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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2013
annual shipments of small cells by
2017. The report, which looks at the
wider mobile data traffic market,
also forecasts 1.4 million macrocell
shipments in 2017.
Vendors and chipset makers including
Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia
Siemens Networks, and Qualcomm
have been talking up HetNets as a
means of helping carriers to expand
capacity in their mobile networks
without relying on traditional base-
station deployments. Small cells are a
key part of that equation.
Phil Goldstein of FierceWireless
(3rd December) pointed out that
ARCchart’s outlook for small cell
shipments “is remarkable considering
that the firm forecast just 261,000
annual small shipments for 2012.”
ARCchart predicts a continuing trend
for carriers to deploy small cells as
a dense network capable of adding
capacity to high-traffic areas.
High-speed broadband
access to the Internet tops
72 per cent in Europe
According to figures released 18th
December by Eurostat, the statistical
office of the European Union, more
than three-quarters of households
across the 27 nations of the EU had
Internet access in 2012, compared
to just under 50 per cent in 2006.
The growth in broadband access has
been even more striking, with fully
72 per cent of Europeans now able
to avail themselves of a high-speed
connection to the Internet, against
just 30 per cent with such access six
years ago.
The highest levels of broadband
access were seen in the northern
member-states of the EU, with
Sweden (87 per cent), Denmark (85
per cent), the Netherlands (83 per
cent), Germany (82 per cent), and
the UK (80 per cent) showing the
greatest penetration. But even in
Italy and Greece, countries harder-hit
by economic crisis, more than half
of all households had a broadband
connection.
Use of social media was found by
Eurostat to be highest in Portugal,
where fully 75 per cent of Internet
users post messages to Twitter,
Facebook, and similar services.
Comparable online activity was lower
among users in Germany (42 per cent)
and France (40 per cent), and lowest
in the Czech Republic (35 per cent).
Eurostat also identified the tiny Baltic
countries as Europe’s leaders in
reading newspapers online. Some
90 per cent of Internet users in
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania access
Internet news sites. In France, only
38 per cent of respondents said they
read news online.
Eurostat published its findings in
advance of a policy speech by
Europe’s Commissioner for Digital
Agenda Neelie Kroes. Among the
topics she was expected to address
are further broadband growth and
possible changes to EU copyright law.
Elsewhere in telecom . . .
✆
✆ Volvo Car Group on 17th
December announced that it
will use Ericsson’s Connected
Vehicle Cloud to allow drivers and
passengers in its cars to access
services available in the cloud.
The network vendor, also Swedish,
said users will be able to connect
with applications for information,
navigation and entertainment from
a screen in the car.
Volvo is Ericsson’s first customer
for the Connected Vehicle Cloud
platform. The carmaker said it
plans to partner with Internet
radio providers, city governments,
highway authorities, toll-road
operators and others.
✆
✆ Seeking to extend its global
dominance in personal computers
to mobile phones and tablets,
China’s second-largest vendor of
smartphones started in November
to sell them in Russia. Lenovo
Group Ltd is offering its S880 and
P700i models in Russia, its fifth
overseas market for the devices,
spokesman Chris Millward said
in a 28th November telephone
interview with Bloomberg News .
In the four months to that point,
Lenovo – which introduced its first
touch-screen handset in China
in 2010 – expanded its sales to
India, Indonesia, Vietnam and
the Philippines. The company’s
mobile Internet and digital home
unit, which makes smartphones,
more than doubled revenue to
$1.31 billion in the first half of last
year. Total sales for the period rose
11 per cent to $8.67 billion.
✆
✆ Just a day after having scored
a victory in the US with over
the maker of iPhones, Korea’s
Samsung Electronics on 18th
December said it was dropping
lawsuits aimed at banning the sale
of Apple Inc products in Europe.
Over the previous 18 months the
world’s two leading smartphone
makers had been locked in patent
disputes in at least ten countries.
Apple began the lawsuit series
when it accused Samsung of
copying its best-selling iPhone
and iPad.
On 17th December a judge
rejected Apple’s request for a
ban on the sale of Samsung
Electronics smartphones in the
United States. While the Korean
company did not say that it would
altogether abandon its quest for
compensation at law, it announced
that it was dropping its effort to
stop the sale of Apple products in
Britain, France, Germany, Italy and
the Netherlands.
✆
✆ China Telecom Corp announced
that it has introduced pre-paid
card products that allow third
generation, or 3G, network users
to buy the ability to transmit
specific amounts of data. The
carrier is the first Chinese telecom
operator to offer wireless network
traffic products to customers.
China Telecom said in a statement
that, compared with older-type
telecom contract plans, prepaid
data cards are convenient to
purchase, flexible in use, and
targeted toward specific amounts
of data demand.
As reported by Shen Jingting in
China Daily (12th December), China
Telecom offers 3G network data
cards for 60 megabytes (MB),
150MB, and 300MB of data. The
price for a 60MB card is 10 yuan
($1.60).
“Data traffic management is a
very important task for telecom
carriers, especially when they
enter the mobile Internet age,”
Le Huihua, senior product
manager of China Telecom’s
operation management division,
told China Daily.