OTTAWA – Wind Mobile used a wireless event in Ottawa on Tuesday to reinforce the view that it needs access to more spectrum and a better regime for tower and cell site sharing.
Speaking on a wireless technology panel at the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association’s Wireless Technology Showcase, Ante Rupcic, VP of core networks for Wind Mobile, said it needs access to large chunks of spectrum during the next round of licensing.
“It’s essential that we, too, get a fair stake of additional spectrum. Again, not these small chunks of spectrum, it has to be reasonable bands, reasonable channel sizes of spectrum. So this is very critical,” he said.
Rupcic said Wind Mobile needs more spectrum for two reasons. It will have to migrate to LTE just as the Big Three Canadian wireless operators are doing now and it requires more bandwidth to handle the doubling and even tripling of wireless data growth the company has seen in the last few months.
“Spectrum exhaust is something that will clearly happen to us,” he told the crowd.
Cell site sharing also needs to be fixed, Rupcic noted.
“What should be taking six months is taking a year or more and the numbers of [collocations] are a lot less than expected,” he said. “What we’re looking forward to is a new process where there is more teeth behind collocation, there is more firm timelines and something that approaches six months in terms of execution.”
Rupcic concluded his comments by saying that the industry isn’t doing itself any favours by sticking with the current cell site sharing regime.
“We’re tarnishing the industry by not collocating. We’re tarnishing the image of service providers if we don’t share a lot this infrastructure,” he argued.
The Wind Mobile comments came in response to those from Rogers Communications CTO Bob Berner. He said more spectrum for mobile broadband is required and that this spectrum has to be in large blocks. The U.S. has recognized this with President Obama calling for an additional 500 MHz of bandwidth to support mobile broadband. Given that additional spectrum is going to be in the high frequency bands, additional cell sites will need to be constructed (higher frequency spectrum travels shorter distances, consequently more cell sites are needed to effectively use that spectrum), he added.
Bruce Rodin, VP of wireless technology at Bell Canada, added that as traffic density increases the cell sites won’t have to be the typical “big honking tower.” In urban areas, the cell sites will be smaller and lower, he added.
Much more to do to ensure success of mobile commerce, mobile health
Panelists pained a pretty optimistic picture about what mobility will be able to do for commerce, health and government services. But despite the lofty predictions, more still needs to be done to ensure success.
CWTA president and CEO, Bernard Lord, pointed out that there are still barriers to success and asked the panelists to explain what some of those are.
For Berner, it has less to do with mobile technology and more to do with verticals such as healthcare and commerce which are subject to a variety of regulations. Many of these advances are “paradigm shifting” for these other industries and it’s often difficult to move forward because of the regulations surround these respective industries.
There is the global ecosystem that has to be taken into account, said Rodin, noting that the Bell and Rogers are tiny compared to China Mobile’s 650 million subscribers.
“There is so much development that is so expensive, we need a global way that everybody [can take advantage of that],” he said.
