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LTE is what you need to build a mass market
In GSA (the Global mobile Suppliers Association) they know everything about the world of mobile communications. At the Broadband Ukraine 2013 conference (which took place in Kiev in June) we talked with Alan Hadden, GSA's president, about the possibilities that LTE opens and the evolutionary steps of its deployment.
― Mr Hadden, the speeds of HSPA are going up and reaching tens of mbps. But that is actually what most of fixed broadband providers offer ― here in Ukraine, at least. As far as I know, LTE operators in Europe also offer their subscribers similar speeds. So the question is: why bother at all with LTE if HSPA can do the same?
― You can talk about the peak speeds which are theoretical, and talk about what the customers actually receive. What is happening with HSPA is most customers receiving a good experience with 5–8 Mbps. This is enough for video streaming, for surfing etc. As the HSPA develops, the operators are really doing two things. They are putting in more capacity: yes, the peak is 42 mbps, but what it means is that they can put more people with 5–8 Mbps and begin to build the mass market. The second thing is that they can give some customers, according to their price plan, a higher speed if they wish. When you come to LTE, there is another increase in capacity. And it's also an increase in performance. If you considering certain services, which include voice applications, wireless gaming and so on, the experience is much better on an LTE network. With LTE, the latency which is round trip time is the same as in the fixed network. Secondly, the peak downlink speed has improved. It's a hundred Mbps. At the next stage, LTE Category 4, it's one hundred and fifty Mbps. When you look at the next evolution which is called LTE Advanced, it has the potential for a peak rate of 1 Gbps. What that means is some operators are protecting the user experience (at the same 5–8 Mbps) while getting more and more people coming on. And some customers are being offered much higher speeds: 15-20 Mbps, even 30 Mbps as a stream, which is interesting for certain types of users. The other thing people, sort of, forget is uplink. On LTE the uplink is very fast. I'll get you a user case. Imagine a business in a rural part (a company that, perhaps, does digital mapping from airplane or helicopter). At the and of the day there are many big photos, so they go back to the office, to their broadband connection, and they send these files. With LTE you don't have to do that. You do it with a laptop and a dongle. I'll give you another example which is perhaps a bit more realistic. It's the specific case of the royal wedding in Stockholm, Sweden. The television company wanted to cover everywhere that the princess and the prince were moving but they only had a certain amount of vehicles. So they approach the LTE operator and said: 'Can you help?' It did, and they were able to send standard definition video files wherever the royal couple went. All they needed was a camera man, a camera, a laptop and a dongle. And something similar was happening in London with the Olympics. So, LTE is more efficient spectrum, higher performance at the downlink and uplink, and the latency is reduced. Overall, it's more efficient technology. And actually it's being applied in even more markets than we saw with HSPA. These deployments are taking place in quite interesting places: small island in the Pacific Ocean, African countries where there's no copper, well-developed markets where they are providing extremely high capacity, or rural coverage where fixed operator doesn't really have copper as well. LTE is being used in the public networks, but it's also being used in the private networks. It's being used by oil companies in pipelines. It's being used for emergency services. In a meantime, HSPA is a great technology, it's already 42 mbps, and it will also evolve. But today we don't really have the user devices for this stage, while for LTE there are already over 800 devices.
― What is more preferable: to begin with HSPA and then add LTE or skip HSPA altogether?
― You start with what spectrum that is available. If you have 2.1 GHz or can get it, then, most likely, you will start with HSPA. All of you neighbors in Europe are using a band for roaming as well. And most likely you'll go in a band where the main ecosystem is. If you don't have 2.1 GHz but have 1800 MHz for GSM, and you are allowed to refarm it, then you'll deploy LTE, because it has a very large ecosystem of user devices. Most companies in Europe actually have, or will have, both LTE and HSPA. If you take the LTE part, most operators at the end of the story will probably have 3 bands. They will have 2.6 GHz for capacity, 800 MHz for coverage, and 1800 MHz as an in-between option. Where do they start depends on what they have, but most will end with that.
― LTE is primarily about data services, and as for the telephony, operators usually rely on Circuit Switched FallBack to 2G/3G netwoks which they also own. So, what's the ned in developing Voice over LTE (VoLTE)?
― You can consider CSFB as first step. In the beginning many operators were providing their LTE customers with a data service (with a dongle, a bridge, a hotspot). Now it's changing for two reasons. Number one: more LTE smart phones which means people are expecting more. The second thing that happening is that the LTE networks coverage in the beginning was quite small (like, within one city), but now the LTE coverage in many countries is building. Some countries have nation-wide LTE coverage today. Many of the operators already have GSM and 3G networks, so the normal first step is Circuit-Switched Fallback because the coverage is there. But in the future they will want to go to putting the voice over the LTE network itself. It's an all-IP network, so it'll be more efficient for the operator to handle voice as just another data stream, and customers get seamless experience. To put voice as data over their network, the LTE operators will need to install an IMS system. That's not so common today, but in the future the situation will change because the IMS will help operators deploy voice and other popular services. For example, HD Voice that's just amazing. Some operators already do have VoLTE: in Korea, in North America, and there is a long list of operators right now who are deploing VoLTE. AT&T, Verizon, Etisalat and others have announced the dates.
― WiMAX was once considered to be the main competitor to LTE. Why it didn't happen? Why most operators are switching to LTE?
― I think there are probably two reasons. I will not talk about which technology is better or worse; that, to me, is not the point. The reason number one: the major investors and operators chose LTE. So when you get these big companies (DoCoMo, Telstra, Vodafone, Telefonica, etc. ) making their choice, this is a signal for the industry, for the manufacturers, to create the ecosystem for these large-scale deployment. For WiMAX and anything else I didn't see this signal. But you did have it from the operators who are mainly GSM and 3G operators. And now LTE became the fastest-developing technology. Why are WiMAX operators switching? Well, the choice of the devices is not there. People want the iPhone, they want the Samsung Galaxy. They want to have a wide choice, and most popular phones of all range of form factors are supporting LTE and not supporting WiMAX. Secondly, operator wants to compete, and it's very hard to compete when you have a technology which has got less support. For example, in the U.S. they set LTE as the technology that would be used by emergency services. The same is happening in India, in Mexico, in Japan, in Australia. With LTE some applications become possible which cannot be served by any other technology. Which means some of the existing technologies over the time will be taken away and you will see LTE and new applications for critical communications being developed in the bands which are agreed for use. And now more and more spectrum is being allocated for those emergency services for LTE. We never saw such a scale before, by the way. HSPA is really interesting and has a very interesting growth but what we saw with LTE is even higher.
― As for LTE Advanced: won't it be rather used for B2B applications?
― Well , yes, but also brings the capacity and performance gains. If you are really talking about mass markets you need capacity at the lowest cost, and that will be delivered with LTE Advanced. Some of the features of this technology are already now working with customers: for example, carrier aggregation where you link two frequencies together. This if live commercially since lust July, I think, in Korea. So the users are getting this new experience and the operator is using new technology with an ecosystem. Look at the growth of LTE in Korea, it's fantastic: 10 million subscribers in a very short time.
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