With Smartphones Plateauing, Eyes on Mobile Networks to Provide Next Wave of Improvements

With the launch of Android One and the growing number of highly capable, yet affordable smartphones, the promise of cheap devices that will put a high-speed data connection into the hands of the mass market is looking more feasible than ever.

In fact, after the initial response to Android One, MediaTek - whose chip powers the current Android One handsets launched in India - said that it expects as many as two million handsets to be sold in India this year.

(Also See: Android One Was Conceived With India in Mind, Says Google's Sundar Pichai)

Earlier this month Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 210 chipset that brings 4G connectivity to entry-level handsets. While Android One is now in the market, phones bearing the Snapdragon 210 are expected to reach markets by early 2015. Speaking at the launch of the Snapdragon 210, Cristiano Amon, Executive Vice President, Qualcomm Technologies and Co-President of QCT, said the improvements taking place in LTE are moving at a faster pace than they did for 3G.

Amon also pointed out that while the reach of 4G is currently limited, its scope is vast.

"The developing world is expected to be 80 percent of all smartphone shipments by 2018," said Amon. "And just 17 percent of that population has a smartphone today. We know that number is going to reach 100 percent."

One of the examples that Qualcomm talked about is LTE-Broadcast. The technology was showcased earlier this year and at the Qualcomm 3G/LTE Summit in Hong Kong earlier this month, the company demonstrated how it could be used to send four HD video streams across live spectrum.

Typically, data is sent on a one-to-one basis; each device picks up a unique stream of data from the tower. This unicast can waste bandwidth if large number of people are consuming the same content. As Qualcomm demonstrated though, LTE-B can be used to deliver the same data to everyone in the cell at once, which can save a lot of bandwidth. And the data does not have to be consumed live - it can be used to cache content, and, thus, not interrupt the user's communication.

One of the suggested uses was to cache replay clips of a game to everyone in a stadium, which could then be pulled up and played later. This way, if lots of people in the stadium want to look at clips between plays, it does not put additional load on the bandwidth of the area.

For the demo, Qualcomm showed a live stream of China Mobile's UTV, which is a Wi-Fi video service in Hong Kong. With LTE-B, the TV can be viewed anywhere without requiring Wi-Fi access and congesting the network.

From the monetisation perspective, Qualcomm also talked about how this technology could be used to serve highly targeted video advertising, based on your location. This is something that IBM had also discussed with us earlier this year, and given that carriers have a lot more information about you than just your location, the targeting can get more fine-tuned.

In India this same technology could be used to deliver videos of various government programs, say, for educating farmers. Since identical broadcasts are supposed to reach a large number of farmers in specific geographies, it could be possible to use LTE-B to broadcast informational videos. It could also find its use in mission critical scenarios such as emergency broadcast systems.

Right now, during emergencies phone networks get clogged and unusable. But if some bandwidth could be set aside for such situation, it would be possible for the government to reach people during crises such as earthquakes with information about relief camps, safety information and more.

At the same time the increasing affordability of communication technology also means that it is becoming easier to connect a wider range of devices to the Internet.

Venkata SM Renduchintala, Executive Vice President, Qualcomm Technologies, and Co-President of QCT said that the number of 3G and 4G connections is expected to grow globally to 5.2 billion by 2018.

"The automobile would likely become the next frontier for connected platforms," said Renduchintala, "with 60 percent of vehicles by 2017 connecting through mobile technologies."

A car will require Bluetooth, power management, and using LTE it would act as a mobile hotspot for your devices, all working together, he added. This brace of technologies is already available, and the delay is only in implementation and standardisation.

Several companies in the communications space are now working to make the Internet of Things and connected cars a reality. In July Samsung, Intel and Dell joined hands to ensure communications standards for connected devices. From the other end of the equation, GM says it will introduce connected cars and automated driving by 2016. Ford also gave NDTV Gadgets a demo of their vehicle to vehicle communications and more recently, GM demonstrated how connected cars can communicate with one another.

What these developments show is that the future of mobile communications could well lie far beyond mobile phones, as more and more connections are used for machines to talk to one another, instead of people.

Disclosure: Qualcomm sponsored the correspondent's flights and hotel for the 3G/ LTE Summit in Hong Kong.