Tag: mobile tech

Mobile technology frustrations grow in India with regularly dropped calls

| October 5, 2015

The explosive growth of telecom and weak infrastructure are posing a threat to Modi’s plan to connect rural and urban India.

Mobile technology has been taking off in India with a vengeance, but the dream that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been aiming to realize – to bring steady connections to urban and rural regions of the country – could be threatened due to a number of common struggles.

Almost one billion people in India have connected to the country’s cell phone services over the last ten years.

This has been a part of the mobile technology revolution that has been occurring in the country. It has brought India to the point that they are the second largest market in the world for wireless phones. However, a recent combination of rapid growth and the poor wireless infrastructure has also meant that the hopes the country has had to expand its mobile network reach has become exceptionally difficult and frustrating to device users.

The current mobile technology situation in the country has earned it the nickname of the “call-drop nation”.

Mobile Technology FrustrationThe regularly dropped calls is currently affecting people in all social statuses and income levels. The help line run by the government in order to allow for consumers across the country to register complaints has now reported that dropped calls are among the leading grievances that have been registered over the summer. It has become national headline news and has even led to the creation of a popular social media hashtag campaign called #NoCallDrops.

Though this problem has been growing steadily worse as mobile connections have been getting worse, the issue has been catapulted into the spotlight over the last few weeks after dozens of cell towers in the country’s capital were deemed invalid by the municipal corporation. This brought the three largest mobile device makers in India before a parliamentary committee in the hopes of discovering a solution to this widespread issue. Modi has called to his officials to repair this problem.

According to mobile technology consultant Prasanto K Roy, “India’s mobile network is under tremendous stress,” adding that “if we fail to address mobile connectivity problems, it will directly hit the government’s Digital India initiative.”

5G mobile technology definition underway between the E.U. and China

| October 1, 2015

These two regions are working together to decide on the details of this upcoming tech.

The European Union and China have now agreed to work together in order to be able to come up with a working definition for 5G mobile technology, which is a term that is already heavily used despite the fact that it has not yet been properly define.

So far, there hasn’t been a great deal of agreement that has occurred as a standard understanding of 5G.

Among the only things upon which everyone can agree when it comes to defining 5G mobile technology is that it is what will be built and purchased as the next phase after 4G. Therefore, any agreement that will occur between the E.U. and China could be quite an important one. The agreement will be an expansion of the foundation that occurred between the E.U. and South Korea, back in June 2014, as well as another one that was signed in May 2015 between the E.U. and Japan.

Many companies have already been tossing around their own definitions of 5G mobile technology.

Mobile Technology - European Union & ChinaMany large players in the mobile tech industry have been talking about 5G for the last while, including Samsung Electornics and, even more recently, Verizon. In fact, in September, Verizon said that they were already working on building 5G networks. That said, actual definitions of the technology have not been provided along with the claims, which has left the industry and consumers somewhat in the dark as to what that actually means.

The definitions for 3G and 4G were created by standards bodies including the 3G Patent Partnership (3GPP) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). They have taken a much more measured tack toward creating their definitions.

The ITU plans to come up with its own name for 5G mobile technology at some point in October. The prediction has also been that the name will be International Mobile Telecommunications system 2020, as that is the year in which it has predicted that the first equipment for 5G will hit the market. That said, an actual technical standard for the tech likely won’t occur until February of that year.