Wind coming to Canada

[inquisitor]

Originally Posted by adam917

You are right in that it really hasn't been very long ago since even plain GSM phones lacked 850 MHz. It seemed to have taken about 3 years for each 'new' band to become commonplace on devices (first 850 GSM, then 850/1900 UMTS came about some time after 2100 UMTS, now it seems to be headed that way with AWS). The real problem likely will be including every used band in future devices. With LTE coming, it seems this number will only get higher (off the top of my head there are the 2600 & 700 MHz bands set aside for LTE, right?).

The limited frequency support of current 3G devices will soon come to an end, since back in November 1997 Qualcomm announced chipsets supporting quadband-GSM and UMTS at 700MHz, 800MHz, 850MHz, 900MHz, 1500MHz, 1700/2100MHz (AWS), 1800MHz, 1900MHz, 2100 MHz, 2600 MHz to be sampled in 4Q 2008. So maybe we will see first devices with those decaband (= 10 bands) chipsets for christmas.
Those chips do not only include frequency bands, that have not been deployed yet, but the QSC7630 will even support CDMA including ED-VO, GSM and UMTS including HSPA with up to 10.2 MBit/s in a single chipset!

I wonder when GSM will be shut down in favour of re-farming those bands to for use in 3/4/5(!) G. Have there been any talks of this happening just yet or do we still have another 5+ years to go?

Of course the industry is interested in deploying 3G in the lower frequency bands due to their higher range and so reduce the required number of basestations. But I believe we won't see any operators to completely drop GSM in favor of 3G soon. That's not feasible unless 3G-capable handsets are that widely spread, that operators don't need to fear a huge customer churn and the loss of inbound roaming revenues by such "hard" switch. Hard switches will only occur in the CDMA-world, where operators will switch from CDMA to UMTS, as Telstra Australia or New Zealand have done.
What will happen is operators with enough frequency spectrum to run GSM and UMTS parallely in the same band, but that requires quite a big chunk of spectrum (at least 2 x 10 MHz, where at least 2 x 5 MHz are continious for 3G). In some countries like Germany, the GSM-bands (at least the 900MHz-band) is fragmented, which makes the simultaneous use of UMTS impossible for some operators, allthough in summary there is enough frequency bandwidth. Therefore O2 Germany and eplus are currently fighting with the German regulation authority for a refarming of the 900MHz-band, which would lead to equal distribution of the existing GSM-bands in 4 continious ranges and according to a press report from yesterday they may succeed.
With LTE problems increase, since the maximum data bandwidth (the actual user experience) correlates with the frequency bandwidth. For those 300 MBit/s of downstream touted all the time, you need 2 x 20 MHz of spectrum. The 850MHz band however has only 2 x 25 MHz - so even if there were only two operators sharing the 850MHz-band, those rates of hundred(s) of MBit/s are pure fantasy.