LTE roll-out will accelerate despite recession, claims Motorola

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LTE roll-out will accelerate despite recession, claims Motorola

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 16 October, 2008

READ MORE: Motorola | LTE

Operators relying on mobile or fixed/mobile broadband services to increase their future revenues are not only facing an upgrade of their wireless networks to HSPA+, WiMAX or LTE, but also a massive increase in the backhaul capacity needed to support that data traffic and multimedia applications. Paul Steinberg, chief architect for Motorola's wireless infrastructure products, reinforced the message this week, predicting that even 3.5G technologies will start to struggle soon in areas of high usage, and that this will force new approaches to backhaul as well as an early move to LTE, despite economic uncertainty.

In an interview with US-based CommsDay, Steinberg said 3G operators in developed markets will experience increases in data usage in the course of this year, ranging from sixfold to 14fold, but revenue from data services is growing only by 10-30% a year. This will push carriers towards all-IP, flat networks like WiMAX and LTE, with their improved cost of delivering broadband data.

Citing research by ComScore, Steinberg said that reasonable traffic profiles for mobile users by 2011 will range from 2.7Gb of data for typical handset users, to 11.1Gb a month for heavy users with both a laptop and handset. He believes some operators will have to start to roll out 4G-class networks as early as the end of next year to cope with the demands. Motorola is still relying on LTE deployments by six operators next year and 10 in 2010. However small their initial build-outs, Motorola points out that the 16 carriers that have committed to LTE in the next two years account for about 1.8bn subscribers worldwide, about half the global total.

According to Motorola, each LTE base station will require 200Mbps-300Mbps of backhaul capacity, which will stretch most fixed or wireless technologies apart from fiber or Gigabit Ethernet. This will lead to new approaches, such as 'wireless fiber' technologies, or relay techniques.