Squeezing every last bit of efficiency out of the limited amount of spectrum operators can afford to buy from the government in whatever country they’re operating is a goal that has driven technological progress in the infrastructure market since the infrastructure market was born. Forget about the latency benefits or speed gains that come with 3G and 4G technologies, what matters is that more customers can connect on the same amount of spectrum, thus increasing quality of service and reducing capital expenditure since you need less base stations to support the same amount of subscribers.
Nokia Siemens Networks just came out of no where to announce that they’ve invented a technology called “Dynamic Frequency and Channel Allocation” (DFCA) which promises to double the efficiency of today’s GSM cell towers. Now while Japan is phasing out GSM all together, and several countries in Europe are giving permission to local operators to use what was once spectrum reserved for GSM to be refarmed for 3G use, there are emerging markets that will be stuck with GSM for some time to come.
Operators serving customers in India, Brazil, China and other “emerging” countries are dealing with such rapid growth, in the order of several million subscribers per month, that throwing up cell towers all over town is costing them more than they’d like. With NSN’s DFCA feature all an operator has to do is apply some software updates to the currently deployed infrastructure and boom, double the capacity.
“DFCA has immense potential to help operators address the challenge of ever increasing voice and data traffic,” said Prashant Agnihotri, head of GSM/EDGE product management, Nokia Siemens Networks. “It helps operators squeeze voice calls into less bandwidth, so it can be alternatively used for data, either through Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE) or by re-farming the spectrum to Wideband Code Division Multiple Access/Long Term Evolution (WCDMA/LTE). It brings a substantial increase for operators in terms of potential earnings per base station site.”
Anything to save money, an operator is likely to sign up for it.