Posts by ARGO

Re: "Unions aren't nearly so keen on the pair consummating the agreement"

Voda UK are heavily unionised, Three UK don't have any union recognition.

And Voda UK have double the number of employees to deliver basically the same service.

I can see why their unions might be concerned.

(though accusing Three employees of being Chinese spies isn't going to do much for recruitment of members there)

>but new ones are never added

Indeed. And then about a year after planning is refused, the same people who campaigned against the mast are in the local paper complaining about the lack of mobile service in their area.

(From personal experience of a village near where I live)

Re: The final death of phone design in the Thames Valley

Several of those even manufactured handsets in the UK. Such a quaint idea nowadays.

Re: "I have yet to speak to an enterprise which is planning to buy one"

Most recent 5G devices already support SA and network slicing.

They can be turned on via software updates.

But vendors would like to have something to test it against before doing that. A novel idea in tech, I know.

Re: Forbid

France Telecom bought Orange from Vodafone, who were forced to sell it after they took over Mannesmann.

Mannesmann bought Orange a few years after Hutch floated half of it.

Hutch were 100% owners when the Orange UK network launched in 1994 and for some years afterwards, and remained 50% owners after the float.

Re: Define “ premium device“

Premium is a marketing term and moves with what the market will tolerate.

If you knock a hundred or two off the lowest priced current-year Apple, you'll be in the right sort of area.

With an iPhone 15 at £800, that puts the current boundary at £600-700.

To be fair, there have been a handful of MPs banging away at this for years.

Unfortunately that sort of behaviour is definitely not what is wanted in potential government ministers, so they never had the power to do anything about it.

Re: Let me get this straight...

Motorola only had the contract for part of the system - the service layer stuff.

Then they bought the legacy Airwave system.

As el-reg commentards noted at the time, that didn't leave them with much incentive to develop the new system - but the regulators apparently knew better than us.

The radio coverage is coming from EE, and devices are expected to come from the usual suspects.

All three elements are late, and services especially so after the re-tender noted above.

Re: 5G speed not just affected by signal

Generally local break out of VoLTE is only for emergency calls.

Would be a bad idea to send those to another country, but as they use a separate APN it's easy to identify them.

Pretty much everyone offering VoLTE roaming has implemented S8HR for normal calls.

(S8 is the 3GPP interface that carries the traffic and "HR" stands for Home Routing.)

Re: This doesn't seem right...

As someone noted above, 6GHz doesn't play nicely with walls.

But it's not inherently better for either technology - just make sure there's no wall between you and the access point / cell tower.

That's not been allowed in the UK for some years now. Still a thing elsewhere in the world though.

It's an ironic admission for a company that's pushing "metaverse" as the solution to everything though.

Re: Sorry which bit of this is new?

Yup, various permutations of network signal time of arrival positioning are already in 3GPP.

They've been gradually ramping up the accuracy requirements over the years.

Starting from ~100m in GSM days, they've now got the 5G iteration to a best-case accuracy of 30cm.

(Should also note that Cambridge Positioning Systems had a way of getting down to ~10m around 20 years ago)

Re: 15 parts must be carried?

There is a list in the regulation linked from the article. It's a slightly weird selection though, and only adds up to 15 if you have more than one item in some of the categories:

• battery;

• back cover or back cover assembly;

• front-facing camera assembly;

• rear-facing camera assembly;

• external connectors;

• buttons;

• microphone;

• speaker(s);

• hinge assembly;

• mechanical display folding mechanism;

• mechanical display rolling mechanism;

• display assembly;

• charger

We had a similar rule when I worked in academia - never let a professor into the lab.

Neither. As none of the people presenting it were at the company when I was there, I asked how to make it do xyz - which had been in the phase 2 deliverables list, but not the demo I wrote. Guess what their product couldn't do?

Re: Pretty sure 3G and 4G can work at the same time...

Not yet, but eventually.

5G latency improvements don't come until Stand-Alone 5G is live (maybe 2023~24 in the UK). At the moment 5G latency is limited by its signalling running over 4G.

At the radio level there's minimal power difference between 4G and 5G. Spectral efficiency is also about the same.

Right now user density would be much higher for 4G2100 than 5G2100 simply because there are 10x more 4G2100 devices out there. That will probably reverse around the same time Stand Alone arrives. The full density capabilities of 5G aren't needed for handsets though; it's more about Internet of Things.

2G interleaving is only an option in the 900 & 1800 bands in the UK - no 2G2100 devices exist. Unlikely to see 5G in 2100 just yet though; there are plenty of other bands available that require less work. For example 700 & 800 give much better coverage than 2100, while 1800 would be a better option for capacity.

The article specified 3.7-3.98 GHz.

3.7-3.8 GHz is already widely deployed outside the US (as band n78), and 3.8 - 4.0 (n77), while less common, is reasonably widespread. Planes are still flying in the countries that have these.

So either the US has some seriously naff electronics controlling their planes, or this is an FAA / FCC turf war.

The shared rural network is supposed to address that. It's 4G only though.

Re: You don't want to be the company

And hopefully doesn't it turn into a five year mission either...

Re: 5G?, Decent 4G and Voice Would be nice In Hertfordshire

But perversely, non line-of-sight can be faster if you have a decent signal strength to start with - MIMO needs multiple reflective paths to work. (Clearly this means MIMO transmission is witchcraft.)

Re: Mediatek

Yes they do. As do Unisoc.

MTK seem to have a healthy order book at the moment, but Unisoc could do with some more customers

Re: Rural coverage is still very poor

The spectrum currently used for 3G doesn't go away though - it just changes from 3G to 4G. Coverage of that spectrum stays the same.

It's even possible coverage will improve, but for a different reason; the networks are under OFCOM pressure to hit 90% geographic coverage. A site they are already visiting for a 3G-4G switch is a prime candidate to have 700/800 added at the same time. And that spectrum goes much further.

(You still need a VoLTE handset to use it though)

Re: Huawei was intent on spending $1.2Bn on it's on a Communications Research Facility in UK.

Also interesting that these new vendors don't have to run their kit past GCHQ. Presumably ORAN is in some way immune from shoddy coding practices.

Re: Ridden Out Of Town On A Rail

Presumably that's why they did it on the Jubilee Line first - it has platform gates.

Because under the digital economy act they have to. That law was introduced in 2017, and the legal test cases relating to it haven't played out yet. This appears to be another one.

Re: Annoys me

Or computer weekly, who originally broke the story in 2009 and have kept prodding at it over the years.