Swedish cellular operator TeliaSonera has selected Ericsson to build the world’s first commercial LTE site in Stockholm. There are no paying customers on it, but it will be part of the Nordic carrier’s commercial LTE network in Sweden’s capital city. It is scheduled to go live in 2010.
The Swedish carrier will also use LTE gear from Huawei Technologies. Huawei has been aggressive in LTE development.
TeliaSonera plans to cover the city with LTE-enabled sites operating in the 2.6GHz band by the end of the current quarter. The number of sites it will install in Stockholm is something TeliaSonera will keep to itself for now.
Japan’s NTT DoCoMo has been the most active operator in LTE, starting its network testing in 2006. At CTIA Wireless last year, it revealed field tests of LTE—which it calls Super 3G, using 4 x 4 MIMO smart antennas, for downlink speeds of 250 Mb/s.
NTT has also said it plans to launch commercially in 2010. Like Verizon, DoCoMo has not named any specific markets or vendors, though it is working with a host of handset and infrastructure partners, including NEC, Fujitsu, Panasonic, NSN and Ericsson.
Long Term Evolution can be deployed both in new 2.6 GHz and 700 MHz frequencies as well as existing frequency bands and uses a flat IP architecture. Ericsson has already demonstrated peak rates of 160Mbps, although those speeds require lots of bandwidth.
Ericsson, along with Alcatel-Lucent, has also been selected by Verizon for LTE deployment. The US wireless giant says it aims to roll out commercial LTE services in 20 to 30 US markets next year.
Sweden’s four main mobile network operators TeliaSonera, Tele2, Telenor and 3 have agreed on common guidelines for advertising download speeds, set to be adopted no later than 1 September this year. Under the new guidelines customers can see the practical maximum speed achieved instead of just a theoretical maximum speed. The agreed practical maximum speeds are as follows (theoretical maximums in brackets): W-CDMA (3G) 300kbps (384kbps); HSDPA 3Mbps (3.6Mbps), 6Mbps (7.2Mbps), 10Mbps (14.4Mbps); HSPA+ 16Mbps (21Mbps).
Perhaps their HSDPA (at 3Mbps) is faster than ours.
LTE does not support legacy circuit-switched services in its basic form, explains Unstrung, since it’s an all-IP, packet-based network.
But there are several options for delivering voice including (1) voice over LTE using the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), (2) circuit-switch (CS) fallback (which is basically using the legacy 2G or 3G networks for voice), and (3) the relatively new initiative called Voice over LTE via Generic Access (or VoLGA, which essentially sends the CS traffic from the mobile switching center through an IP tunnel across the LTE network).
A rift has already emerged, as T-Mobile is VoLGA’s most fervent supporter, while Verizon Wireless and France Telecom’s Orange favor the CS fallback approach.
