Three UMTS Licence and the Regulator.

clohamon

It seems that Comreg are coming around to giving "3" credit for the 390 new sites claimed under the NBS.

The Mobile siteviewer (admittedly not very reliable in the past) has just mysteriously jumped from a total of 6544 sites(14/07/2011) to 6917 (20/07/2011) - a difference of 373; i.e. pretty close to the number of sites claimed by Three under the NBS.

To confirm that these are all "3" sites one could look at the location of the successful planning permissions that were sought by "3" between December 2008 and November 2010 - about 208 of them, and so far all of them tally with sites now showing on the siteviewer.

Watty and others have long been saying that the NBS was just a licence subsidy to "3"; paid for by Irish and European taxpayers. We should know later in the year (though possibly not 'til 2012) whether 3's accountants have been satisfied yet that the erection of these extra sites has reduced "3"'s outstanding obligations under its UMTS licence in financial terms.

(Another related question might be whether Comreg will now be taking on responsibility for settling NBS issues between "3" and their customers.)

watty

Cunningly "3" has put all monies received under NBS into running costs and done the masts from their own capex. Can't be any question who owns them or that they are just Mobile phone masts.

watty

If we take a round figure of 7000 sites and say each has 3 sectors...

If we say that on average (not the peak up to speed) that there is a shared 4Mbps throughput per sector when loaded (more like 2Mbps actually)

That's 3 x 7000 x 4 = 56 Gbps total capacity, on average. But its not a single RAN and the cells support a small number of simultaneous users, so some cells over subscribed and others near empty. This means the "real" congestion is much higher, up to x4 on average or worse than capacity suggests.

Fibre can be 10Gbps per street...

Fixed Wireless can be 200Mbps capacity per mast, so only 300 masts, not 7000 is same capacity.

KaSat is 70Gbps, but that's clear skies, sum of both directions and 82 spots so for single Irish spot more like 250 Mbps capacity (0.25Gbps).
Hylas-1 has no dedicated Irish spot. It shares two spots over whole of Ireland, UK and part of Mainland Europe, so likely less than 200MBps Irish capacity.

Even if you have 10x spectrum of LTE (which is impossible), 7000 Masts is only equivalent to less than 60 streets of FTTC!

So Mobile is good for phone calls. At 50:1 contention and 10Mbps, Mobile using 7000 masts "perfectly" in a single wholesale RAN would only serve less than 300,000 customers. In reality the limitations of the technology mean more like 3Mbps and 200:1 contention for 300,000 customers*.

Mobile is never going to deliver reliable Internet, never mind Broadband unless there is 10x as many masts.

Satellite can't be promoted a for more than a few thousand users in entire nation or else the contention and caps are laughable.


*
Congestion is total connections x package using more than capacity
Contention is NOT about how many on line, but = (sum total customer packages)/ capacity.