LTE – who will be the early adopters?

LTE was quite predictably high on the agenda again at last week’s Wireless 2.0 event in Bristol, which was organised by Silicon South West.

In the opening session, Vodafone’s group director of research and development Prof. Michael Walker described the results of its recent LTE FDD trials that achieved an average throughput of 15Mb/s - very close to predictions - with latency down to around 10% of that currently being achieved with HSPA. And of a demonstration network that’s already up and running on the Vodafone campus in Newbury, he commented, “It certainly wasn’t the disappointment that 3G was on Day One.” The operator is now beginning TDD trials in both Europe and Asia, although all this activity doesn’t mean that a rollout is just around the corner – according to Prof. Walker its service is unlikely to launch before 2012. Nevertheless, Vodafone’s interest in Verizon Wireless should provide it with some useful operational experience well before that, since Verizon plans to launch LTE services in 2010.

The factors that determine which operators will be the first to launch LTE were explained by Ebrahim Bushieri of Lime Microsystems. Verizon and Sprint have a more compelling need to launch early because their cdma2000 networks do not benefit from the same degree of scalability as do Europe’s UMTS-based systems or TD-SCDMA in China. Likewise NTT-DoCoMo in Japan, having been the first to launch 3G, is working with older basestation equipment that is reaching the limit of its expandability, so they will also be keen to roll out LTE as soon as possible. Lime also believes that small cells, including femtocells, will form a major part of LTE networks, and that these will need to cover a broad frequency range to cope with the multiple air interface standards that will exist. This in turn will drive the need for flexible, wideband RF transceivers.

A number of speakers, among them Ben Timmons of Qualcomm and Rick Dingle, VP of customer engineering at Icera, were quick to point out that, unlike the situation when 3G launched, both silicon and terminals will be ready for LTE well ahead of the networks going live.