Nokia Siemens foreshadows the 1Gbps wireless network

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 09:24

Business IT - Technology

However, although it will operate in current cellular spectrum allocations, to achieve its full potential of 100Mbps and above LTE needs 100MHz spectrum blocks, as does LTE-A.

Telstra seems confident of getting these in the next few years, so would be well placed to exploit LTE-A when it becomes available.

Ericsson, however, is not forecasting commercial LTE-A services on any scale for almost a decade. This forecast seems to be based less on an assessment of the technical, commercial and spectral challenges than on a simple extrapolation from the history of 3G WCDMA and, more recently, HSPA, which is now close to delivering data rates in the tens of Mbps range.

Ericsson's Kursten Leins told iTWire: "based on typical technology evolution cycles, it takes around two years from the time a standard specification is finalised until commercialised products (base-stations and terminals) are generally available.

Based on the current standardisation time-plan for LTE-Advanced, this would mean standards finalisation by mid 2011, with commercial products available sometime in the second half of 2013."

In the case of Australia he notes that "3G standards were finalised in 1999, and we had our first 3G network launch in Australia in 2003 with Hutchison 3. However, it took until at least 2007 for the technology to become truly 'mainstream' in Australia."

Still, at the rate things are going in Australia, we might well see LTE-A ahead of NBN!