Research finds operators can reduce costs and expand coverage

The latest report from Pyramid Research, the Light Reading Communications Networks telecom research arm, shows mobile broadband operators could benefit greatly in a number of key areas with the refarming of spectrum.

Noted as one of the most significant regulatory changes throughout Europe in the last 20 years to affect the mobile broadband industry, spectrum refarming could provide mobile operators with big improvements to both the quality and availability of its existing services and would also increase the capacity of their networks.

The advantages of refarming the 900MHz spectrum for UMTS, which includes looking at 3G coverage, data usage, competition, frequency characteristics, mobile broadband computing and capex are analysed in the report called Spectrum Refarming for 3G: A Low-Cost Boost for Mobile Broadband.

In order to evaluate strategies and talk about different regulatory considerations the experience of refarming in three main countries, Switzerland, UK and Finland where looked at by the 15 page report.

An analyst at Pyramid Research and the report’s author, Andrei Tchadliev found that the uptake of data card subscriptions had grown at an incredible rate following the introduction of 3G data cards throughout Europe in the later part of 2007 and 2008.

He said “At the end of 2008, there were more than 22 million such subscriptions across Europe, and we expect this number to exceed 100 million in 2014. Healthy competition, meanwhile, has meant that operators continue to expand usage allowances and lower prices while pushing network capacity to the limit.”

Consultation has now been started by European national regulators on the refarming of the 900MHz spectrum, which had originally been allocated for GSM based services, in order for it to instead be used for 3G UMTS, the next generation of mobile broadband.

Source – www.istockanalyst.com