Ericsson Australia to take lead role in future mobile network deployments

Stuart Corner
Monday, 14 July 2008 06:34

Business IT - Networking

Ericsson announced earlier this year what it claimed was the first commercially available chipset to support LTE, capable of delivering 100Mbps downstream and 50Mbps upstream and suitable for inclusion in both infrastructure and end user devices.  Samples of ASICs will be available during 2008 and commercial release is set for 2009, with products based on the platform expected in 2010.

Meanwhile Japanese cellular operator NTT DoCoMo announced in April that it had achieved a downlink transmission rate of 250Mbps in an outdoor test of an experimental system in 20MHz bandwidth, the maximum under new standards.  DoCoMo said that by 2009 it expected to complete development of the technologies required for the launch of what it described as a 'Super 3G' network.

The term 4G has for years been applied to WiMAX and, to a lesser extent to what is more correctly called LTE. According to Ericsson, neither technology deserves this label which is more correctly applied to technologies yet to come and offering even higher throughput. "Looking beyond LTE, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defines ‘4G’ as network technology with throughput of 100Mbps for wide area/mobile use and 1Gbps for hotspot coverage to be applied in new spectrum bands with 100MHz channels. Such systems will be commercially available to meet these requirements long beyond 2010," Ericsson says.