• “Transmission costs - the No. 1 barrier to truly bridging the digital divide”
• Altobridge breakthroughs - Local Connectivity and On-demand use of transmission bandwidth key to cost cutting
• Partnership work with Maxis ongoing
Singapore, 18 June 2008 – “Despite significant advances to drive down capital costs for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), several key challenges still remain before the digital divide is truly bridged, with transmission costs standing out as the No.1 barrier.”
Although more subscribers in more areas can now be connected and are reaping the benefits that mobile communications brings, the above quote from Mike Fitzgerald, CEO of leading wireless application solution provider, Altobridge, (CommunicAsia 2008, Hall 3/3H1-01) highlights the fact that high transmission costs have hindered the delivery of communications to a huge number of people around the world for too long.
Fitzgerald continued, “The lower our industry can get transmission costs, the more subscribers we can connect, and the more remote communities and people we can bridge and bring into the connected world. Transmission capacity is becoming a rare and expensive commodity and as we introduce new generations of technology, more and more capacity is being demanded.”
For his part, Mike Fitzgerald has headed the pioneering R&D efforts of Altobridge, which have truly cut the cost of communications, to, from and between mobile subscribers. The company has invested significant resources over the past five years resulting in several major technology breakthroughs, which, in Fitzgerald’s own words, “have had a measurable impact on mobile operators’ bottom lines”.
Two of these breakthroughs, the company’s Local Connectivity solution and its Split Communications Architecture, are poised to have major impact on networks, globally.
“We have developed what we term our Local Connectivity solution,” said Fitzgerald, “through which it is possible to keep local traffic local, therefore removing the cost of traffic being backhauled, back and forth across the network. We achieve this without impacting the standard signaling protocols of the core network and, with up to 70% of traffic being local in emerging markets, this breakthrough is hugely important.”
The second breakthrough is a new patented ‘split communications architecture’. Fitzgerald continued, “We take the core network element that controls base stations and we split it, creating a unique ‘on-demand’ solution. This enables us to take control of the transmission link and drive down cost by utilising the link more efficiently, which has allowed us to get voice calls down to between 5 and 8 Kbits/s per call, the most operationally efficient solution at market today.
“When we combine these two breakthroughs together with a cost-effective remote Base
Station, MNOs can benefit from the most operationally efficient communications solution for remote communities currently available, particularly for smaller locations of between 100 and 300 subscribers. And yet, all parts of a mobile network can potentially benefit from these technical breakthroughs,” Fitzgerald concluded.
The company’s intellectual property has evolved from working with some important vertical markets. Altobridge has already launched the world’s first cost-effective mobile phone system for commercial aircraft, available today from AeroMobile and flying with Emirates amongst others. Its solution to provide standard, cost-effective mobile communications to the world’s merchant maritime industry is also available today from Blue Ocean Wireless.
The company is currently working with MNOs to deliver communications to some of the most remote locations on the globe, including work with Maxis in parts of east Malaysia.
