The Empire Strikes Back ... with “Hyper Dense HetNet”

Continuing on the saga of mobile architecture wars, the first stop on our journey is to get some peak on QCOM’s activities. It is befitting to give them the title of “The Empire” as they spent the good part of the last decade acting as patent bullies collecting royalties from their CDMA arsenal. After the global adoption of LTE as the standard for evolving both 3GPP and 3GPP2 based RAN, the CDMA gravy train has come to a screeching halt, so they have shifted their focus lately on selling real stuff However, they need to sell a lot more of these tiny processors to continue their growth profile. Recently they have been pitching the “1000x data challenge” in various industry events. Guess what, who is going to benefit from this vision, of course “The Empire”.

Embedded in this 1000x data challenge is their vision of “Hyper Dense HetNet”, as the illustration below implies we need to buy whole bunch of QCOM powered small cells to enable this vision.

QCOM visionaries ensure us that it is very cost effective to deploy this kind of hyper dense HetNet. The basis of this assertion is that somehow magically everyone on this planet will deploy one of these femtos (HeNb) to augment the capacity provided by the macro footprint. Since these suckers will foot the bill for these fancy femtos and also pay for the cost to backhaul the traffic, the bottom line impact to deep pocketed operator is dismal compared to investing equivalent amount of capacity in their macro footprint. Genius, isn’t it!

These visionaries have ignored the fact that almost everyone would deploy a WiFi router at home for the benefit it provides, cutting the bulky cords on most of the gizmos at home. However, if anyone has to deploy a femto just because the coverage or the capacity provided by their operator sucks then it is time to pull a switcheroo on this operator. It is no surprise that femtos are nothing but a straight admission from the operator that “we don’t know how to do a good RF planning” or even better “we are running short on chump change, can you please pay for the coverage of the expensive service we are going to bill you later”.

The QCOM visionaries are admitting that one of the biggest challenges after convincing everyone on this planet to deploy these femots is to open the access to everyone. For WiFi this has been done through “fon” service, however, the same logic of opening WiFi AP does not work for femto (HeNb), as there is no incentive for the sucker who bought the femto to open it up with the promise that he can get the coverage somewhere else. The mobile service comes with the promise that you will get the coverage at most of the places. Then there is licensed vs. unlicensed spectrum issue and a bunch of commercial and regulatory issues have to be addressed to make it practical.

The same visionaries also claim that this approach to scale RAN is technically more feasible than the competing approaches such as Massive MIMO or Cloud-RAN as sophisticated coordination is required for the competing approaches. Vow, and it will be a piece of cake to manage the interference from billions of these femtos.  

Close, but no cigar!

Footnote: the views in this series of blog are my own personal opinions, no corporate kool-aid involved

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