Nokia Siemens foreshadows the 1Gbps wireless network

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 09:24

Business IT - Technology

Nokia Siemens Networks claims to have staged the first demonstration of LTE-A (long term evolution-advanced) wireless broadband technology, a future evolution of today's 3G networks that could deliver speeds up to 1Gbps. But don't hold you breath.

Nokia Siemens said the demonstration, at its research facilities in Germany, "illustrated how advances to relaying technology can further improve the quality and coverage consistency of a network at the cell edge – where users are furthest from the mobile broadband base station."

Relaying technology will be a feature of the, currently evolving, LTE-A standard. It means that cellular base stations relay signals between them to one that has a backhaul link, rather than directly into the backhaul. This enables capacity and speed of the network to be increased.

Today's announcement follows one from NSN last month when it said it was "already working on the next step of radio evolution called LTE-Advanced which is further enhancing LTE capabilities towards the data rate of 1Gbps."

LTE will be the first official 4G wireless technology. According to another vendor, Ericsson, it is designed to be a smooth evolutionary upgrade from LTE with full backward compatibility, Ericsson estimates a time-line for specification setting and standardisation that would see the standard finalised in mid 2011.

LTE, the next step in the evolution of HSPA, promises maximum download speeds of 100Mbps at least. Vendors have already demonstrated this in the real world and are now ready to ship cellular infrastructure that will require only a software upgrade to support LTE.

Telstra is boasting that its Next G investment roadmap is "already looking towards LTE technology in 2010 and beyond."
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