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- 2009 /
- January-March 09 /
Speed and coverage are LTE’s killer apps
Time will tell what “killer applications” will spring from LTE, but the growing demand for mobile broadband indicates that speed and coverage may well be enough to drive explosive growth in the 4G technology.
March 23, 2009
In a panel on 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) at the recent GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ericsson CTO Håkan Ericsson and GSMA CTO Alex Sinclair discussed the outlook for commercial rollouts of the next generation of mobile communications networks. LTE, they agree, is driven by consumers’ hunger for higher speeds and mobility in all markets.
“Actually the driver is commercial demand,” Sinclair told the audience. “Since we launched mobile broadband, we’ve been astounded. We’ve got 230 networks in 100 countries with 100 million users and a tenfold increase in usage and consumption. We have unleashed a hunger in the consumer for this sort of stuff, and now we’ve got to serve it.”
Eriksson presented Ericsson’s forecast that by 2013 there will be nearly 3 billion broadband subscriptions globally, of which 80 percent will access the internet via a mobile connection. That would amount to approximately 2.4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide.
The “killer application” for LTE has yet to be identified, he says. “I think it will be something we don’t even know yet.” One clue can be found in the fact that LTE enables the use of small and cheap modules to connect a host of everyday devices, such as cameras, game consoles and household appliances, to the mobile broadband network.
“Since I started working with 3G in the early 1990s, I’ve been asked many times, ‘What is the killer application for 3G?’” Eriksson says. “And the answer has always been, it’s the speed and the coverage. I think that will be true to a large extent for LTE as well, because LTE gives even higher speeds.”
Sinclair says LTE is not likely to upset the apple cart for operators who have invested in 3G networks. LTE can share network infrastructure for most mobile communication technologies, whether they use paired or unpaired spectrum. He and Eriksson both see existing 3G technologies continuing in tandem with LTE.
“LTE is a modular system. So the cost is not quite as bad as some people would paint it out to be,” Sinclair says.
Eriksson says technologies such as GSM, HSPA and EDGE will coexist with LTE for a long time. “To handle the hundredfold increase in data consumption, we need all the spectrum we can find – and we will need all the technologies that we have. We cannot say, ‘Okay, HSPA has done its share of it, now let’s move on to LTE.’”
While the economic downturn dominated discussions at the Mobile World Congress, Sinclair says that the lack of spectrum availability could prove more detrimental for the commercial rollout of LTE than the global financial crisis. “Several very large operators have made some very substantial commitments and, ironically, the failure of governments and regulators to release the right spectrum could potentially have much bigger impact than the economic downturn,” he says.
