LTE and WiMAX both report landmarks

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LTE and WiMAX both report landmarks

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 8 June, 2009

READ MORE: LTE | WiMAX

New technologies have their ups and downs and it is easy to attach too much significance to isolated deals or trials, but there was news about both LTE and WiMAX on Friday that suggested wider implications. For LTE, T-Mobile Austria achieved air interface speeds of 130Mbps from a Huawei base station, indicating how European carriers are stepping up the pressure to make LTE fast and commercially viable. Meanwhile, Chinese reports suggested there may be a route for WiMAX into a huge market that has seemed virtually closed to the system.

T-Mobile Austria said it had installed an LTE base station from Huawei and, in a demonstration situation, had become the first operator to deliver 130Mbps, using four modems simultaneously active in the cell. The main purpose of this demo, though clearly not in a commercially realistic environment, was to put pressure on the Austrian regulator to open up 2.6GHz spectrum quickly, so that cellcos can move forward with new networks and services.

Huawei technology was also used recently by TeliaSonera in Norway, to demonstrate a live LTE connection to a laptop that was faster than links available using fixed broadband - although the Telia subsidiary that carried out the test, NetCom, did not elaborate on actual speeds.

On the WiMAX front, Clearwire president (international), Barry West, may have got a touch of clairvoyance last week when he said China was not a closed door for 802.16e, despite the administration's heavy support for TD-LTE as its primary 4G platform. China's Commercial Times reported that WiMAX would be used to deliver television and broadband in 30 cities, via a $14.5bn investment by the SARFT, the country's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.

The reports quoted Paul Lin, general director of the Information and Communications Research Laboratories at the Industrial Technology Research Institute. SARFT denied the reports over the weekend, but news agency Interfax speculated that this was because details were still to be finalized before making an official announcement. Whatever the complexities of official news reporting, SARFT has been working on OFDMA-based technology for years and has its own satellite/terrestrial mobile TV standard, CMMB STiMi, which it says will be available in 10m devices by the end of this year, and which is gaining some uptake in parts of Africa too.

However, sources say operators are also looking for a technology that can support broadband and video/TV, when the Chinese ministry opens up 700MHz spectrum, which is expected to be earmarked for urban networks, to improve capacity and coverage for fixed as well as mobile services as the urban middle class continues to grow rapidly. With TD-LTE still a few years away from commercial deployment, WiMAX could gain an opportunity here. According to The Commercial Times, regional operator Xiamen Mobile is already working with China Mobile to trial WiMAX in Xiamen, while carriers in Nanjing and Hangzhou are also involved in WiMAX developments.