Mobile Internet Eating Up The Spectrum!

Go back some 10 to 15 years and see the sci-fi flicks of that time. You see a lot of technology that is shown in the movie which we have made possible today. The sci-fi writers imagine things and put them in the movie. But, even they didn’t imagine what we can do with our mobile phones in the future. Well, I need not tell you what we can, we all are witnessing it!

The mobile phone technology is advancing at a very rapid speed. Today’s phone has digicam type camera quality, storage memory in GBs etc. And since the inclusion of mobile internet, the technology never looked back. Starting from simple text pages, photos of small size, we can today stream videos on YouTube, watch live TV and what not?!

But wait! It comes with a cost. Well, I am not talking about the bucks you pay for it! The mobile broadband, because of the tremendous multimedia features added, is consuming a lot of radio bandwidth. Experts believe that the mobile broadband network traffic will see a twenty five to thirty times increase over next five years & the service providers are already feeling the pinch! The evolution of smartphones and androids give an easier access to the internet.

It is said that in some ten years from now, 90% of the broadband will be covered by smartphones. (Well, that’s an optimistic mobile company’s expectation!) The data bytes being transferred through the air are doubling, even tripling annually. The popularity of the mobile internet is ever growing. The amount of download is rising at a very fast rate.

But the major concern is how to get so much bandwidth? Now, its unrealistic to think that the demand will decrease. At the same time, we can’t expand the supply! The “sweet” range of frequency for wireless broadband is 300 to 3500 megahertz. If we increase the higher limit, it gets difficult for the wave to penetrate well into the buildings etc and if we decrease the lower limit, that awkwardly increases the antenna height!

The laws of physics that limit the frequencies are same everywhere. So its obvious that most of the countries in the world are facing the spectrum issue (Some less developed countries aren’t, yet.) Almost all the countries have large amount of spectrum dedicated to TV, which is mostly in the range suitable for wireless broadband. Now they are targeting a conversion to digital broadcast TV so that more wireless spectrum becomes available. Countries like Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and Finland are already done with the transaction while most of the other countries are expecting the completion of transaction till 2013 (China in 2015).

The mobile companies (well, almost everyone related to the wireless broadband) are expecting some game changing technology to come up in the coming years so that the entire “spectrum famine” comes to an end! But no work is done till now so as to get out of this unpleasant situation. The spectrum issues are surely getting thorny day-by-day!