Fujitsu, DoCoMo, NEC, Panasonic and Samsung have announced a fabless JV to develop LTE chipsets for UEs. They’re looking to do this by March 2012 and it’s unclear when the chips will flow. Seems like this level of cooperation will be helpful to get chipset prices down. I hope they include band 12 (lower 700MHz.) Full PR after the break…
Link: DoCoMo
Abi has a new report, for sale, titled “Femtocells” that shows the market signed 88 contracts world wide for femtos, of which 37 operators have launched and this resulted in 2.5m units shipped. An interesting observation is “ Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, and Ubiquisys are closely tied in terms of the top share of contracts. Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent have 27 operator contracts each, while Ubiquisys has 28 contracts through NSN and NEC collectively.
However, the market share of unit shipments looks very different compared to the contract market share. Cisco/ip.access and Airvana/Ericsson are closely tied for top share and collectively represent 55% of the market’s shipment volume. Cisco/ip.access supplies to AT&T and Airvana/Ericsson supplies to Sprint.”
I think the exponential growth is about to start but there is a major change required to get there… stay tuned…
Links: abiresearch.com
ZTE rolled out a compact TD-LTE Smart Antenna at the Multi-Antenna Technology Conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. Apparently the demo, with this smart antenna, achieved 8Mbps at the cell edge using beam forming. Sounds great. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a public pic of this smart antenna nor any other information in English… So more to follow.
Full PR After the break.
Link: ZTE
4G – Google News
