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- 2009 /
- January-March 09 /
LTE paves clear road to global standard
3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the first global mobile communication standard, and the beauty of it is that it offers many of the world’s network operators a smooth transition to delivering fourth generation services.
March 16, 2009
By supporting both of the world’s mobile network transmission schemes – frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) – LTE has emerged as the leading fourth-generation technology for mobile communication. In a panel discussion at the recent GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ericsson CTO Håkan Eriksson and China Mobile Research Institute General Manager Bill Huang discussed LTE’s role as a “unifying force” that will allow the world to embrace mobile broadband as a primary communication technology.
“The fact that the LTE standard now has the ability to address both the FDD spectrum and the TDD spectrum makes it a unifying force worldwide that will be able to use all of the available spectrum,” Huang said. “China Mobile is talking with many operators worldwide about their plans to deploy the TDD mode of LTE. It really is the first time we have created a standard that addresses the need of all operators.”
Eriksson told the audience in Barcelona that all of the world’s primary mobile communications technologies have clear migration paths to LTE, including China’s 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. The Chinese standard is based on TDD, which uses unpaired spectrum. He says there are also tracks leading to LTE from FDD-based technologies such as CDMA, GSM and HSPA, which use paired spectrum.
“For the first time we have a true global standard,” Eriksson says.
China Mobile plans to evolve to TD-LTE, a TDD version of LTE that will be compatible with TD-SCDMA. Huang points out that the evolution path to TD-LTE does not negate China Mobile’s continued investment in 3G service. “The beauty of it is that many of the radio components, many of the backhaul networks, and many of the cell sites can be shared,” he says. “The technology is designed with evolution in mind.
“China Mobile is going to roll out TD-LTE, Verizon Wireless is going roll out FDD-LTE. So in spite of the economic crisis, operators are seizing on the demand from the market.”
Eriksson says there has been no single standard previously because mobile networks evolved over the last 30 years as national projects without a unified global vision. “No one expected mobile communications to succeed on such a worldwide scale. By 2013 there will be about 3 billion broadband subscriptions worldwide, and 80 percent of those will be mobile.”
Huang says the rapid ascendance of mobile telephony over fixed will be mirrored as the market for mobile internet develops. “In 20 years mobile communication has effectively replaced the fixed line phone. Over the next 10 to 20 years, the same thing will happen to internet access. People will use mobile devices as their primary means of internet access.”
