At CTIA 2009 in Las Vegas this week (press releases), the big cellular show in Las Vegas this week, the buzz was on cellular’s Next Big Thing, their Long Term Evolution network upgrade.
Although commercial rollouts of LTE are probably two years away, Verizon announced at CTIA this week that it will launch commercial LTE services in 25 to 30 markets by 2010, with carriers AT&T and T-Mobile expected to follow suit soon after.
Verizon is now building its Wireless LTE Innovation Center, which will serve as a home base for developers. The center, based in Waltham, Mass., will open in summer 2009 and include a lab for product testing and development, and home and business environments to allow simulated usage of products in real-life situations.
Verizon Wireless, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have all announced plans to roll out commercially as early as 2010. LTE can offer maximum data rates of 100 Mbps in downlink and 50M bps in uplink for every 20MHz of spectrum. Like WiMax, LTE is built entirely around IP (Internet Protocol) and transports all traffic, including voice calls, as packets.
Among the LTE vendors pushing the technology at the cellular show in Las Vegas:
- Motorola’s LTE Unite was promoting eNodeB (right), described as a “very agile, zero-footprint LTE solution that provides an advanced LTE RAN solution that will support Frequency Division Duplex and Time Division Duplex and be available in frequencies ranging from 700MHz to 2.6GHz and with bandwidths from 1.4MHz to 20MHz.
- Alcatel-Lucent introduced its Evolved Packet Core, a set of network components that will help to power the LTE network of Verizon Wireless and other mobile operators. Alcatel’s all-IP system is built around Alcatel’s 7750 Service Router, already used in wired broadband networks, and consists of two plug-in modules for that router, plus two separate devices to manage the network and services.
- Kyocera Communications announced it is displaying a prototype of its all-in-one LTE base station, along with three iBurst terminal devices. According to Kyocera, iBurst offers uplinks and downlinks of up to 32M bps per 5MHz, which makes it small enough to work on the GSM band.
- Powerwave Technologies announced a new family of 700/800 MHz and 2.5-2.7 GHz antennas, and two new digital remote radio head offerings for WiMAX and LTE.
- Nokia panned the prospects of WiMax, comparing it to Betamax.
Verizon is promising 4G wireless for rural America using their 700 MHz spectrum, reports C/Net. “At this point we haven’t made any attempt to get stimulus money for the LTE build-out,” said Tony Melone, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Verizon Wireless. “But it’s still early in that process and there’s not enough clarity around the stimulus package. We don’t know what strings will be attached to that money. Regardless, we plan to blanket the country over a period of time with 4G. We bought the licenses to cover the entire continental U.S., and we plan on building the network where ever we have a license.”
Motorola, built out the Mobile WiMAX infrastructure in Portland, but is now aggressively promoting LTE, and has developed base stations specifically designed to upgrade to the 4G data standard from their current 3G GSM and CDMA technologies. Motorola has done side-by-side comparisons between its own WiMAX gear and LTE systems, finding that an optimized LTE network is about 15% more efficient than an optimized WiMAX network, which typically supports average downlink capacities of 30 Mb/s and uplink capacities of 10 Mb/s.
Both LTE and WiMax promise data speeds in excess of 100 megabits per second. “We think WiMax is here to stay,” said Julie Coppernoll, Intel’s WiMax marketing director. WiMax networks have a coverage area of 400m people and are projected to reach double that by next year, she added.
“Clearwire has an average of 120 MHz of spectrum in most of its U.S. markets,” said Clear’s Co-Chairman Ben Wolff today at CTIA. “If you have 120 MHz of spectrum, you can deliver 540 MB/sec. If you have 10 MHz, you have throughput of 45 MB/second.”
He said there were four critical elements for broadband wireless:
- Spectrum: You need about 40 MHz of spectrum at the minimum to deliver 4G, he said. Clearwire has an average of 120 MHz.
- Technology: You need the right infrastructure to deliver it. “There’s a clear difference between 3G and 4G, but between 4G standards, they are comparable. I don’t see a lot of difference.”
- Network: It’s all IP, which increases bandwidth and performance.
- Devices: You need a lot of devices in order to acquire customers. Today, Clearwire has more than 30 laptop computers that have WiMax embedded. They’ll have 100 devices by the end of the year.
WiMAX proponents claim that spectrum is key to delivering the goods. The new 700 MHz bands in the United States have only some 20 MHz available. And Mobile WiMAX uses Time Division. It doesn’t take half the available spectrum to listen. It is sometimes argued that symmetrical (FDD) LTE is better for voice networks, while WiMAX is better for data. But data demands may soon surpass those for voice.
Fred Wright, who serves as Motorola’s senior vice president for cellular and WiMAX networks, sat down with Network World senior writer Brad Reed at CTIA to discuss why LTE has so much potential as a wireless data standard.
LTE is all about data and multimedia services. I expect that LTE devices will have four-inch display screens, for example, which won’t have any buttons or keypads on it. It will be a larger display screen than current smartphones. So what you’re going to see more of is slide-out keyboards. The screen might be four-by-five inches, but it will be all screen.The reason for this is that LTE will be all about video. Ten years ago you never would have seen a video screen in an SUV and now it’s one of the hottest commodities on the market.
Motorola knows that established cellular carriers, with LTE, are likely to be a larger market than independent ISPs with Mobile WiMAX. And money talks.
Worldwide wireless revenues showed big year-to-year gains. Wireless data revenues for 2008 rose 39 percent over 2007, when data revenues totaled $23.2 billion, with wireless data revenues for 2008 amounting to nearly 22 percent of all wireless service revenues.
