Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 12 February 2008, 5:25 PM
Plumberīs lament
I have an admission: Iīm a bit of a geek. In particular, a wireless geek, and in particular particular, the analogue hardware bits.
Which is why youīll often find me at MWC on the stands of people who make the plumbing for mobile networks - masts, cables, antennas, amplifiers and so on. I know my Heliax from my half-wave dipoles, and once the standīs resident engineer and I have exchanged the secret handshake of the truly radioactive, itīs amazing how the conversation flows.
And they are not happy. In the words of one microwave antenna company sales executive, "sales have fallen off the edge of a cliff" for 3.5 GHz base station bits, with other bands not looking much better. I know his company of old - indeed, have bought some of its products in a previous existence - and Iīve no reason to doubt that theyīre just as competitive and technologically advanced as always. Thatīs not the problem.
Once you get past all the up-tempo bravado from the network operators and service providers, you realise that there are remarkably few major network build-outs actually going on. Quite the opposite, if you think about T-Mobile and 3īs 3G network consolidation.
This is worrying, given that antennas are ordered very early in the process of making a network, and that well before then youīll be talking to the antenna companies about what you need, how much it will cost and other aspects of planning what is a very complex system. Like plumbers, the people who make the boring bits of the network are the best bellwethers of whatīs actually happening next - and from the look of things, that might turn out to be not much.
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