First of all, Happy Birthday to me. \o/
News about LTE, a lot of them this month, actually. Since, my last big post about it, when I talked about the fight between Mobile WiMAX and LTE, a lot of things changed. Big funding raises from European Union will support the research for LTE, about US$ 25 million will help to develop it. For those, who don’t know, the 4G will be the next generation on mobile phones and PDAs, to give high speeds for us, up to 100 Mbps. The LTE’s improvements will be, comparing with 3G, high throughput, low latency, FDD (Frequency Division Duplexing) and TDD (Time Division Duplexing) on the same platform, and a simple architecture resulting in savings on the operating system. LTE will be as well compatible with old technologies as GSM and CDMA.
LTE Deployment partners
Verizon, north-american telecom company, did successful trials with LTE this month, in Boston and Seattle. They used 700 MHz spectrum in LG and Samsung devices to upload and download files, video streaming and navigate into web, of course. Add to that, the bet of Motorola, Nokia-Siemens, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung and Qualcomm to adopt LTE in their mobile phones, and the scheduled tests for LTE in Motorola phones in Japan next month. We can notice that LTE is very close to officialize his position as 4G technology, a big turnaround for a technology that was almost dead months ago.
Plus, FCC (Federal Communications Comission of USA) certificate the first LTE base station for this country, Alcatel-Lucent base stations. It’s a high performance compact base station designed to help operators launch services quickly. To read more about it, visit 3g.co.uk, highly recommended.
Of course, all this new technology happens first in countries prepared to, where the governmental commissions set the standards for those new technologies, as reserve frequency spectra and how they will control the companies with this new techonology. What I can say, here in Brazil, things are very slow. Anatel, telecommunications commission of Brazil, don’t set those standards yet and the lobby between mobile operators and cable TV (using MMDS) probably will delay this definition. Definitely, that’s horrible for Brazil, a huge market with 160 million mobile phones, and it’s horrible for the companies who wants to enter this market.
Anyway, Nokia-Siemens believes that LTE could be launched here in 2011, only a year after the launch in Europe & US. Ericsson wants LTE in Brazil soon, but remembers that a new technology will be deployed only when the investments on 3G were paid. And 3G only got a ‘boom’ this year, 2009, reaching 5,5 million people, but promises to reach 100 million members in 2013 (counting the new 4G members).
What about WiMAX? Well, as I said, WiMAX will grow in developing countries market, as Brazil, China, Russia and India mainly with fixed broadband wireless, letting LTE dominate broadband on mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs. In Futurecom 2009 (October in São Paulo, Brazil), some forecasts says that WiMAX could bring 38 billion reais (US$ 20 bi) only in Brazil the next few years. Intel, Google and Nextel bet high on WiMAX, 14 billion dollars to put it into the north american market, but only for fixed devices.
We will see what happens next, my bet stay the same: LTE and WiMAX will walk side-by-side!
Yes, This is for real an astonishing gadget to receive in my collection. Does anybody at all have aconclusion where I can purchase it? Any guidance?
Great insights. I loved to read your article. You must be putting a lot of time into your blog!