Verizon goes the LTE route with Vodafone, in huge blow to UMB
Published: 29 November, 2007
READ MORE: Verizon | Vodafone | LTE
Verizon Wireless said in a statement today that choosing LTE along with Vodafone gave both companies "a unique opportunity to adopt a common access platform with true global scale and compatibility with existing technologies of both companies". The partners have set out a coordinated trial plan for LTE that begins in 2008, with trial suppliers including Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia Siemens, and Nortel. LTE testing is starting to gather pace even in advance of finalized profiles from the 3GPP. Recently, announced that the two companies completed LTE test calls between the former's equipment and LG mobile device prototypes. The test used 2x2 MIMO systems over 10MHz channels. This effort was part of a broader testing regime being conducted under the auspices of the LTE/SAE Trial Initiative (LSTI), a group of operators and vendors established to ensure the rapid commercialization and easy interoperability of LTE systems, with the ambitious view to getting commercial products to market early in 2009, an agenda that would narrow the current head start of WiMAX, but which seems quite likely to be unachievable.
Significantly, and again with echoes of Sprint, Verizon stressed that "discussions with device suppliers have expanded beyond traditional suppliers such as LG, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson, as consumer electronics companies anticipate embedded wireless functionality in their future products".
As Verizon Wireless' co-parent Vodafone has also reluctantly accepted, along with many other cellcos round the world, the open internet model is now unavoidable in next generation mobile systems, despite the negative effect on margins, customer control and costs. Supporting open access has the potential to be extremely expensive, because of the high and unpredictable bandwidth requirements of unfettered internet and multimedia use, with the profit opportunities far from defined. And so a new breed of infrastructure is required too - one that combines high performance and capacity with ultra-low operating costs and cost to deliver each Mbps.
In this context, the choice of LTE is logical, given Verizon's timescales - unlike Sprint, it believes its current EV-DO upgrades will support all the services it needs to offer its base for the next few years at least, so it can afford to wait for LTE, rather than leap to the more readily available WiMAX. LTE, like WiMAX, will incorporate many advances in areas like smart antennas and flexible channels that will allow operators to reduce cost of delivery and make more efficient use of their spectrum, and it will also, like WiMAX, provide the opex benefits of a flat all-IP network (although, of course, Verizon will have integration and backwards compatibility issues to address with regards to EV-DO, which will inflate costs compared to a greenfield operation).
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