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LTE-Advanced managed to take a prominent role at last week’s Mobile World Congress, even though its predecessor is only deployed in a dozen places and it is not yet officially a standard. The wireless community aims to put that right this week, though, in a conference in Taiwan aiming to bring the purportedly 1Gbps system to completion. That could see the specs frozen as early as Friday, opening the way for companies to design their first products. However, despite high profile demonstrations, most carriers will not deploy the new platform until towards the end of the decade, and for now, are preoccupied with ensuring a return on their investment in the first round of LTE.

Despite that note of caution, about 800 representatives from all the main mobile vendors – and many more – are attending a 3GPP standards meeting in Taipei this week, looking to accelerate the progress of the next LTE specification, one that has already been accepted by the ITU as an official IMT-Advanced platform, along with WiMAX2.

These technologies are supposed to achieve 1Gbps on the downlink when stationary and 100Mbps when mobile, plus 200Mbps on the uplink. Of course, it remains to be seen just how ideal the conditions need to be to make that happen in real life. To deliver 1Gbps speeds, an operator would need 40MHz of spectrum and 8×8 MIMO antenna arrays (or about 100MHz of spectrum without MIMO).

It is clear, however, that the appetite for ‘true 4G’ (as opposed to the various systems now marketed under that banner) may be whetted earlier than expected, given the race to add mobile data and broadband capacity while adopting more affordable and modern network designs – LTE-Advanced is heavily focused on small cells and the kind of deconstructed RANs that Alcatel-Lucent and others were showcasing in Barcelona. It will also be self-optimizing and self-healing, responding to faults in the network or to changes in demand by taking actions, such as adding power to a base station or decreasing its radius, automatically.

LTE-Advanced will also support multicarrier implementations across non-contiguous spectrum bands, as demonstrated in Barcelona by Nokia Siemens, as well as easier hand-offs between different networks like 3G and Wi-Fi, for roaming and offload. On the backhaul front, the standard allows for some over-the-air backhaul via a macrocell, reducing cost in some lower capacity sites, and opening the way to new topologies – for instance, running small cell access in one band and macrocell backhaul in another.

The standards setters need to move quickly, since several vendors and institutions are already claiming LTE-Advanced products – Nokia Siemens offered a compelling demonstration of the pre-standard on its Flexi platform at MWC, while NTT DoCoMo has already carried out various tests under its SuperG initiative, followed by similar activity by Korea’s ETSI research body.

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