LESSONS FROM HISTORY

The Ionica story and its relevance today

John Haine

What was Ionica?

Founded 1992, Cambridge based
Aim to provide a national alternative to BT in the residential
and small business market, providing both connections and
service
Awarded 50 MHz of spectrum at 3.4 GHz for Fixed Radio
Access (FRA); and Telecoms Act PTO licence
Developed proprietary FRA technology, manufactured under
licence by Nortel as Proximity I
Basic proposition buy cheap wholesale long-distance
minutes, sell at a modest discount to normal retail price
Two lines for the price of one
Wireless Local Loop
Slide 2

The Ionica building St Johns Innovation Park

Slide 3

Potted history

Development of complete radio access system started 1992

Service launched May 1996 in East Anglia
Expanded to Yorkshire and Midlands
Over period 1992 1998 raised >300m in equity, and debt
facility of 300m
IPO in July 1997
By 1998 achieved 62,000 subscribers
Entered administration 29th October 1998
All subscribers transferred to BT by early 1999

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Why wireless access?

Low cost per home passed
Once passed you can market your service
Cable costs ~200 per home passed
Wireless could cost ~30

Pass lots of homes with minimum investment

Then use low cost mass marketing methods (i.e. regional TV ads)

Most of the cost per connection incurred only after

customer signed up

COVERAGE WAS KING!

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Technical requirements

Target system range 5 km to maximise coverage

Coverage target of 80% of premises in range
Enough capacity for at least 5% penetration of homes passed
Service transparency i.e. high-quality analogue telephony
& modem data (this was the mid-90s!), 2 lines, multiple
numbers
High availability - ~99.99%
Example:
Cover Cambridge city with 3 base-stations for coverage
Added 3 more for capacity later on

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Achieving long range

Near Lineof-sight
path

Typical
height 15 m

Base station

Eaves or
chimney
mounting

Customer premises
Clutter

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CPE

Elevated position on premises

Minimise path obstruction by clutter
Minimise multipath
Maximise signal - ~10 dB gain relative to ground level

Use highly directional antenna

Directional gain of 18 dBi helps link budget
Rejects multipath & interference from neighbour cells

Need good prediction model to assign preferred server and

pointing direction

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CPE a/k/a Residential Service

System (RSS)

External enclosure with all RF & digital

electronics multi-pair downlead into house
Very high performance 30 cm phased-array antenna
Remarkably low-cost electronics for a proprietary system
PSU & telephone cabling / socket inside house
Back-up battery to meet 999 calling requirement

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CPE antenna installation

objective

One visit - similar to broadcast antenna

Needed to know house location from
postcode to access propagation database
Target was 4 installs / day / team
Installation technology similar to satellite / TV antenna (but
better engineered)

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Base station
Preferred height 15 metres for
planning reasons
Normally sectorised no need
to cover areas where
customers arent
Combination of sectorisation
and vertical pattern gain ~13
dB

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Link budget

+26 dBm transmit power

-102 dBm receive sensitivity (cf GSM), channel BW ~300 kHz
31 dB antenna gain total
~159 dB total margin

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Survey
Survey vehicle with
telescopic mast
Set to given height at survey
location
Check height with mast-top
TV camera
Measure signal level
Lower mast
Drive on!
(you dont make
measurements very
quickly!)
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Survey results
example

No obvious power-law
dependence on range
Clear that some locations at
short range are not covered
Other results showed that much
longer range (>10 km) was
possible on uncluttered paths

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Survey results
example

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Multipath
A significant worry from the start
Channel sounding & sweep measurements seemed to show
delay spread <0.4 microseconds
System design incorporated simple equaliser to cope

Slide 16

Coverage prediction

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Development
Ionica-led consortium of local R&D companies (Generics,
Symbionics, Plextek) and Nortel (Paignton, Devon)
Loosely based on GSM standard

No support for mobility, handover, roaming

Offset-QPSK modulation
10 slots/frame, TDMA, FDD
Multi-carrier circuit-switched trunking protocol
RSS could access 3 slots/frame
1 slot 32 kbit/s; ADPCM voice; 2 slots concatenated for modem data
requiring 64 kbps A-Law for transparency

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What worked?
Technology generally performed well
Most of the time, for most people, quality was excellent
(significantly better than BT)
Roll-out was very quick covered 2.8 million homes between
June 1996 and October 1998
In some areas, take-up was extremely fast (no competition
from cable companies)

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What went wrong?

Capacity issues
Software version at launch limited capacity by 50%
In areas where there was no cable competition, subscribers
signed-up very quickly
Quickly ran out of capacity, had to stop selling
New software load fixed capacity, but too late
Data was growing very rapidly at this period early massmarket Internet traffic much higher than anticipated
Exacerbated by allocating double RF BW cf. voice

Difficult to increase capacity by cell splitting without lots of

re-pointing subscriber antennas no handover!
Truck-roll very expensive
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What went wrong?

Coverage issues
Despite survey evidence, coverage wasnt as good as
expected
Prediction was also difficult installs failed too often
wasted visit, cost
affected reputation

Too many marginal cases

worked initially
performance got worse with time
multiple site visits to try to fix problem

Hard to meet 4 installs /day / teaminstallation targets, too

expensive
Path changed with time
seasons
weather (e.g. wet leaves)

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What went wrong?

Multipath
Small proportion of sites affected with anomalous multipath
problem
Never seen during surveys
2 paths, similar amplitude, very small delay difference (~40
ps)
caused slow fading as path phases varied
wideband: very hard to equalise
serious affect on modem timing recovery (because not anticipated)

Made installation much more complicated try multiple cells,

different positions on house
Reduced No. Installs to 1 or 2 a day
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What went wrong?

Availability
Users expect a fixed service to be available essentially all the
time
99.99% = 53 minutes unavailable per year (all causes)
Radio link has to be rather better to meet overall target
Propagation issues can last for long periods (until the leaves
fall?)
Led to some customers getting very poor service

Slide 23

Rural coverage?
Ionica covered only urban areas where there was reasonable
customer density
1400 MHz spectrum competition in 1995 to provide FWA in
rural areas
Ionica looked hard at whether it was worth bidding

Most people in the country live in villages

Villages tend to be in valleys (where its sheltered and watered)
Also lots of trees
Difficult to reach houses from remote base sites
Need at least one base station per village
Hard to cover enough houses from a single base station to generate
enough revenue to be viable

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What are the lessons for today?

Could radio bridge the digital divide?

Clutter

Slide 25

What are the lessons for today?

Need diverse paths:
No re-pointing for
growth
Diversity against slow
fading - handover
Simpler installation

Clutter

Slide 26

What are the lessons for today?

BUT:
Antenna directive gain
much lower
Smaller cells higher
cost

Clutter

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What are the lessons for today?

Capacity
Ionica was hit by long bandwidth-hungry Internet sessions carried as
circuit-switched calls
Any wireless system should use packet-switched air interface for IP traffic
Now strong trend for streaming services to move on to Internet
essentially circuits but carried as packet streams over Broadband
Trunking advantage disappears again
Can a wireless access system cope?

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What are the lessons for today?

Is user installation possible (avoid truck roll)?
Requires mobile-like coverage to overcome building penetration and
height loss
Very small cells (~500m radius)
High-cost network
QoS outwith operators control
Already being done with WiMax
Much better to install CPE outside and as high as possible, but then
site visit needed

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What are the lessons for today?

Rural coverage (the Digital Divide)?
Radio wont easily reach the houses from outside the village because
they are in valley and shadowed
Need to build multiple base stations in the village to provide diverse
paths
Difficult to fill base station capacity & therefore get RoI
Need to get broadband trunk to village to backhaul base stations

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What are the lessons for today?

Inevitably there has to be a
broadband hub to serve the village
May feed wireless base stations or
drive ADSL down short phone pairs
or even fibre to the home
Phone pairs already installed to
almost every house
Can wireless really compete for a
fixed service?

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What are the lessons for today?

Virgin Media to trial ultrafast broadband over telegraph poles

By Lilly Vitorovich, Dow Jones Newswires
Thursday 11 March 2010
U.K. TV and broadband provider announces U.K. trial.
(Total Telecom 11 March 2010)
Virgin planning to run overhead fibre drop wires from telegraph poles to
houses where they have trunk line plant passing through.

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Learning from history?

Take your pick...
Those who cannot learn from history
are doomed to repeat it.
George Santayana

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition.

We don't want tradition. We want to live in
the present and the only history that is
worth a tinker's damn is the history we
make today.
Henry Ford

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Acknowledgements.....
Leigh Carter
Patrick Mitchell
Alan Whitehead
Guy Gibson
Wayne Boucher
Paul Martin

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