Mobile industry celebrates 25th anniversary of cellular

THE UK MOBILE INDUSTRY celebrated the 25th anniversary of cellular communications networks in the UK with an event held at the Flight Gallery of the Science Museum in London.

The Cellular 25 event saw heavyweights from just about every major player in the industry attending to add their two pence about the development of mobile networks in the last quarter of a century and making predictions about the next 25 years.

"Cellular 25 has been developed in association with the chief technology officers of the five cellular operators and therefore constitutes an important cross-industry initiative to mark the role that technology and engineering has played and, even more importantly, will play in driving social and economic advances in the UK and globally," said Sir David Brown, who chaired the event.

Ten speakers from the major UK operators as well as chip makers, device manufacturers and infrastructure companies were all given 10 minutes to offer their insight into the industry today and its development for the foreseeable future.

"Life changing developments in all spheres of human activity begin with a dream," added Brown during his opening speech.

"When I became a telecoms engineer I bought into the collective dream of available, affordable phones for everyone on the planet. We dreamed that dream in universities, companies, governments and in pubs. God knows how many pints of bitter we poured into that dream. Yet we never imagined that by now that dream would have turned into a reality for more than four billion people."

Although all ten speakers focused on different aspects and topics during their short speeches, one theme that ran through the majority of the talks was that if mobile is to continue to evolve and meet the growing demands of users around the world then the entire industry is going to have to work together to overcome the many challenges facing the development of cellular communications.

Chief amongst these was the issue of spectrum allocation, with several speakers calling on the UK government to ensure that the 2.6GHz range and the 800MHz range to be freed by the digital dividend are set aside for the development of the next generation of mobile data technology such as LTE and then on to LTE Advanced.

"We do have some solutions such as LTE, a great invention, but I'm afraid that without the spectrum it's not much good," said Emin Gurdenli, technical director of T-Mobile UK.

"The government has got to deliver its piece, and we the operators have to keep our peace with the government and amongst ourselves to support Digital Britain."

Gurdenli also admitted to driving down the M25 at 90 miles per hour while testing handover between two cell towers, a feat that will seem almost unbelievable to anyone who regularly drives on the M25 today. We're not sure if there's a statute of limitations on speeding, but it's been around 25 years, so we reckon he's probably safe.

Other challenges such as rural development, content delivery, revenue generation, regulation and privacy were also raised. However one topic that was conspicuously avoided was that of roaming. While speakers were happy to highlight the growing trend of ubiquitous connectivity and predict that people will continue to become connected wherever they are, none mentioned how exorbitant international roaming charges effectively cut a user off at the knees the moment they leave their country of origin.

"One thing our industry has proved time and time again is that none of us have the monopoly on wisdom," concluded Brown.

Clearly some major physical, logistic and economic hurdles lie ahead if the technology is to continue to scale and meet the growing appetite for mobile data services, however it was encouraging to see that the entire event seemed good natured, with people from rival companies talking amiably with a genuine sense of working together for the common good. µ