A new Tbaytel cell site serving the area south from Wawa along Hwy 17 is now operational. The tower is located at the Toke Mountain Ski Area.
Initial reports indicate that there is service improvement in the area. There is a good cell signal at the landfill site, all of Mission now has service, and there is a signal along Harbour Road up to Tremblay Flats Road.
This entry updates my previous entry concerning the impact of HSPA only sites. It addresses recent changes in the generation or G nomenclature, in particular the use of 4G, LTE and WiMAX.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations sponsored regulatory body for such things, held the World Radiocommunication Seminar 2010 (WRS-10) in Geneva, Switzerland the week of December 06, 2010.
One of the decisions was that the collective name for the next generation of wireless services will be called International Mobile Telecommunications - Advanced (IMT-Advanced) and have the two components “LTE-Advanced” and “WirelessMAN-Advanced”
In a related announcement, it approved the use of the term 4G for LTE or WiMAX technologies and “other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation.”
This legitimized a practice the major US vendors started using a year ago as they increased their data speeds with HSPA and HSPA+ (LTE) or EV-DO Rec C (WiMAX) technology and started to identify the service as 4G in the their major advertising campaigns with a note in the fine print that it was using enhanced 3G equipment.
Canadian carriers continued to use the more traditional terms. This led to some amusing entries in technical forums and newspaper comment sections by officious sounding experts bemoaning the fact that Canada was stuck in 3G while the US was already using 4G. In reality, Canada was ahead on the US in deploying the advanced technology but adhering to the internationally approve terminology.
Once the ITU announced the new guidelines, the Canadian carriers jumped quickly onto the bandwagon. These two press releases by Telus, one in 2010 and one in 2011 illustrate the point. In 2010, the 42 Mbps download was called Dual carrier HSPA+. In 2011 Telus touted the same system as 4G. I would expect the other major cell vendors will be close behind. Barrett Xplornet is currently proclaiming their new wireless and satellite services as 4G.
Maybe the meant to be humourous Best Buy Super Bowl with Bieber and Osborne about a 6G phone may not be that far off after all.
I have received reports that the Northland Consultant team has been extremely busy installing external Yagi style antennas and connecting them to customer provided Bell or Rogers data hubs. My understanding is they have done installations on St. Joseph Island, on the mainland along the St Joseph North Channel, the area north of Bruce Mines towards Rydal Bank, Echo Lake Road area and the area south of the SSM airport.
Once set-up, speed tests show a 3-5 Mbps download and 2-4 Mbps upload. I guess I had better be like the ISPs and state that these are samples only and your actual statistics may vary due to terrain, weather, local situation and other acts of the technology gods.
If you are near any Bell or Rogers cell site and want broadband (high speed Internet), you may want to give this a try.
For more information about HSPA broadband, see my blog entry.
Someone asked if the capability to access broadband (high-speed Internet) using 3G HSPA technology is only available through the Bell site at Desbarats.
The answer is no.
All Bell and most Rogers sites along the highway 17 corridor provide HSPA service. Both vendors sell #3 HSPA data hubs and data sticks These maps from the respective vendors and should be considered optimistic. The actual reception in any area is dependent upon a number of factors including but not limited to system availability and capacity, customer's equipment, signal strength, topography and environmental conditions. Each user location has to be considered independently.
Similar technology is coming to the North Sault area in the near future.
Bell continues to make changes to its cellular network. Their newest site in our region was activated on 23 Dec 10 near Desbarats. This site only works with 3G HSPA technology.
Background
There are two principal ways to designate cellular telephone capabilities:
1. Main modulating techniques. The two originals were called CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) originally used by Bell/Telus and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) originally used by Rogers. (Think of it in terms of Sony Beta and VHS – incompatible techniques that do the same job). They developed along parallel tracks in Canada until 2008 when Bell and Telus announced they would be converting to HSPA by 2011. (Again think of VHS beating back the Sony Beta challenge.) While both major networks use the same technology network access is not interchangeable. The next major technology upgrade will be to LTE (Long Term Evolution) for HSPA networks or WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) for CDMA based networks.
There is another technology called AWS (Advanced Wireless Service) being used by some of the new entrants in the market place. They are currently not available in Northern Ontario so will not be discussed in this article.
2. Generation. As major upgrades in each technology were made, they were referred to as generations or G for short. They are:
a. 1G – This generation provided the original standard. It was analogue.
b. 2G – This generation made the transition from analogue to digital.
c. 2.5G – This unofficial generation took advantage of digital capability to offer data transfer.
d. 3G – This generation provides high speed data capability to allow video streaming and other data extensive applications. It ushered in the era of the Smartphones.
e. 4G – This generation will increase the data speed to around 1GBps download.
Generation/Technology Matrix
| Bell | Rogers | |
| 1G | CDMA1 | TDMA |
| 2G | CDMA | GSM1 |
| 2.5 | CDMA | GSM |
| 3G | HSPA1 | HSPA |
| 4G | LTE | LTE |
Note 1: As incremental improvements in the technology of each generation took place, modifiers were often added but the underlying technology remained the same. For example, as speeds increased HSPA became HSPA+ which in turn became HSPA x2 or Dual Cell HSPA.
Handsets and other Hardware
As of this time, handsets and hardware are unique to the network for which they were sold; a Bell/Telus handset will not work on the Rogers’s network and vice-à-versa. This should not be confused with roaming which allows a phone to operate on another network with the same technology if the operating agreements are in place.
Headsets and hardware are also defined by modes. Modes identify the generation and technology they are capable of operating within. Phones are classified from unimode to pentamode or 1 to 5 modes. Dual mode phones – analogue and digital were quite common at one time as were tri-mode phones.
Headsets and hardware are also defined by frequency bands. The various generations within each mode operate in different frequency bands. Some handsets can operate in up to five frequency bands.
Handsets do exist that combine both mode and bands but they are rare.
The newer Smartphones tend to be unimode as 3G HSPA is required to take advantage of the high data speeds and smart applications. This means that phones like the Apple iPhone will not operate on 2G/2.5 networks. Conversely, older model handsets will not operate on the HSPA networks.
Current Situation
When Bell and Rogers originally upgraded their networks from 2G to 3G, they used existing sites and left the 2G/2.5G equipment in place. In the case of Bell, this meant that the both the older CDMA based and newer 3G HSPA handsets could access the network through the same cell site.
With the addition of 3G HSPA only cell sites like Desbarats, this option is no longer available. People living within the coverage area of a 3G HSPA only cell sites will have to acquire 3G HSPA handsets or hardware to take advantage of the service.
On the positive side, 3G HSPA can provide broadband (high-speed Internet) service in area that currently does not have access to broadband service.
Both Bell/Telus and Rogers are actively testing LTE and it is expected there will be limited LTE capability in major urban areas within a year or so.
Data Speeds
Trying to identify realistic data speeds for the various generation/mode offerings is a challenging task. It would seem the public pronouncements are driven by marketeers and not technology. While the ITU has defined the basics, they are generally ignored. Almost all advertising have escape clauses like “up to ‘x’ number of Mbps” or “subject to network congestion”. Field testing in the Algoma area shows that a download in the range of 4-5 Mbps can be expected at the present time. Follow the link on HSAP Access on the ADnet website to see some of the factors that affect data speed.
