Wireless 2.0 summit: No LTE from Vodafone until 2012
Published: 6 July, 2009
Wireless technologists tend to flock together, forming tight regional clusters of innovation, often around certain key universities and silicon start-ups. The US and Chinese examples may grab the headlines, but there are some in Europe too, and one of them - the hi-tech community based of the UK's southwest - was holding its Wireless 2.0 summit last week in Bristol.
One of the key themes was LTE timescales, predictably enough, given some of the wireless chip companies that make the southwest their home - from LTE frontrunners like Qualcomm, to start-ups like Lime on the flexible RF transceiver front, picoChip in femtocells, Cognovo in cognitive radio, and Icera with its soft modem technology.
Such firms may be racing towards LTE in innovation terms, but most European operators will wait awhile before harnessing these breakthroughs in any scale. Indeed, Vodafone used the event to make perhaps its most definitive statement that it would wait until 2012 before deploying, though it will have the advantage of an inside track on progress by its US joint venture Verizon Wireless, which will start rolling out in 2010. Professor Michael Walker, group R&D director at Vodafone, said: "There will be no European LTE networks in 2010 except for a few small ones to demonstrate capabilities to governments. Vodafone roll-out will depend on geography, but won't be before 2012."
In contrast to the 3G era, Vodafone sees the reason to be cautious as being market driven - whether the applications and customer need are in place. Past obstacles, such as shortage of terminals or spectrum, are less relevant this time. Walker believes Vodafone will not need additional spectrum for LTE in some markets, as it will be able to use existing frequencies in new ways - but equally, this flexibility does not tie it to a hard timescale (and raises questions over its strategy for participating in new auctions such as 2.6GHz).
Instead, it can continue to drive the most performance and value from HSPA(+). Walker also said: "The gulf between the network and the terminal has gone away", with Qualcomm promising LTE handset silicon by the end of 2010, though Ben Timmons, director of business development at the firm, qualified this by saying: "We will have commercial mass silicon ready in 2010 but will interoperability be done and networks built?" Rick Dingle, VP of customer engineering at Icera, added: "Unlike in 3G, terminal technology is keeping pace - we will be waiting for the networks not the terminals."
Walker also used the conference to plead the case that wireless networks can deliver fixed broadband performance, claiming the 100Mbps of fiber to the home is equal to the theoretical maximum throughput of LTE, while wireless delivers a better user experience. "LTE capacity on 20MHz is an order of magnitude higher than HSPA," said Walker. "In the first real LTE field trials an average downlink speed of 15Mbps was achieved with 4.5 spectral efficiency." The trials indicated that LTE was delivering 20Mbps at the center of the cell, falling to 1.3Mbps at the edge. Despite that potential, though, he said: "We plan to learn from the negative experiences of deploying 3G."
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