Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and France Telecom’s Orange, today received regulatory approval to merge their UK businesses, creating the country’s largest mobile operator.
While the company may now be the largest mobile operator in the UK, it doesn’t address the biggest challenge that all mobile carriers are now facing: lack of spectrum. To address that issue, T-Mobile, Orange and other European mobile operators are also proposing to OFCOM, the regulatory body in the UK, an innovative solution to spectrum usage.
Instead of auctioning spectrum into restricted chunks, the consortium is proposing a fundamentally new approach.
Similar to the FCC’s “White Space” initiative, where television band spectrum can be used by unlicensed devices, the T-Mobile proposal, called LT-MAX, would merge the technology of White Spaces (“listen before transmit” and transmitter mapping), with Software Defined Radios that can change frequency and modulation on the fly.
LT-MAX, according to T-Mobile, delivers fiber speeds – 1 Gbps and beyond – without the expense of installing fiber to the home. A prototype LT-MAX device, developed by PicoChip and other LT-MAX partners demonstrated up to 10 Gbps (fixed) and 1Gbps (mobile) connectivity in tests using freqrencies ranging from 100 MHz to 100 GHz.
The SDR radio, matched to a programmable fractal wideband antenna, interrogates a database of nearby antennas. If no interference is found, the radio design could use virtually any frequency between 700 Mhz and 80 Ghz. The International Telecommunication Union, which must approve international telecommunications standards, has been researching similar approaches for several years.
The main advantage of the LT-MAX approach is cost and speed. A single radio design could be used on any band and deliver virtually any speed.
The impact on the trillion dollar telecommunications business is the main disadvantage. Costs today are based on spectrum scarcity. Carriers have spent hundreds of billions buying narrow chunks of public spectrum which they “own”.
The LT-MAX approach would make spectrum free. Mobile carriers are expected to oppose it. Utilities, municipalities and companies like Google and Microsoft are expected to support it. TV broadcasters, after developing the mobile-unfriendly ATSC standard, are expected to kill their way out of any legislation that opposes the right of group owners to get spectrum for free.
