Wireless Industry Analyst

In my previous article on convergence, I discussed the mobile baseband radio. While the WAN capability is most important, it also needs to be complemented by the so-called connectivity solutions. WiFi, bluetooth, GPS, FM and mobile TV have increasing penetration in the higher-end phones and will be a part of the convergence devices of tomorrow.

WiFi can facilitate seamless mobility for your voice call while also offloading internet browsing from the cellular network when you are near a wireless hotspot. WiFi can be used in conjunction with cellular systems today to enable fixed-mobile telephony convergence (FMC). There are dual mode handsets that can offload the burden on cellular networks, address in-building coverage issues and also switch your call seamlessly between the Wide-Area Network (WAN) and the Local Area Network (LAN).

Bluetooth as a short-range wireless technology has carved itself a niche, especially in the headset market. Legislations mandating in-car hands-free driving is one of the trends that will drive bluetooth penetration into mobile devices. The bluetooth standard has been improved to handle more sophisticated use cases such as stereo audio and high-speed data transfer. While some use cases overlap with those of WiFi, the audio profiles of bluetooth will find a unique place in the convergence movement.

GPS will help enabling location-based services (LBS). Like the GPS companies would like to say, tomorrow will not just be about when but also about where. GPS will be part of most if not all mobile devices in five years. Qualcomm has been bundling GPS with its chipsets for a while now with the hope that LBS will become more important that the mandatory E911 services. You can also look at GPS in your convergence device as the merger of the PND with the mobile phone. Garmin is attempting just that with its Nuvifone.

Mobile TV, for me, is perhaps the least exciting of the major convergence devices components. The reason is display. Display technology today is a far cry from enabling a good TV experience in your hand-held. Realizing this impediment, companies like Qualcomm are investing in display technology. High quality displays such as Qualcomm's Mirasol along with features such as retractable thin screens and a wide network coverage can help change the picture (pun intended).

FM will also become a staple. Besides these technologies, we can also think of Zigbee, RFID, UWB as other candidate radios that can convergence in your mobile device. These may come as part of a second wave that will seek to converge home networking as well.

Convergence for me is more relevant from a technology provider perspective. As I alluded to in my previous convergence article, innovative ideas and use cases have always existed. But it is only now that form-factor reduction and power consumption research have caught up with the human mind which generates creative mobility ideas. These technological advances coupled with increased attention to usability have made mobile convergence possible. One of the key effects of these improvements is the inclusion of more radios into the hand-held. So, it will be illustrative to look at the wireless components of convergence along with use cases.

The heart of the convergence device will be the mobile radio. We have the rapidly proliferating 3G standards that combine voice with reasonable speed data services. On one side, we have the Wideband CDMA (WCDMA), and its evolution namely High Speed Data Packet Access (HSDPA), HSPA, HSPA+. On the other hand, we also have the Data Optimized CDMA evolution standard (CDMA1x EV-DO).

Looking ahead, the industry talks of 4G wireless as well. Today, we have two main 4G standards, namely 3GPP Long-term evolution (LTE) and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX.) LTE is the 3GPP evolution path beyond the HSDPA standards. WiMAX, promoted as THE wireless broadband solution, received a reprieve in the US recently as Sprint finally decided the tie the knot with Clearwire. While mobile WiMAX will have to share the pie with LTE, fixed WiMAX can offer backhaul wireless broadband services as the panacea for the emerging markets.

The transition from 3G to 4G has to be preceded by the maturity and monetization of the existing and future 3G infrastructure. It appears that the 3G networks are slowly ramping up as data becomes a more prominent differentiator in the developing markets. These networks will mature in the next couple of years and thrive for five years or so before slowly being replaced by Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based 4G technologies that promise much higher data rates and hence more service possibilities.

Keep in mind that from a convergence device perspective, mobile broadband is the key technological driver. So, the cellular baseband modem that is complemented by the Wide Area Network (WAN) coverage from the wireless service providers becomes central to such a device.