Cell Phone Reception: Quality Getting Worse

Alex Mindlin reports in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/technology/21drill.html that J.D. Power and Associates has announced that  cell phone quality has hit a plateau after steady improvement from 2003 to 2009.  The article cites the trend of indoor usage as people replace or supplement landlines being responsible for this quality plateau.  Regardless of where the calls were made or over what handsets, the quality of calls have declined over the last 6 months.  The article does not differentiate between carriers, but indicate the worst city for reception is Washington with 18% problem calls, three times the rate for Pittsburgh or Cincinnati which have the best call quality.

Those of us who have worked in the indoor coverage niche for years have seen this coming.  Improvements in technology and additional spectrum have been overwhelmed both by subscriber growth and the bandwidth thirst of smart phone applications.  Wireless technology was keeping pace with demand until the introduction of the iPhone.  On the consumer behavior side of the equation, cell phones have evolved from the family road emergency tool to the personal communications device.  Consequently, if I want to reach the individual, I call the cell and most of the time that person and phone are indoors.  The only solution to the problem is frequency reuse by cell splitting and the new cells need to be inside office buildings, public venues and residential buildings.  The most efficient architecture for indoor cell service is the combination of a picocell and a distributed antenna system.  This allows for separating the geographical aggregation engineering from the traffic aggregation engineering within buildings.

Over the last 5 years, both the carriers and the OEMs have indulged in wishful thinking and have avoided directly confronting these trends in the serving architecture... they have continued to upgrade and build macro towers and have treated indoor as an afterthought at best or something that might go away somehow (700 MHz may fix it, smart antennas may fix it, better coding may fix it, etc.)

There has been a move by AT&T in the last year to recognize the importance of indoor, particularly for large venues, however, there is not consensus in the industry.  One could expect a bad quality report to motivate carriers, however, with the continued consolidation of the carriers, quality as a competitive differentiator may become less important http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/att-to-buy-t-mobile-usa-for-39-billion/.

What’s your view... has the time come for indoor wireless coverage and capacity to take center stage and have well architected solutions?  Or will wishful thinking and market power continue to delay a solution to this problem?