LTE operators happy to be bit pipes
News report from the LTE Forum conference in Stockholm, April 27-28
Suggesting that mobile operators are mere bit pipes used to be tantamount to profanity. But times have changed, as speakers from both TeliaSonera and Telenor used the phrase freely at last week’s LTE Forum conference in the LTE capital of the world: Stockholm. The highlight of the conference was the two operators’ hyped down but optimistic view of LTE.
“An important thing about our LTE service is that the minimum data rate is as high as 2.3 megabits per second,” said Mats Lundbäck, network director of TeliaSonera Sweden at last week’s LTE conference. That may not sound like a lot, but compared with the few hundred kbps or less you get with HSPA in the worst case, it is indeed a big step up. The modest baseline rate also shows how far operators have come in reducing LTE from hype to reality. According to Mr Lundbäck the average rates on the TeliaSonera Stockholm network are 15.7 and 4.4 mbps for uplink and downlink, respectively, at 10 MHz of bandwidth.
His words carry significant weight because TeliaSonera is the only commercially live LTE operator in the world today. TeliaSonera’s Stockholm & Oslo LTE networks cover 400.000 people, and – according to Mr Lundbäck – will this year be expanded to include 25 cities in Sweden, as well as parts of the Finnish and Estonian capitals Helsinki and Tallinn, respectively. Despite a shortage of terminals, TeliaSonera seems bent on confronting competitive pressures head on by being the first on the LTE market.
Telenor of Norway – remarkably the world’s sixth largest operator by population covered – has not yet gone live, but is subjecting LTE to rigorous testing in Oslo. According to Mr Rune-Harald Hakken from Telenor Business Development, LTE’s biggest problem is still terminals. Competitor TeliaSonera is still offering only a single-mode Samsung dongle, and according to Mr Hakken we will still have to wait until end of the year for multi-mode terminals supporting all of LTE, 3G/HSPA, and GSM. The LTE world is hurting for mobiles to a degree reminiscent of the early GSM days, where GSM was dubbed “God Send Mobiles”, said Mr. Hakken.
Mr Hakken also offered words of caution to those who think rather too highly of LTE. “We don’t believe that LTE will be the basis for the future digital home with lots of HDTV channels and the like. If you believe that, you’re dreaming,” he said. He also said that LTE is not a substitute for DSL, coax and fibre-based broadband services, and that he expects that femtocells will be important for LTE.
“Another main challenge for LTE is quality of service, because voice and data will be carried on the same bearer. That means that we need a convincing solution for QoS in order to make sure that voice services get the right priority,” said Mr Hakken.
Date: 06-05-2010
Author: Claus Hetting
HETTING to speak at RailTel Europe 2012
HETTING selected for 3G project in Asia
HETTING selected for project in Russia
Copyright 2008 - HETTING Consulting - Gustav Wieds Vej 29, st. tv. - DK-8000 Århus C - Denmark - Phone +45 25 34 17 05
Powered by ADzite CMS
