Vodafone's Lecture series on Mobile Telecom and Networks

This compilation brings together the transcripts of the third of a series of lectures on the subject of Mobile Telecommunications and Networks. The lecture series was established by The Royal Academy of Engineering and Vodafone to celebrate the enormous social and economic benefits that mobile communications have given us – a success story brought about and maintained by excellence in communications engineering. The three lectures in this series were given over the period between March 2008 and February 2009. All three were exceptionally well attended and generated enthusiastic and lively debate and discussions.

The series was opened by Professor P R Kumar, Franklin W Woeltge, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Illinois. His lecture addressed the converging worlds of communications, computation and control – described through infrastructure - free wireless networks, and illustrated with fascinating films of model systems created at the University of Illinois.

The bedrock of all wireless communications systems is radio frequency spectrum, and this was the subject of the second lecture, given by Professor Linda Doyle of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Dublin. She entered into the debate of how one should allocate and manage spectrum, covering approaches from classical ‘command and control’ to dynamic ‘grab what you need when you need it’. Her lecture gave rise to the most lively debate we have had during the Questions and Answers sessions.

Most lectures on mobile communications nowadays are concerned with subjects like broadband access, convergence, mobile widgets or the phone as a computing device, so it was refreshing that in the final lecture of the series Professor Peter Vary of the University of Aachen returned to basics – voice communications. In a fascinating lecture he covered the history of and contemporary research on speech coding for mobile communications, providing great insight into what is the most important function of the phone.

The transcript is available here.