Stuart Corner
Friday, 29 August 2008 12:49
Opinion and Analysis
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3G cellular vendors are confidently predicting commercial availability in 2009 of the technology's next great leap forward, the long term evolution (LTE) and touting download speeds of up to 100Mbps but this will require access to new spectrum, which might be a problem.
The rate at which LTE has been developed is impressive, and that may be due in no small measure to a rival technology: Mobile WiMAX. It is much maligned these days. Despite the many industry analysts who claim for it substantial markets, there are an equal number, loudly supported by a bevy of global vendors from the 3G cellular camp, who do their best to dismiss it.
And it is certainly running well behind schedule. Just ask Unwired CEO, David Spence who
iTWire reported a year ago as saying: "[unavailability of WiMAX equipment] has slowed us down from where we set out from in 2004 and 2005. We are virtually a year behind." Make that two years now. The company has a few base stations in place and is doing some very limited demonstrations.
However it's an ill wind, as they say, and one thing that the seemingly imminent introduction of a rival, mobile wireless broadband technology did was to spur the cellular industry into a frenzied spate of collaboration and technology development to match or even exceed the performance claims being touted for mobile WiMAX.
The result is that, from a standing start with the first workshop held by 3GPP, the global standards body, in late 2004, the industry is confidently predicting commercial availability of its counter to WiMAX, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) of 3G in mid to late 2009: a deadline that was thrown into focus this week by two events: the demonstration, in Sydney, by Ericsson, of a prototype LTE base station and user terminal delivering throughput up at 160Mbps downstream and 40Mbps upstream; and in Ottawa the, claimed, world first demonstration by Nortel and LG Electronics (with which Nortel has a joint venture) of cell-to-cell handover using an LTE terminal in a moving vehicle while it was receiving streaming high definition video.
"The milestone announced today shows that Nortel's LTE solution can provide the reliable mobile coverage that today's 2G and 3G network users depend on while offering much greater bandwidth, higher capacity and lower latency," Nortel claimed. According to Ericsson, "In an actual LTE network deployment, individual users could expect downloads of around 10-20 times the speed of today's HSPA services.
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