LTE performance: bad news is good news

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 27 January 2010 02:19

Opinion and Analysis

A blog post by Scandinavian research firm, Northstream reporting 'disappointing' performance after informal testing of the world's first commercial LTE network received wide publicity, but the firm has since watered down its criticisms.

TeliaSonera in December turned on the world's first commercial LTE networks in Stockholm (supplied by Ericsson) and in Oslo (Huawei). At the time TeliaSonera claimed a theoretical maximum download bandwidth of 44Mbps is Stockholm and 96Mbps in Oslo, where LTE had been deployed using 20MHz channels instead of the 10MHz in Stockholm.

In early January, Northstream got its hands on one of the first Samsung LTE dongles and reported in its blog: "Our immediate reaction is that the browsing experience was rather good, probably thanks to the low latency compared to 3G networks. But the throughput measurements were sort of a disappointment as after countless tests, of which many were performed outdoors to eliminate any problems related to indoor coverage, never exceeded 12Mbps in downlink. More impressive in that case was the 5Mbps uplink. But what really reminded us of the early days we're still in were the rather frequent drops in service, even at locations where the signal strength indicators were maxed out just a second earlier."

This is what one would expect from the early days of a brand new technology, and the blog continued to that effect. "But considering that Rome wasn't built in a day, our first LTE experience is a very positive one. It works, and that's respectable. Ok, we don't have indoor coverage in the office, and even outdoors with full signal strength the service comes and goes, but admittedly we were sceptical to the chance of getting a commercial grade service from day one."

What seems to have surprised Northstream was the extent to which its blog posting was seized on by news outlets: "There is always a yawning gap between the peak or theoretical data rates promised for new wireless technologies, and their real world performance. The latest operator to suffer a PR problem because of this is TeliaSonera, whose LTE network in Stockholm, the first commercial LTE system in the world, is delivering only 12Mbps," said one report, noting that "This is not the first time that Telia's Stockholm network has come under fire," a reference to it being revealed that the Oslo network had twice the theoretical throughput of the Stockholm network.

IDG reported that "The download speed offered by Swedish operator TeliaSonera's LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network never exceeded 12Mbps when tested by market research company Northstream, a far cry from the "up to 50Mbps" promised on the provider's Web site."

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