Long Live LTE!

Thursday, February 17th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

Day 3. Ah ha the sun is out eventually and it is a beautiful crisp winter’s day.

So if you had not guessed yet I am technologist at heart and today will be a technology day, geeks rejoice. I was just reflecting that I started working on GSM (or SMG back then) even before it could walk or talk. It did not get its voice until 1991.

So it is quite an odd feeling to be here and see a very worthy successor to the pioneering 2G technology, that successor is LTE. I have always felt 3G W-CDMA was a camel designed to quickly move beyond the 2G confines, both ill conceived and poorly implemented. It was not even evolutionary it was just there. Even back in 1998 I had argued that the All-IP network and OFDM was a better way forward – now it has happened.

So today I head off to the LTE Forum to learn about the newest family member (I will not call it 4G). The first presentation is from ZTE and outlines the state of LTE as well as promoting ZTE, I will skip that sales part. LTE only started life in 2005 at the standards stage and now 180 operators have committed to deploy it, 17 have already deployed and there are 63 terminal devices – not too shabby for a fledgling network.

There are usually several questions related to any new network deployment: how much will it cost, what is the ROI and where do I get the spectrum. Let’s start with spectrum. By and large, this is coming as part of the move from analog TV to digital. Most countries are selling off spectrum in the 800MHz region – it is perfect for LTE. Other spectrum is also coming as part of the 2G switch off to free up the 900MHz band. One lingering issue maybe assigning a set of common frequencies worldwide to allow easy international roaming.

The cost of an LTE network over the complete lifecycle is significantly less than that of 3G or 2G, by several orders of magnitude. This is largely due to the fact that it is IP and a very flat architecture – so Juniper and Cisco should be ready to cash in on the LTE roll out. Because the OPEX of the LTE networks is so low, the ROI is very fast – less than 18 months in most cases!! So now we have a spectrally efficient technology that is cheap to run with bandwidths up to 100Mbps, which means the operators can be cost competitive with very cheap rates – of course that won’t happen until the competition starts, but expect costs to drop significantly over the next 4-5 years (possible shorter).

As all GSM Operators adopt LTE and all but one CDMA operator follow suit, we are heading towards a tipping point where there will be large bandwidth pipes throughout the world enabling “the cloud” connectivity at last – anywhere & anytime. It is a very exciting to see several technologies converge to provide a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime shift in the way we will work, rest and play. Your teenage sons and daughters may no longer commute to the office (“destruction of place“), their work place will be anywhere they want it to be.

OK back to the real world……Kill the music…..

Over the next 2-4 years expect to see most 2G networks go and the majority of 3G networks too, they are just not economically sound; the real estate they occupy in terms of spectrum and buildings is just too valuable. Most new radio technology deployed now is software; defined so changing and adapting will be as simple as downloading new software – well maybe.

If your wondering whether LTE can do voice too it is called VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and provides almost CD quality voice. Coupled with the ability to send video simultaneously maybe that video chat will really happen. If you think about it voice is just video with a blank screen. Finally for those of us who worry about our carbon footprint the new LTE networks use about half the power of the current networks while providing the same coverage with data rates. So changing to a new network can also significantly reduce your utility bill.

2G is dead, long live LTE! I can say I was there at the birth and death, a short 20 year life. How long will LTE live? Well, probably nowhere close to that time span. Perhaps in 5 years time, I will be writing about LTE Advanced or some other impenetrable TLA.

Tags: LTE