LTE deadline extended to March, vendors rework 4G structures

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LTE deadline extended to March, vendors rework 4G structures

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 16 December, 2008

READ MORE: LTE

Although the deadline for parts of the LTE standards family has been extended to March 2009, the specifications for the air interface are now complete, in time to be included in the 3GPP's Release 8 set of standards. With operators and vendors already talking up their plans for LTE, this will increase the excitement about the technology, even though the long process of defining and processing interoperability testing still lies ahead.

According to reports in Unstrung, most of the LTE work is now done, and by March, "LTE is home and dry". The final work will be on SAE, the evolved packet core architecture for LTE, which must be finished by the end of March to be eligible for Release 8. Adrian Scrase, VP of partnership projects at European standards organization ETSI, said: "There are quite a number of parts for SAE, where the work still lags behind LTE work. We have a high level of confidence that the items will be completed by March, otherwise we wouldn't have included them on the list."

The decisions were taken at a 3GPP meeting in Athens last week, which finalized what would be included in Release 8 and also in Release 9, which should be frozen in December 2009. Other aspects of Release 8 include femtocells (Home Node B as the 3GPP calls them).

Although vendors will now have a clearer blueprint for their LTE developments, they are still at the stage of making ambitious deployment statements to add some gloss to their depressing business outlooks. This has tended to lead to headlines about companies like Alcatel-Lucent prioritizing on LTE and defocusing on WiMAX, as many vendors pursue a partnership approach to the latter - sharing cost and risk by rolling out systems via an ecosystem, especially in devices, rather than a one-stop shop. In fact, it is highly likely that this partner approach will become the norm for all new systems in the all-IP world, far closer to the PC model than the traditional base station sector. In many ways, WiMAX is establishing a blueprint that will become commonplace in an all-IP world where hardware is standardized and commoditized, and vendors set themselves apart through services and through the software and devices that their ecosystem partners can bring.

The beneficiaries of this new blueprint for the wireless market will be the WiMAX specialists, which can partner with larger companies to achieve scale, as Alvarion has done with Nortel; and those companies already accustomed to dealing in the open ecosystems of the PC and consumer electronics worlds, such as the Taiwanese ODM community. Meanwhile, the wireless equipment makers will play to their strengths - carrier contacts, systems integration and managed services capabilities.