Smell background of a person on phone

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The evolution in mobile telephony will bring in technologies that will enable a caller to speak without using vocal cords and even smell the background of a person or aroma of food being cooked on other end over a phone. These are some of the advance features of 4G that is expected to come in future.

“Researches are working on a highly advanced feature with which a person on phone will be able to communicate over the phone without using vocal cord and just by moving mouth,” said Vipan Kumar, senior deputy director general (vigilance) and CVO, Department of Telecommunications at a seminar organized by The Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers on 'Path Towards 4G -NGN Technologies and Challenges ahead'.

He said people will be able to smell the background of a person on the other end over phone, as 4G advances. Though some of the applications may not be available for 4G, they will be there once we enter 5G, he said.

Kumar acknowledged 4G as the need of India but pointed out various challenges that exist, like technical standards of 4G technology and lack of devices that can support 4G services.

“To support 4G services, there will be the need of additional acceleration which is required by the technology to manage power. Power consumption is going to be a big issue. This is critical because it will add multiple processing and communication elements to drive higher levels of MIPS (throughput) in mobile devices. All these elements will increase current drain,” he said.

Kumar added that there will be the need of OFDM-based technology to manage some of the process streams and power challenges for these applications and devices. He further mentioned that, for higher level service, about three time more base station would be required to deliver a 10-fold increase in data rate, but this increasing density of BTS should be checked using modern technology.

“To reduce base station density, advanced antenna techniques such as MIMO and space-time coding (STC) are used. These techniques improve spectral efficiency and reduce number and growth rate of base stations,” said Kumar.

He also pointed out that in case density of towers is not checked then higher capital cost associated with towers will make it tough for service providers to come out with viable business model.

Beside discussing features and benefit of 4G , prominent personalities from Telecom industry present at the seminar said India should skip 3G and leapfrog to 4G technology.

“Indian customers are looking for high speed access. India had earlier missed 1G which was plain mobile phone and had opportunity to directly go for 2G technology which was digital mobile telephony. When 4G technology is available in the world and so far we have not been able to come up with 3G, we should leapfrog to 4G technology,” said Bharat Bhatia, director, Motorola India.

SN Gupta, chief regulatory advisor, BT Global Services, pointed out that 4G is the need of India as it is more efficient compared to 3G.

“Beauty of 4G is the usage of spectrum with scalability. It requires bandwidth from 1.25 Mhz to 20 Mhz whereas 3G requires bandwidth of 5 Mhz. Theoretically, 3G gives data transfer rate of 2 megabit per second (mbps), where as 4G gives data transfer rate of 100 mbps between two points across the globe in mobility and 1 Gigabit per second in case of fixed access. 4G is 3G on steroids,” said Gupta.

He added that the government should choose technology that is green and future proof.

“4G is completely based on IP network and is future proof. It is also a packet based technology and hence it will support interoperability with other technology,” said Gupta.

Rajat Mukherji, vice president, Corporate Affairs, Idea Cellular mentioned that if India decides to leapfrog to 4G then it has the potential to attract investment of Rs 150,000 crore in next four years.

RN Prabhakar, member , Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and chief guest at the occasion agreed to the efficiency that 4G technology has but pointed out that telecom companies should evaluate viable business model that can work for them before India embraces 4G.

“Present network in India are not sufficient to support 4G network. Before we go for 4G, operators need to evaluate their infrastructure and come with viable business model of India,” said Prabhakar.