Wireless industry is considered one of the fastest growing, not just because a large number of people are buying mobile phones, but also because new standards are emerging and are implemented on a faster pace.

As we start talking about 3-G standards, the world around us is surging ahead with 4-G, with faster data access and more reliable wireless broadband internet connectivity.

For mobile phone operators, each emerging standard presents both opportunities and problems. While they spend large sums of money in deploying base stations, that runs the network for mobile phones to connect, the high-power and high-volume infrastructure, are often vertically dedicated.

This means they have to deploy newer base stations each time a new standard comes to prominence.  

“This inhibits the adoption of newer standards,” said Vanu Bose, President and CEO of Vanu Inc, who have introduced the world’s first commercially available software radio access network (RAN), called Anywave, that lets wireless carriers operate multiple standards simultaneously on a single hardware platform.

To explain radio access network, which is essentially a software, Vanu Bose gives the example of how one PC (hardware platform) can perform tasks like word processing, accounting or telephony, depending on the kind of software installed in it. “We are doing something very similar in wireless,” Vanu Bose, son of Amar Bose of Bose Corporation (famous for the sound and speaker technology) said.

“Just how one hardware platform, that is your PC, does word processing and accounting with different software applications, any wave can allow various standards, be it 2-G, 3-G or 4-G to be operated on the same hardware platform. This would not only allow mobile operators to switch to newer standards easily, but also help them cut costs.”  Software RAN used in the traditional base stations are called ‘firmware radio’, which uses low-level and non-portable software.

Because these are written to work with specific hardware platforms, they can’t work when the hardware is upgraded and it is also expensive to rewrite them from the scratch.

For this reason, mobile operators are used to stick on to the aging hardware platform, which, in the face of rapidly improving compute power, are destined to become obsolete.

As a result base stations remain ineffective and use higher power. With the creative design approaches done through software RAN, a higher level of portability is possible. This enables the hardware to be upgraded and betters the performance.

Vanu Bose believes RAN offers a particular advantage for India, as the number of people picking up mobile phones is increasing. Though most people use voice-based services, he feels data access, especially videos and photo sharing, is also becoming popular.

So mobile phone operators would soon, if not already, be feeling the need to adopt newer standards to make data access better and may find software RAN helpful. After lab trials, Vanu is now in the process of talking to the mobile operators and is getting ready to go for field trials. The company has also set up its Indian operations with a view to capitalise on the engineering talent available in the country. Vanu Bose says the team is learning the technology and would work on its implementation, besides developing applications for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), which is a 3-G standard.