Sidecut Reports

Despite the friendly face it is putting on its strategy to beef up wireless reception in Palo Alto, AT&T is facing some rough local resistance to its implementation ideas from citizens of the cultural center of Silicon Valley.

Though AT&T has earned city approval to install a new regular cellular antenna as well as some new antennas to support a public Wi-Fi hotspot zone, its actions have riled some residents including one longtime Internet technologist who has threatened to cut off the city government’s free Internet access due to his opposition to the cell-tower approval process. There was also heated debate about the Wi-Fi hotspot plan, which eventually won city approval in part because of AT&T’s pledge to install the gear without entering the building the antennas will be mounted on.

So far there has been no city decision on a wider-reaching AT&T plan to install numerous smaller cellular antennas in a technology deployment known as Outdoor Distributed Antenna System (ODAS), which like the other ideas is aimed chiefly at improving AT&T’s cellular reception in the California city that is home to a wide range of Silicon Valley leaders and influencers, and sits next door to Stanford University. The Palo Alto deployment is part of a wide-ranging AT&T strategy to increase the number of DAS deployments nationwide, but like the other ideas it is running into some local opposition.

While the smaller DAS antennas (which can be mounted on existing structures like power poles) might seem more aesthetically acceptable, several residents feared that by agreeing to allow AT&T to install the antennas the city could be jeopardizing a long-standing plan to bury utility lines and eliminate overhead poles. According to one news report, the Palo Alto city council may “step back and discuss a larger, citywide approach” to cellular implementation plans, based on the contentious nature of some recent applications like AT&T’s.

While Google’s new instant search feature certainly impressed many at the news conference in San Francisco Wednesday, the impending launch of Google Instant for mobile devices might be the next application that brings fragile cellular networks to their knees.

Why? Though we probably won’t know until thousands start using Google Instant on their cell phones, the application’s feature of guessing what you are typing may actually mean fewer mobile searches since theoretically you will find your answer faster. But with new results appearing with each letter typed, Google Instant may also cause a lot of unwanted traffic as servers, cell towers and handheld devices engage in constant communications to support the “instant” search results. Could all that search traffic clog mobile networks to the point of saturation? We don’t know for sure, and didn’t get any confident answers Wednesday to make us think that the Googlers have thought this through completely, either.

Google reps at the announcement Wednesday all acknowledged that Google Instant would certainly increase bandwidth needs for either mobile or landline connections, but also pointed out that search results were typically very small bits of information, especially when compared to things like streaming video. But the increased amount of connections needed could cause less-than-instant search-result slowdowns, especially in a mobile situation. In demos of the mobile version (which Google said won’t be available for a month or more), there was a noted latency of a few seconds’ delay when compared to the desktop/laptop version of the program.

Google VP for search Marissa Mayer admitted that some beta testers of the service had to turn it off in cases where their broadband connection wasn’t good, and Google reps at the event said that it (obviously) would work better on Wi-Fi, OK on a 3G connection and not at all on “2G” wireless like AT&T’s EDGE network. Though Googlers Wednesday didn’t think the instant searches would cause someone to burn up their mobile data cap while looking for a nearby restaurant, the mobile version will come with a handy “off” button — just in case.

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Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from our latest free report, Clearwire’s Spectrum: The 4G Advantage, which takes an in-depth look at the wireless spectrum holdings of national WiMAX provider Clearwire Corp. (Nasdaq: CLWR), and how those holdings give Clearwire a market advantage in the race to build “4G” wireless networks. In this excerpt we explain the meaning of spectrum “depth,” and compare Clearwire’s depth of holdings to those of major telcos. To download our report for free, click on this link.

SPECTRUM DEPTH: WHAT IT MEANS, WHY IT MATTERS

When it comes to talking about spectrum holdings, the most-often overlooked or misunderstood element of the discussion is the idea of spectrum “depth.” The “depth” of a provider’s spectrum holdings comes from the fact that the shorthand used to describe the different “bands” — as in 700 MHz or 2.5 GHz — doesn’t fully explain that each “band” contains many different frequency channels of varying size; the 2.5 GHz band, for example, actually includes frequencies from 2496 MHz to 2690 MHz, while the recently auctioned bandwidth in the 700 MHz band includes frequencies from 696 MHz to 806 MHz.

Depending on how the spectrum was sliced for distribution, in each band there is only a certain amount of spectrum “depth” — as in chunks of those frequencies — available for their delivery portfolio. The spectrum depth matters most when it comes time to bring bandwidth to users — simply put, the more spectrum you have, the bigger “pipes” you can provide.

For the historic cellular bands, the amount of spectrum depth provided by the government was sufficient for the technical needs of the time — providing voice phone calls. The advent of “digital” voice technology made cellular systems more efficient, allowing for more calls to be made over the same amount of cellular bandwidth.

As technology advanced rapidly, more types of digital communications started leaping onto cellular networks, from text messages to email to full Internet access, albeit originally at transmission speeds reminiscent of the earliest dial-up modems. But by the end of the decade, wireless data services were reaching mainstream at the so-called third generation or “3G” level, where the major providers were promising speeds of a megabit per second or more, good enough even for limited forays into streaming video as long as your connection stayed solid.

The big problem was — as technology advanced rapidly, producing such wildly accepted phenomena as YouTube and the iPhone, spectrum assets in use remained largely the same, leading to some predictable dropoffs in service as the available airwaves all got snapped up.

While some of the woes plaguing AT&T and its iPhone dilemma were due to network infrastructure issues — such as the lack of robust “backhaul” connections from the wired Internet to many of AT&T’s cellular towers — spectrum shortages undoubtedly contributed to some of the dropped calls and interrupted web surfing, as AT&T tried to handle its “unprecedented” wireless-data growth with the same spectrum depth it used for cellular voice calls.

In a recent report released publicly to the Internet, Morgan Stanley and analyst Mary Meeker assembled what many observers believe to be a fairly accurate tally of the spectrum depth for each of the country’s major wireless providers: In the original (~800 MHz) cellular bands, Meeker said Verizon and AT&T each had 25 MHz of spectrum “depth.” At the PCS or higher-frequency cellular band, AT&T has an additional 34 MHz of spectrum depth, while Verizon has another 21 MHz, Meeker said. Most of this spectrum, however, is being used for the telcos’ cellular voice and 3G data services.

For future networks, AT&T and Verizon have assets in the AWS spectrum band as well as at 700 MHz — but in total, the AWS and 700 MHz assets, when combined with historic cellular spectrum, give the two phone giants each roughly only 91 MHz of total spectrum depth in most markets. That is the total split up amongst the four different frequency ranges, and with more than half of each carrier’s portfolio already in use.

Clearwire, by comparison, has an average of 150 MHz of contiguous spectrum depth in most major markets across the U.S., at the 2.5 GHz band, all available for 4G — a spectrum position that will theoretically allow Clearwire to more easily and more cheaply offer high-speed broadband services to a far greater number of customers than its spectrum-constrained competitors.

The Sidecut Reports Clearwire’s Spectrum: The 4G Advantage takes a deep-dive look into the wireless spectrum holdings of the provider of the nation’s nascent WiMAX network, examining its historical roots, how Clearwire came to control the spectrum, and how its depth and breadth gives Clearwire a U.S. market advantage in the race to build 4G wireless networks. To read the full report, download your free copy today!