The GSM Association released some studies this week designed to bring pressure on regulators to reserve 900 MHz spectrum globally, purely for 3G mobile broadband. For mobile broadband, read access to the web on a handset.
The logic was both compelling and complex, and consisted of two reports one from UK researcher Ovum, which claimed that as many as 300 million more people in Asia, Europe and Africa could enjoy access to mobile broadband if this spectrum was reserved and coordinated in those regions.
The idea would be that as a first layer for HSDPA, 900 MHz would be used and then in cities and dense urban areas the 2100MHz band would also be brought into play.
The greater range of radio waves in the lower spectrum band and their ability to provide better coverage in buildings would enable operators to achieve much broader 3G coverage, particularly in rural areas. The study claims to show that a 3G network in the 900MHz band would achieve up to 40% greater coverage than a 3G network in the 2100MHz band for the same capital expenditure.
Of course the savings could go straight into the pockets of operators, or it could be used to build out a more attractive network and we suspect that some of each would go on.
‘National governments need to coordinate their spectrum policies to enable the widespread rollout of HSPA in the 900MHz band,’ said Tom Phillips, Chief Government and Regulatory Affairs Officer of the GSMA. ‘Such coordination would make HSPA at 900MHz a cost-effective way to provide valuable broadband services to the many people untouched by the high-speed Internet revolution that has swept through the developed world.’
Ovum forecasts that if the Asia Pacific region alone adopts this practice, then it could lead to 450 million people in the region using 3G by 2012, whereas if 3G were restricted to 2100MHz alone, Ovum says there will be just 200 million people adopting 3G.
A second report from RTT talks about how supporting multiple spectra across an entire handset makers’ portfolio, drives up the pricing on handsets, the most expensive part of any network.
The report attempts to quantify the increase in costs for a cellular network caused by spectrum fragmentation and argues that lower manufacturer runs can put as much as 50% on the cost of a handset (See table 1 in pdf vesion).
Despite the exploded bill of materials cost (see Figure 2 in pdf version) which suggests that the RF component of a handset, that which varies with each piece of spectrum, makes up just 7% of the total bill of materials on a handset, handset prices soar when specialist spectrum is used that is not common elsewhere, the report argues.
Part of this, is the cost of handset design when a different spectrum is required, other issues are that most handsets need 5 or six radios on them in order to effectively roam, and this would stop rising if the 900 MHz option was universally adopted.
Another factor the paper argues is what it calls opportunity cost, effectively the cost of running small dedicated spectrum design runs for handset makers and what they feel they have to charge for orders of low numbers of specialist devices.
But overall it concludes that the interaction up and down the value chain of various components, and the fact that device complexity leads to poorer signal propagation and larger cells, and that this is what drives up the handsets and network costs and the report concludes that only extremely high volumes of same spec devices will enable cheap devices.
We expect this lobbying is only just at its beginning and would expect to see more and more pressure based on this desire for 900 MHz cellular interoperability.