Stride into the next new age

THE ATMOSPHERE above our heads is a highway for thousands of millions of electrical signals - radio, television, telecommunications, radar and satellite.

These signals have different frequencies and travel along bands. A band is a segment of the invisible communications highway's width.

If you have trouble with the abstractions of science, imagine a spectrum with its seven colours changing from violet to red. Those seven bands of colour represent the width of the communications highway.

The vast bulk of electronic signals - TV, radio, mobile phones - travel along the violet, purple, blue end of the spectrum. These signals are low frequency; they do not require large amounts of power to push them. This end of the spectrum, like a multi-lane motorway, is comparatively crowded.

"There are about 500,000 million bits of information per second using this lower end of the spectrum, and that's just in Europe. By the year 2004 electronic traffic is going to increase ten-fold," said Dr Hemant Mardia.

He is a 38-year-old Leeds University electronics graduate who is managing director of Filtronic Broadband, one of the subsidiary companies within Filtronic plc set up by Professor David Rhodes to develop products for the broad band, wireless and cable markets.

Filtronic is looking to develop products for the sparsely used bands at the orange and red sections of the spectrum. However, signals can only travel along these bands at high frequency, which requires far more power than lower frequency. These sections of the spectrum are known as Broad Band.

This September wireless telecommunications operators such as Atlantic Telecom, Teligent and Winstar may be bidding for licences for these higher frequency bands. The Government, which issues the licences, stands to gain billions of pounds.

But moving along the spectrum requires a different sort of technology, partly because the distance a signal travels diminishes its quality especially over what's known as The Last Mile, said Dr Mardia.

"Just as radio has a different technology to TV, the mobile phone has a different technology too. The capacity of the system is a lot smaller than that offered by Broad Band Access. But this means moving from low frequency to high frequency and you need different technology for the equipment.

"We have been working on this over the past few years, developing a higher frequency range which receives and transmits. This is called Millimetre Wave Technology rather than Microwave Technology. It means that the electrical components are physically smaller than the lower frequency equipment."

But the higher frequencies of BBA present electronics manufacturers like Filtronic with a number of problems.

The loss of signal over distance.

Having sufficient electrical power to overcome that loss.

Developing a pure enough signal to operate across a wide, or broad, channel.

To address these problems Filtronic has developed electronic chips, circuit boards and filters which, when put together, operate at high frequency without loss of clarity or power.

Dr Mardia said the equipment amounted to a box and a satellite dish at the receiving end and a base station or series of base stations to pass on the signals. Each base station has a range of only three kilometres because of the power needed to transmit at high frequency.

The cost of a box and a dish at the moment is in the £2,000 to £3,000 range, but that will fall as sales increase.

One simple question arises from the foregoing: what is this new technology for?

It can supply computer and telephone communications, including the Internet, faster than existing wire-less low frequency equipment as well as telephone lines. Eventually BBA will also provide video phones and good quality video pictures which will make video conferencing a reality around the world.

As cost comes down small businesses and the home will be able to afford the technology too.

"We already supply BBA technology to cellular equipment manufacturers like Nokia. The £3m we have invested means that we are increasing our ability to manufacture in the UK the chips and circuit boards that will go into the boxes. We don't make dishes, not currently," Dr Mardia said.

The box itself is no bigger than a shoebox. The chips and circuits boards inside range from small to miniscule. Twenty chips for each of six circuit boards, the latter no bigger than a baby's thumbnail. The chips are connected up by gold wires 4,000th of an inch thin - more slender than a human hair. The technology is put together by automatic assembly machines.

"Our facilities at Baildon and Newton Aycliffe in County Durham. We required 30 to 40 more people and expect to expand that number significantly. These people will be designing and testing the equipment. To work at these frequencies you need precision equipment and skill," he added.

Not so long ago the miracle of the age was optical fibre, the cable capable of taking a laser beam with an enhanced communications capability. Does the advent of BBA mean that optical fibre communications will become redundant?

Dr Mardia thinks not. BBA will be complementary.

"Optical fibre already permits long distance and high frequency communications, but it's expensive to connect up to the home or business. There's also the cost of engineering, digging up the ground to lay the cable. Then there's the problem of The Last Mile.

"In optical fibre technology there's the problematic link between the main trunk line carrying the transmitted information and the receiver who wants it. This branching off from the main cable is known as The Last Mile.

"BBA overcomes that problem because all that's needed is a base station and a clear line of sight to the receiver. There's no bottleneck at the junction between the main cable and the branch line into the subscriber.

"There's no physical digging up or pipe-laying either. BBA is fast to deploy, cheaper and easy to add to. If you want to expand the network all you need is an extra box and dish," he added.

So, BBA technology, without wires or piping, transmits and receives and has a capacity to carry a vast amount of varied information. One box and dish can supply TV, telephone, radio, computer and Internet needs and do so quickly without loss of quality of signal.

Technological advances being as fast as they are, countries without existing communications links offer the best opportunities to market BBA equipment.

"China is an example because as a fast-developing nation it needs a BBA infrastructure; it hasn't got an existing phone network linking up the country, so there's a huge market there. They can go right for this technology without having to worry about phone lines," Dr Mardia said.

Filtronic is in a good position, if not pole position, to take advantage of China's requirements because the plc already has a 25,000 sq ft factory at Suzhou, 100 kilometres from the port city of Shanghai, manufacturing micro-wave cellular handset antennas and cellular base station equipment for mobile phones.

"You have to be manufacturing in China in order to bid for part of the business. China will be a large proportion of our future expansion. We expect to have a similar size business there that we have here in the UK," he added.

Currently, Filtronic plc is a multi-national enterprise which employs 3,000 people at its 15 factories and offices in the UK, Finland, America, Australia and China. About a third of the workforce is employed in the UK.

The China operation represents an investment of £3m. The workforce numbers 40. In the next two years, however, both the custom-built factory and the workforce are going to increase in size to about 50,000 sq ft and 200 respectively.

However, this likely expansion may be only a fragment of the growth which Filtronic's boss Prof David Rhodes foresees.

In the T&A's 21st Century supplement last month Prof Rhodes - a brilliant scientist with a world-wide reputation in microwave and high frequency electronics - predicted that by the year 2004 Filtronic would be four to five times its present size.

This ought to galvanise all those bodies in Bradford responsible for GCE A Levels, higher education and job training because Filtronic's one raw material in short supply is skilled electronics engineers.

In another T&A article in March Prof Rhodes did not rule out the possibility of taking Filtronic out of Bradford if this shortage was not met.

"We have got to make sure we get what we need here otherwise we can't stay here," he said.

Will complacent Bradford wake up to the future? If it doesn't the city is in for a very nasty shock - perhaps long before 2004.

The next generation of mobiles

Mobile phones have been with us for about ten years. There are about 400m of them in use all over the world. The market capacity is estimated to be 1.6 billion.

As the number of mobiles increases so does the demand for wireless bands. In April the Government auctioned off a range of lower frequency bands for what's known as the Third Generation of mobile telephones - simply, the latest equipment.

The buyers were main players in mobile telephone manufacturing such as Vodophone, Orange and BT. The Government gained a whopping £22 billion from this auction.

The new bands, which will be good enough to transmit low quality video and the Internet to this Third Generation, is expected come into operation in the next two or three years. The mobiles are expected to last four or five years before the next generation is ready.

The difference between mobile telephone technology and Broad Band Access is that the latter is fixed (from base station to receiver) and has a higher capacity and better quality signal.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.