SONLTE
From the monthly archives: "January 2011"
LTE-Advanced-demo-South-Korea-thumb-550xauto-56098

ETRI Field Tests LTE Advanced and eMBMS

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I have always admired the fact that the South Korean Government spends a significant amount of money on ‘strategic’ technology development. For IT/Wireless and other advanced technology, they have an agency named Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI.) ETRI is working on a five year plan to develop LTE Advanced and note the 3GPP standard Release 10 is supposed to be available in April of this year. ETRI has invested $60M with 500 people researching and developing, obtaining a solid 24 patents plus another 500 applications and so on, around LTE Advanced. Recently they demonstrated LTE Advanced on the streets, delivering 3D video to a moving vehicle at rates up to 600mbps. Within this demonstration, they also showed off the use of the forthcoming Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service (MBMS) described within the 3GPP LTE related standardization efforts. MBMS of course makes delivering similar content more efficient over the LTE channel using multicast techniques and some changes in the subcarrier spacing. Also note, there is a ‘requirement’ to deploy LTE Advanced in South Korea in 2014, so this is a step towards that goal.

Another interesting result of this strategy is that it looks like ETRI and Korean vendors will be a major player at the IPR table (Along with Qualcomm, Interdigital etc..)

Links: Telecoms Korea, ETRI

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googlte_es

(Former CEO) Eric Schmidt: We Must Focus on LTE

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I didn’t see this coming, firstly the #1 focus in his article is LTE, then of course his shuffling out of CEO to Chairman only.  Either way, this statement was fascinating to me. What I don’t know is what is the fate of the whitespace radio initiatives and visions Google was having before? Does that mean Android is targeted for LTE and whitespace is more of a network deployment plan?

Full after the break…

Source: HBR

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LTE_IPRs

LTE IPR PIE *Almost* Evenly Divided

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ZTE saw fit to remind everyone that they have 7% of the essential Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) for LTE today, which prompted me to take a closer look at the scoreboard. It’s a close race! I wonder if everyone is truly going to follow the Fair, Reasonable, and Non Discriminatory FRAND approach or if this turns out into a more serious situation. I hope for the former but those wily lawyers are lurking. ZTE’s PR in it’s fully glory after the break.

Source: ZTE via Business Wire

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CES_show-floor

Get ready for the CES stream of consciousness!

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Time for CES in Las Vega$! From the 6-9th we’ll hear about devices, MiFi hotspots, infrastructure and other goodies like TVs, streaming video devices, the use of WiFi for video etc… It’s a pretty good boondoggle on balance. Get your party hats ready. For many attendees, it might just be a stream of unconsciousness.

att_4G

ATT: HSPA+ Now, LTE beginning 2H 2011 finish YE 2013

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ATT is getting their 4G on with 20 UEs (mobile devices) and an LTE roll out that begins 2H 2011 and wraps up at the end of 2013. I will give you a different perspective. To begin, let’s assume a typical site of theirs is a 3 sector site that has 2 GSM carriers for about 20×3=60 Erlangs and 2 WCDMA carriers for 59x3x2=354 Erlangs for a grand total of 414 Erlangs of  12kbps voice, that’s about 4.28Mbps. For data each of these sites now has 1 HSPA (14.4Mbps FWD+5.8Mbps RVS) carrier, and 1HSPA+ carrier (21Mbps+12Mbps) = 54Mbps of throughput per site required for backhaul. Now let’s add the (31Mbps FWD + 12.5Mbps RVS) (This assumes the lowest common denominator of 5MHz spectrum.) All of this adds up to 98Mbps per site.

That’s just the PAYLOAD from a typical site, not a heavily loaded one with multiple X2 sessions (for LTE) etc… That’s huge traffic. Some of those sites have shared lines and antennae, that’s a lot of RF power ‘burning’ up due to duplexor/splitter losses..but in most cases you can look at a tower in the US and notice that they are installing new 700MHz antennae. How much further until the data avalanche causes the old voice infrastructure to be an unbearable burden?

Full presser after the break…

Source: ATT

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VoLTE

VoLTE

Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is the next big thing. In fact, in 24 months, virtually all LTE enabled smart phones will support it. Curious?
Small Cells

Small Cells

Small Cells, previously known as 'femto' or 'pico' cells are possibly a savior to network operators. They offer capacity and coverage to the end user and are inexpensive for the network operator. Why aren't they everywhere?
Public Safety

Public Safety

LTE is and ideal technology for Public Safety use. See Why.