You might have a Verizon 4G LTE smartphone in your pocket right now, or you may be rocking on T-Mobile’s 42 Mbps HSPA+ network, but for most folks around the world, roughly 4 billion of them, they’re still stuck using 2G technologies. Luckily for them Nokia Siemens Networks just conducted their first pre-commercial test call that uses their Orthogonal Sub-Channel Dual Full Rate (OSC-DFR) software. To put it in their words: “OSC-DFR can reduce capital and operations expenditure for operators as it requires fewer carrier units and base station sites as well as less transport capacity. Moreover, the OSC-DFR feature allows operators to accommodate more voice and data traffic into the existing spectrum, thus facilitating the reuse or refarming of 3G/LTE services in GSM frequency bands.”
The latter portion of that quote is the most interesting. Say you’re an operator with just 10 MHz worth of spectrum. Instead of having to spend money buying up more invisible air, you could just start using NSN’s new OSC-DFR software, cut the amount of spectrum you currently allocate to voice by half, and then pour the rest into data. The best part of all this is that nothing needs to be done to the handsets that are already out on the market. All the magic happens at the core of the network.
Despite advances such as this, we’re pretty certain operators are going to continue crying to the government and asking for more spectrum. Smaller players can’t afford to pony up the money needed for additional spectrum since they spend all they can on customer acquisition and network equipment upgrades, while on the flip side the big guys will gobble up all the spectrum they can buy, but delay using it, just so that they can save on costs. We’ll keep you up to date on which operators opt to roll this out. Expect to hear more about this in the second half of this year when trials with real operators begin.