Stuart Corner
Friday, 04 April 2008 08:56
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
In less than two years the next phase of 3G cellular technology should be commercially available and its backers say it will be cost and performance competitive with ADSL. This raises some rather interesting issues for rural Australia.
Calling the next phase in the development of 3G cellular technology 'Long Term Evolution' might have been a good idea at the time, but the name is looking increasingly inappropriate as commercial availability of LTE technology gets closer.
There's been plenty of activity and announcements around LTE at CTIA Wireless 2008 - the US wireless industry's annual trade show - in Las Vegas - over the past few days, including the announcement by Ericsson of what it claims is the first commercial LTE chipset - suitable for use in both network and terminal equipment. Ericsson expects to have general availability of its LTE network gear by Q3 2009 and - although it does not make terminal equipment other than through its handset joint venture with Sony - it is confident that terminal equipment makers will be ready with devices to support LTE. Other vendors are not far behind.
The figures being quoted for LTE data throughput are up to 100Mbps downstream and 50Mbps upstream. According to Ericsson's vice president network for South East Asia, Martin Bäckström, in tests Ericsson's equipment has achieved maximum speeds of almost 150Mbps upstream. More importantly he claims average speeds of 80Mbps upstream and 40Mbps downstream and says that LTE performs significantly better than HSPA at the edges of a cell site's coverage area.
That's not to say these speeds will be available in commercial networks: those will depend on how many users operators want to support in a cell site and how they dimension their networks. According to Bäckström so long as operators have spare slots in the base station's racks, an upgrade to LTE from a current GSM or 3G WCDMA base station simply means slotting in a new card.
However operators at the leading edge of HSPA deployment have only just gone to the current highest speed variant, 21Mbps and at present can't offer terminals to take advantage of this. So why to go LTE in a hurry?
According to Bäckström, there are two reasons: it's more economical in its use of the spectrum resources and "for most consumer LTE will exceed the speed you can get in fixed network XDSL technologies." He suggests also that LTE services could be offered at prices competitive with ADSL. And he points out that there are operators in Sweden today offering all-you-can-eat HSDPA services at 1.8Mbps on HSPA for around $US10 per month, and that the USB HSPA modem is the highest selling broadband access device in the country.
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