$8.6 billion reasons that LTE will arrive this year

Stan Beer
Monday, 12 January 2009 15:15

Business IT - Technology

Telstra, whose 3G network was supplied by Ericsson, is boasting that its Next G investment roadmap is "already looking towards LTE technology in 2010 and beyond." However, although it will operate in current cellular spectrum allocations, to achieve its full potential of 100Mbps and above LTE needs 100MHz spectrum blocks. Regardless of the uncertainty, Telstra seems confident of getting the spectrum it needs in the next few years.

ABI believes LTE application development will also drive investment as operators work to determine which services to deploy on this high speed, low latency network.

Sprint and Verizon have both announced that they will provide third-party access to their GPS data.

”The resulting new applications will tie mobility and presence aspects together to create more compelling services than in the past,” says Manjaro. “This is significant because it represents the beginning of a new generation of application development which will leverage the vast amounts of data in operators’ networks.”

Application developers already talking to these carriers include WaveMarket, Inc. and uLocate Communications, Inc.

Telstras' LTE plans are of course 'hot' in light of what CEO Sol Trujillo has been saying about using Next G to combat the planned FTTN National Broadband Network (NBN), from the which the dominant carrier has been excluded.

At an address to the Citigroup Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference 2009 in Phoenix Arizona last week, Mr Trujillo said:

"We’ve already upgraded to 21 and it’s our plans over the next year or year and a half to take it at least to 42 megabits per second. So when you talk about getting up to broadband speeds of 12 megabits in an RFP and you have a nationwide network that reaches 99 per cent of the population that we’re generating already $20 more per month of ARPU and we’re expanding margins I would say that we’re probably in a good competitive position."

What Mr Trujillo didn't say, of course, is the amount of additional wireless infrastructure required to achieve comparable bandwidth per head of population to a fixed line network.