The world-first demonstration of an LTE-enabled call marks a milestone for Ericsson and is an important step forward on the path to standardization.

Adrian Scrase, Chief Technology Officer, European Telecommunication Standards Institute, says: “Standards will only become mature through feedback from real deployments. The sooner we have these sorts of trials, the sooner we can get comprehensive feedback on the standardization process.”

Scrase has been involved in the Third Generation Partnership Project's (3GPP's) LTE standardization work since it began in 2004. He says that a lot has happened on the LTE front in the last 12 months. A number of operators and providers, including Ericsson, have together successfully deployed LTE test networks. In addition, a number of operators such as Vodafone and Verizon have committed themselves to the LTE technology.

“This is a big green light for 3GPP and the industry. While there is a significant amount of work left to be done, we have a good technology and a customer base that is waiting to buy the products,” Scrase says.

Ulf Ewaldsson, head of Product Area Radio within Business Unit Networks at Ericsson, says that significant progress has been made on LTE.

“Last year in Barcelona, there was a lot of talk about LTE. For Ericsson, it was all about showing that we could provide high speeds with LTE,” he says. “This year, the picture is different and our demonstrations show that we are now coming into a more industrial phase.”

In addition to its end-to-end LTE solution, Ericsson is demonstrating the use of LTE with both paired and unpaired spectrum on the same base station platform.

Scrase also views this demonstration positively. He says that there are many questions surrounding the spectrum arrangements for LTE, but he expects a large future market for LTE with support for both paired and unpaired spectrum use.

“We expect considerable interest from China in this technology,” he says. “They will probably see LTE, with support for unpaired spectrum, as the evolutionary step from their current 3G mobile telecommunications standard - TD-SCDMA. This standard uses unpaired spectrum, so it's likely they will continue to go for unpaired spectrum in China.”

Scrase emphasizes that the goal behind LTE is to provide not only high performance, but at a competitive cost.

“The intent behind the LTE technology is to provide a global mobile broadband system where the broadband experience on a mobile device is similar to the experience of fixed broadband”, he says. “But we have to do so at low costs for both operators and consumers. Users have a lot of choice today, and they will always go with the cheapest solution that meets their needs.”