Having just finished explaining the confusion around LTE and 4G to one of my colleagues at our publishing dept. and after a long holiday, I thought I could do with some 4G catching up. There were two major launches this week worth mentioning: first one was by AT&T, which deployed commercial networks in St.Louis and Staten Island, NY., taking the carrier’s nationwide deployments to a total of 32 cities. The second one was by Bharti Airtel – the Indian operator deployed one of the world’s first TD-LTE networks and the country’s first, 4G network in Kolkata. Reportedly, Bharti Airtel is now in talks with Qualcomm to acquire the latter’s BWA licence.
The present LTE ecosystem is fast developing and with the rate of LTE network commitments at an all-time high, network vendors have significantly improved their position to offer products and solutions to network operators. Consequently, we have forecasted a rapid uptake of LTE mobile broadband technology in the next five years but with a very limited global reach.
We believe that the subscriber levels will attain 428m by 2016, but will only reach 6% of the global subscriber population. Most of this growth is expected to occur from this year onwards, with many mobile operators making preparations now in order to realise their roll out targets. This is also reflected in GSA’s latest LTE worldwide status report – 301 operators are currently investing in LTE in 95 countries and there are some 57 commercial networks deployed in 32 countries so far.
Our ‘LTE – The Next Generation’ whitepaper is now available to download from here…
Tags: 4G, Airtel, AT&T, LTE, LTE Network, mobile broadband, Qualcomm
Well, as such, be it operators with currently deployed HSPA+ suggesting their networks to be “4G” or operators with deployments of WiMAX or either flavour of LTE making claims that these networks are actually 4G, as per ITU-R technical specifications and requirements, they and yourself included are all either wrong or mistaken.
As per ITU-T definition and requirements for 4G standards, named the International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced (IMT-Advanced) specification, setting peak speed requirements for 4G service at 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s) for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) for low mobility communication (such as pedestrians and stationary users.
Mobile WiMAX Release 2 (IEEE 802.16m) and LTE Advanced (LTE-A) are IMT-Advanced compliant standard technologies which are likely to support peak bit rates in the order of 1 Gbit/s. The earliest that services should be expected from any or either of these is next year depending of the ability of operators to farm and/or acquire new spectrum.
Best regards,
Shahid Batalvi
Hi Shahid,
Many thanks for your comment. I was a bit reluctant to be pulled into this argument once again, however I thought I would just mention this one thing – I do agree that the initial claims by network operators to call any forerunning technology as 4G was just a marketing spin. However, ITU did make the following changes in late (Dec) 2010 to accommodate LTE, WiMAX, HSPA+ and any other evolved 3G technology as 4G: “Following a detailed evaluation against stringent technical and operational criteria, ITU has determined that “LTE-Advanced” and “WirelessMAN-Advanced” should be accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced. As the most advanced technologies currently defined for global wireless mobile broadband communications, IMT-Advanced is considered as “4G”, although it is recognized that this term, while undefined, may also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third generation systems now deployed. The detailed specifications of the IMT-Advanced technologies will be provided in a new ITU-R Recommendation expected in early 2012″….
And of course, we do very well understand that the two true-4G standards officially designated as IMT-Advanced are LTE-A and WiMAX2. One can either blame the carriers for pushing the ITU or just the ITU for redefining 4G again and again…..
Best,
Nitin Bhas.