RTT Technology Topics - 2009
We help companies and organisations maximise returns from existing and future technology and engineering investments.
RTT Technology Topics
Every month we produce a technology topic that reflects current
RTT research. These are sent to an elective list of engineering,
marketing and business team leaders.
There are over 120 Topics archived on this site starting from
August 1998.
The archive provides a free resource for researchers in the industry
wishing to use past experience to validate technology, engineering,
market and business decisions.
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| 2009 | Title | Synopsis |
|---|---|---|
| December | Information Networks in an Information Age | The convergence of computing and communications has created a new generation of Information Networks that dominate the developed world today. These networks have the potential to transform the rest of the world both in terms of social and economic progress, education, health and the environment. |
| November | New thinking in a Newly Connected Economy | Telecommunications should be considered as a cross between transport infrastructure and a utility. If delivered along side other utilities, for example water and electricity, it should be possible to achieve a step function reduction in connectivity cost and energy and environmental efficiency |
| October | Universal Broadband Access | Universal Broadband Access- the new wireless economy? examines
the technology and engineering economics of universal broadband
access and suggests that universal broadband investment funds might be better spent on providing universal narrow band access to people living in survival economies. |
| September | Tri Band Networks | Reorganising radio networks with macrocells at 700, 800
and 900 MHz, microcells at 1800, 1900 and 2100 MHz and pico
and femto cells at 2.6 GHz would deliver the efficiency gains
needed to realize universal broadband access but would imply major changes to present market structures. |
| August | Spectral Economic Efficiency | The result of past policy has been that most countries now have cellular networks that are operating on economically inefficient spectrum. This is imposing unnecessary industrial cost which is resulting in unsustainable cuts in R and D and engineering investment. This suggests there may be merit in developing Technology Economics as a discrete sub set of more general economic theory. The objective would be to achieve a closer coupling between engineering theory and practice and economic theory and practice. |
| July | Technopolies | The dominant determinant of any new choice of technology is that it should maximise return on existing R and D and manufacturing investment. Backwards compatibility with existing systems therefore becomes essential.This is true for all levels of the industry supply chain including RF components, radio and baseband silicon, infrastructure and end user product and service offerings and explains the technopoly effect, the de facto development of a single dominant technology |
| June | A Broader View of Broadband | The UK has a one hundred and fifty year legacy of telecommunications R and D and manufacturing investment. It therefore makes sense to couple broadband connectivity investment policy with telecommunications industry investment policy. |
| May | LTE TV | The inclusion of Multi Cast Broadcast Single Frequency Networks, MBSFN, as a work item in present and future LTE releases suggests that there is still a measure of vendor and operator confidence that mobile TV remains a worthwhile investment opportunity. In practice MBSFN could be used to realise additional revenue and improve returns on existing spectral and network investment both for the cellular and broadcast community. |
| April | Digital Britain in an Analog World | It only makes sense for operators to invest in new radio spectrum and the related infrastructure if the spectrum can be accessed with handsets and mobile broadband devices that work at least as well as existing devices and preferably better. This requires substantial research and development and manufacturing investment at component level. The problem with this is that the margin realisable from RF components and RF integrated circuits is not presently sufficient to cover this investment. |
| March | Capital Transfer Networks | The companies behind telecommunication technologies and
innovations including cellular phones are generally conventionally
financed and have conventional shareholding structures. Collective economics may have a broader role to play in the telecoms industry. In particular collective economics may have a broader role to play in financing future R and D. |
| February | Mobile Broadband | R & D is an area where opportunity cost substantially exceeds actual expenditure. Poorly directed poorly targeted engineering effort may well translate into millions of dollars of lost revenue and lost profit opportunity. A few hundred hours of well directed well targeted engineering effort may well translate into millions of dollars of future industry value |
| January | White Space | For White Space devices to be successful they must have
similar scale economies to existing WiFi, Wi Max and cellular
handsets.The devices must support equivalent or faster data
rates than existing cellular products and or cellular handsets
and when used as portable devices should use similar amounts
of DC power. However the receive and transmit functions have to work across operational bandwidths that are far wider (when expressed as a percentage of the centre frequency of the band) than all other existing mainstream radio systems. Additionally the receiver dynamic range needed from these devices is substantially more than cellular or WiFi handsets. This introduces a number of practical performance and cost issues. |