Nov 15
GSM Association Backs LTE for Mobile Boadband
Nov 15, ‘07 — The board of the GSM Association voted to back LTE (3GPP Long Term Evolution) as the mobile broadband standard to succeed HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), the CEO of the group said Tuesday.
The vote is an indication that GSM operators are unified in their support for LTE, and gives them a united front as LTE competes with Qualcomm’s UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband) and with WiMax, backed by the computer industry, to become the next mobile broadband technology.
LTE is several times faster than HSPA and could help spur demand for more downloading over cellular networks. Japan’s NTT DoCoMo may become the first operator to widely deploy the new technology, which is expected to be ready by the end of this decade.
Rob Conway, CEO of GSMA, announced the association’s backing of LTE during a speech at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, China, and called on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the leading United Nations agency for communication technologies, to ensure the industry wins the spectrum needed to offer mobile broadband.
NTT DoCoMo is pushing aggressively ahead with plans to speed up its mobile broadband services in Japan, and is looking to LTE to take care of the job. The company counts over half of Japan’s mobile subscribers as its customers and has already started running tests on LTE technology to become its “Super 3G” offering. One advantage to LTE is that it can be used on existing 3G networks.
Download speeds on Super 3G could reach up to 300Mbps (megabits per second), Masao Nakamura, the CEO of NTT DoCoMo, said in a speech, a huge improvement over HSDPA.
DoCoMo is also researching 4G (fourth generation) mobile technology. When it’s commercialized, 4G will promise 1Gbps download speeds, said Nakamura, but in testing DoCoMo has achieved speeds as high as 5Gbps.
Testing on LTE is expected to be finished by 2009, said Matthias Reis, head of the LTE business program at Nokia Siemens Networks. Operators are currently using HSPA, and starting to roll out HSPA+ and IHSPA (Internet-HSPA). By 2009, testing will be done and operators will be able to start rolling out the technology, he said.
Meanwhile the GSMA continues to back current generation wireless technologies. Separately Tuesday, in partnership with Microsoft, it announced a contest to design laptop PCs with HSPA-enabled chipsets to make it easier for the average user to access the Internet via a mobile network.