At this month’s LTE & HSPA Evolution Asia conference in Hong Kong, Ericsson Vice President Group Function Technology, Erik Ekudden, delivered a keynote presentation that described the momentum behind LTE and the opportunities presented by a worldwide evolution to the new standard. Ekudden also conferred with customers during customized Technology Forums that were co-located with the conference.
“There has been phenomenal acceptance of LTE,” Ekudden says. “All the major operators have confirmed that they have a long-term strategy to move to LTE, which builds confidence throughout the industry that the volumes will be there to create economies of scale and support an expansive ecosystem of devices and services.”
The stage for this success is now being set. Not only has Ericsson announced the first commercial LTE device platform and network products, but data traffic in HSPA networks is rapidly increasing, particularly in networks that combine mobile broadband subscriptions with HSPA-enabled laptop offers, such as AT&T has done with Lenovo. Operators are going to become one of the key channels for connected devices as mobile broadband evolves to LTE, Ekudden says.
Ekudden says that because it descends from the world’s most pervasive family of standards – the 3GPP GSM/WCDMA/HSPA standards – LTE will involve more cost-efficient transformation for most networks. It also offers a smooth migration from all the major systems, including CDMA and TD-SCDMA.
Already 85 percent of the world’s mobile subscribers are on the 3GPP platform, and that number is expected to grow further. “We’ll see lower costs because of the high volumes of the industry mainstream track, and we’ll see richness in terms of devices and services that users really want,” Ekudden says.
Besides delivering high speed connections, LTE offers operators an optimized architecture with higher network capacity, bringing down the total cost of ownership. Because it supports both paired and unpaired radio spectrum using its FDD and TDD modes, LTE is deployable in all bands. Operators can reap the benefits of high volumes and low costs by deploying industry mainstream TDD technology in the unpaired spectrum, using a common LTE FDD and TDD platform. In addition, LTE supports a number of different-sized bandwidths, from 1.4MHz to 20MHz.
With the first commercial LTE deployments on the horizon, Ekudden cautions that operators should consider the industry-wide benefits of synchronized deployment. “We have used the knowledge gained from 2G and 3G when it comes to unified technology, ensuring early terminal availability, stable products and interoperability. It’s also important for the industry to evolve at the same pace, which requires an ongoing dialog between suppliers and operators, and between operators, so that you get the frequency bands and the features aligned.”
Meanwhile, the march toward LTE is accelerating. Ekudden says that the radio access standardization of LTE was finalized at the end of 2007 and the remaining specifications are nearly complete. Product development for LTE is in progress and the first LTE systems will go to market at the end of 2009.
