobile usage, for example. That's arguably the most bandwidth-intensive way to use mobile spectrum, but it solves a lot of problems in terms of applications.
Not particularly relevant, but mobile is all over the place these days. Everything seemed so simple when IMT-2000 finally happened.
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This is the first reference seen to high power usage/battery drain on VoIP calls with 3G. The extra processing load for VoIP is known. But the problems seem excessive; are they peculiar to the author's circumstances (eg handset, network, etc) or can the problem be generalized to all VoIP calls? Yes, that's what the author is saying, but is he correct? I knew there were problems with VoIP on mobile networks, but didn't think they were that bad.
We've been discussing potential IMS kludges for years - but voice calling is the keystone in the walled garden gateway. In the proposed solutions, this one looks more likely IMO -
"Some people have started thinking about extending LTE with a circuit switching emulation. This could be handled on the lower layers of the protocol stack and the software on top would not notice if the call uses GSM, UMTS or LTE. This one is easier said than done because I don't think this concept will fly without a seamless handover to a 2G or 3G network. If such a solution ever gets into mobile phones, it would make life for IMS even harder. Who would need it then?"
Thanks for the post; I'll link it to Frank Coluccio's thread.
Jim |
