Indian telco Reliance's LTE trial bad news for WiMAX

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 01 December 2010 13:21

IT Industry - Strategy

Indian telco Reliance has announced a trial with Ericsson of TD-LTE technology in its 2.3GHz wireless broadband spectrum, further diminishing hopes that India would be a large market for mobile WiMAX and thus help ensure the technology's long term future.

Reliance is trialling TD-LTE in 2.3GHz spectrum recently aquired at auction. In May, prior to the auction, Ovum commented: "The forthcoming auction of two slots of 20MHz TDD spectrum in the 2.3GHz band in India will be the last defining opportunity for the WiMAX camp. With its huge population, low wireline broadband penetration, and mobile operators with small, congested spectrum allowances, India has always been touted as the ideal market for WiMAX."

Reliance was one of several successful bidders f but the only one to secure licences for the whole of India. Its decision to deploy LTE rather than WiMAX is likely to be followed by others.

Reliance said bandwidths of 80Mbps downlink and 20Mbps uplink were achieved using ST-Ericsson dongles. "Full mobility with flawless delivery of applications such as HD Multimedia Streaming, LIVE TV was demonstrated with on-the-move speeds of 50 and 70 kilometres per hour as well as a seamless handover among the number of LTE base station sectors."

A Reliance spokesman said: "This LTE trial not only demonstrated the superiority of LTE-TDD technology but it also strengthened our confidence in the timely availability of LTE eco-system in India with Ericsson's global deployment expertise'¦We look forward to leveraging on the pilot to set up a commercial network that will build on a globally standardised eco-system and technology that offers immense potential for a wide spectrum of end-user offerings".

In Australia, in the past week, WiMAX network operator vividwireless has announced plans to trial TD-LTE in its 2.3GHz band and EnergyAustralia - which originally called tenders for and is implementing WiMAX for a smart grid network - is already looking to LTE: it announced plans to trial LTE at the same time that it named Ericsson as its WiMAX supplier (Ericsson will supply Airspan products).