5G antennas will be Massive

 

This is one 5G base station form factor, as envisaged by China Mobile.

The Massive MIMO technology expected to be at the heart of 5G will mean large base stations, containing possibly hundreds of smart antennas, and far too big to be installed on windy mobile masts. LTE base stations use no more than six.

Tod Sizer, head of wireless research at Alca-Lu Labs, thinks it's a creative challenge for the industry. He expects the large antennas will be placed behind billboards and on the sides of buildings in densely-populated downtown areas.

China Mobile's thinking is it can embed the antenna in company names or logos on the side of buildings, as shown off here at Mobile Asia Expo last week.

The unfortunate case of Ms Zhao

Fake mobile base stations are rife in China. A single GSM transceiver costs around 50,000 yuan ($8,000) and can be used to profitably blast out SMS ads to hawk property, massages, fake receipts and other services over a small area.

It’s only one part of China’s massive mobile spam problem, which runs at some 400 billion SMS a year, but given that this leaves a transaction trail, identifying the spammers pose no problem for even the dimmest investigator.

Indeed, as this blog has reported, it didn't take much for a Beijing newspaper reporter to do exactly that, and it was only after his disclosures that authorities troubled themselves to act. Bear in mind that as well as harassing users with junk messages and often promoting illegal services, the unauthorised signals also caused calls to drop. 

Now that authorities have been nudged into action, a media campaign is underway to reassure a concerned nation that their government is working diligently working to rid the airwaves of this hitherto hidden scourge.

One of these reports prompted a Beijing student to contemplate the illegal base stations as a means of sharing information about the not-quite forgotten events of 1989. Zhao Huaxu rashly shared this thought in a tweet which, unlike the torrents of overlooked spam, quickly attracted official attention. So much that they took her into custody, which in turn caught the attention of the twittersphere.

I confess my attention was caught by the fact that Ms Zhao is a student at my old college in Beijing. While she is merely one of several truckloads of citizens preemptively arrested and criminalised in the panicky months leading to the anniversary that cannot be mentioned, her plight and background recalls the naïve youths I shared a campus with many years ago.

Although a campaign is afoot to have her released, her prospects are extremely dim. As well as the privations of custody, she presumably faces the end of the college education for which she and her parents had sweated for so many years.

All of which reminds us once more that in this country official indifference to the inconvenience and harassment of ordinary citizens is matched only the unflinching persecution of harmless teenagers.

Is malware taking over our smartphones?

Are our mobile phones being swamped with malware?

Calgary startup Wedge Networks claims that as much as 90% of data uploaded from mobile phones is malware. What's more, says Wedge COO Steve Chappell, operators don't see it as a problem - “as long as customers are paying for their data.”

Wedge's figures are impossible to verify, but it does have some smart SDN-enabled data inspection technology that can peer into massive volumes of data in real-time.

Wedge has found that 89%-91% of data uploaded from Bharti Airtel users, and nearly 90% of data from customers of Thailand's TOT, is infected. Similar results were found in the data traffic of operators in other markets, Chappell said.

The malware does not pose a threat to handsets or users. “The aim is to be disseminated,” Chappell points out. But those who created the threats are exploiting the meagre level of security in consumer devices.

While operators are indifferent to the threat to users, they insist that the malware be removed before entering their backbones, reaping huge savings.

Chappell says by taking advantage of the flexibility of SDN, Wedge's solutions have the ability to scale enormously.  Indeed, the company has just landed a contract with an unnamed Middle East government to provide real-time 'web filtering' over a 40Gbps data stream - an impressive technology achievement (that it is being primarily used to block politically objectionable websites is less so).

The technology was developed by co-founders CEO Hongwen Zhang and chief scientist Husam Kinawi as postgrads at Calgary University.

Wedge has just completed a $10 million B funding round. Bell Canada, Mitsubishi and China data center firm 21 Vianet are customers, while Comcast is conducting proof of concept tests.

What China's innovation gap tells us

Earlier this week I posted to Light Reading about the almost total absence of telecom start-ups in China, despite it being the world’s largest supplier of telecom gear.

It’s the one high-tech sector where the country can claim leadership, and the lack of start-ups is a significant gap in what Chinese call the 'industry chain’. Not that start-ups are the sole engine of innovation – far from it – but they are a great way of concentrating resources and attention on specific issues and technologies.

The industry structure is at the heart of the problem. The oligopoly in the services market means operators have little incentive to innovate, and this in turn puts market power in the hands of vendors, who make sure small vendors stay small.

Other factors also come into play, such as the weak research sector and corruption and plagiarism in science, compounded by the government's ham-fisted attempts to micro-manage innovation.

There’s an interesting analogy in the aviation sector, another vertical where China has great ambitions. Citing a new Rand Corp report, the Wall Street Journal points to the tension between the airlines, who want the most efficient aircraft possible, and the state-owned manufacturer trying to find buyers for its dud planes. (For those interested, James Fallows’ excellent China Airborne examines China’s innovation and wider economic potential through the lens of aviation.)

China’s telecom sector of course works far better than that, benefiting from a genuinely competitive supplier market, but similar strains between vendors, operators and government ambitions exist, as demonstrated by the mandating of TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE.

In the short-term this hardly matters for the telecom sector. Start-ups aren't the be-all and end-all of innovation, and there is plenty of global competition both to challenge the vendors and ensure operators get the technology they need.

But it's a problem for China, which aims to refashion its economy through science and innovation. Its inability to extract more innovation out of its massive telecom industry reminds that it is still a developing country and that achieving manufacturing scale is not the same as achieving thought or technology leadership.

At last, a mobile spam crackdown

Chinese police have finally cracked down on mobile base station spoofing, the source of an epidemic in mobile spam, reportedly arresting 1,530 people in a nationwide sweep over the past month.

According to the official Xinhua news service, a joint effort by nine government agencies has destroyed 24 “production dens”, seized 2,600 unlicensed base stations and uncovered 3,540 cases of fraud.

As this blog reported in December, one survey estimated that 200 billion mobile spam messages were sent in the first half of last year – roughly one a day for every single user in the country.

But it’s hard to overlook that this assault on spam began only after a prominent newspaper revealed the extent of the problem:

The Beijing News recently related the tale of a professional spammer who roams the Chinese capital with a small cell transceiver in his van, charging 1,000 yuan ($164) to reach thousands of users within several hundred metres.

The spammer, Guo Peng, said he had five GSM small cells, each costing around 50,000 yuan ($8,220), with which he earns up to 5,000 yuan a day. He can send out 6,000 messages in half an hour via the China Mobile or China Unicom networks. Guo said he knew at least 20 others in the business in Beijing, each with multiple base stations.

It’s difficult also not to contrast the belated interest in spam with the meticulous shutdown of unappetising political content on first Sina Weibo and now WeChat. One survey estimates that Weibo posts may have fallen by as much 70% after a series of campaigns last year.

Bear in mind, too, that mobile spamming is not victimless – it works by shielding an operator’s signal, causing calls to drop, not to mention the fraud and other criminal activities that spam enables. Plus of course the sheer annoyance to users. But these aren’t priorities.