Companies making and trying out LTE equipment are already recording data speeds on the street of 100 megabits a second. But how will they support the demands that the data will put on the rest of their network? They are concerned about meeting customers’ expectations. By Alan Burkitt-Gray


Dick Lynch, Verizon: final phase of trials before the
commercial infrastructure roll-out starts


John Donovan, AT&T: appointed Ericsson as a key
supplier for its LTE project

LTE operators are worried. Not about the technology: that’s still in the early days, and what they’ve seen so far they’re happy with — but about the implications of streets full of devices that work at 100 megabits a second on their networks.
The LTE bandwagon is rolling. Verizon Wireless has tested equipment and systems in two US cities with equipment from Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson and says it is ready for 25-30 cities by the end of 2010.
TeliaSonera has systems in Stockholm and Oslo — with equipment from Ericsson and Huawei respectively. Telstra’s Hong Kong subsidiary CSL is testing ZTE kit in its crowded city and reports good results.
Good in terms of speed — that’s what they’re all boasting about. Though give them a moment to reflect and they start to think about the implications.
The trials are “on track”, said Dick Lynch, CTO of Verizon Wireless at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. “We’re currently on phase four — the final phase — of the trials in Boston and Seattle and in 60 days they will be fully passed in terms of testing before we start the commercial infrastructure roll-out in a big way.”
The trial system uses back-end equipment from Starent — now part of Cisco — and Nokia Siemens Networks.
There is a “tremendous interest” from appliance makers in the idea of putting LTE devices in their equipment, he added.
The trial installations have been thoroughly tested, with services such as streaming video continuing through handovers between cellsites, he said. “And voice is more readily doable than we thought.”
Single spectrum

The 25-30 cities planned for launch by the end of 2010 will bring LTE within the reach of 100 million people, he added. “We have a single spectrum across the US. I’m confident that this is readily doable.”
Two senior executives from CSL boasted about speed, too. CTO Christian Daigneault said he has recorded data via a dongle in a laptop at rates around 70 megabits a second driving and walking around Hong Kong, and 100 megabits in the CSL office.
However the company is so far testing LTE-only dongles and has not tried combined LTE/HSPA equipment. CSL is also running HSPA at up to 21 megabits now and plans to increase that to 42 megabits in June 2010.
“As we progress in the trial we will use LTE/HSPA dongles,” said Daigneault. “That will be in the next few weeks.”
CEO Tarek Robbiati said: “There are no single chips that do both LTE and HSPA at the same time. They are coming.”
CSL is using ZTE equipment for the LTE trial — the same company that supplies its HSPA system. LTE is running on the same backhaul network, said Daigneault. “There’s a life of many years to come in HSPA. We’ll use LTE in the high capacity areas. This is one of the features we’ve been testing.”
He said that “the performance of LTE is very promising” but warned: “This very high speed is exposing other bottlenecks.” Robbiati said that high-bandwidth services would stress some operators’ backhaul: “The national infrastructure in some countries may reach breakdown.”
For ZTE the news that CSL is planning to invest in LTE was welcomed by company chairman Hou Weigui.
Data challenge

But other vendors also warned of the data challenge. Rajeev Suri boasted that Nokia Siemens Networks, of which he is CEO, ran LTE at 100 megabits a second in January on a USB dongle. “These are speeds that others will be hard press to match,” he said.
But mobile operators are approaching an iceberg caused by the amount of data their customers are using — and they could soon sink like the Titanic, said Suri, who took over the leadership of NSN in November 2009.
Some will survive, “but others will be like the Titanic — they didn’t see the iceberg or they forgot that most of it is underwater”, said Suri.
Mobile data from smart devices will increase 100-fold by 2015, he warned. “Traffic will continue to explode,” he said, “but the industry can’t afford to just provide more capacity and more capacity. The revenues are not growing.”
He said that he expects industry revenues for mobile data just to triple by 2015. “That’s not sufficient. The revenue is not going up at the same rate.”
By 2015 the mobile industry will be carrying 23 exabytes of data every year. “That’s equivalent to everyone on the planet — 6.3 billion people — downloading a digital book every day.” Operators and vendors have to rethink the way that networks are operated, he said.
Other vendors at Mobile World Congress agreed with Suri’s analysis. “The big surprise is the overwhelming data traffic,” said Erwan Ménard, head of Hewlett-Packard’s telecoms business.
Overwhelming data

“We’ve learned a lot from the 3G traffic. Ten years ago people were wondering about applications for GPRS.” But no longer, he told Global Telecoms Business. “Now worry is the amount of data, not about how to use it. It’s a whole different equation. One could see it coming, but it has accelerated a lot — and at the time of economic downturn. It’s a little overwhelming.”
Mark Greenquist, CEO of Telcordia, agreed: “As more data gets added …. LTE’s only going to make it worse,” he told Global Telecoms Business at Barcelona. “You can’t just continue to throw more capacity at it.”
In the past the normal reaction was to add more and more capacity to the backhaul network. “With LTE we’re running into the limits,” said Greenquist. Operators will have to look at different strategies: “How do you segment your customers in different ways, to get the maximum out of the revenue? You need to get more sophisticated in the way you manage the capacity. There’s a bigger debate in developed markets about managing bandwidth and managing quality of service.”
Pankaj Patel, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of its service provider group, warned that video will account for two-thirds of mobile data traffic by 2014. “The transformation is beginning to happen.”
Increased investment in mobile networks is one of the reasons Cisco bought Starent in late 2009 for $3 billion, he said. “We in Cisco have four ‘big bets’ in telecoms — IP/NGN, video, mobility and management of cloud services — and we placed an even bigger bet on Starent.” The deal was done in under two months from announcement to acquisition. The deal was closed on December 19 and people worked through the holidays to bring the two companies’ product and marketing strategies into alignment.
“The world is definitely moving to 3G and 4G, and IP is increasingly relevant,” said Patel. “Newer and richer services are being developed, along with smart phones and devices. This has made what Starent and Cisco bring even more relevant. Mobility will be more of an attribute of every side of our life.”
Meanwhile AT&T appointed Ericsson as a key supplier for its LTE project. “We were delighted to make our announcement,” said John Donovan, CTO of AT&T, also speaking at Mobile World Congress. The deal with Ericsson makes for “great continuity” to deliver services.
CSL’s parent company Telstra waited till the rain-soaked crowds has dispersed from Barcelona before announcing its LTE trials for Australia: NSN and Huawei will supply kit for the project, due to take place in May 2010, though commercialisation is probably a few years off.
Capacity expansion

Telstra CTO Hugh Bradlow told GTB before the announcement of vendors in the trial that “the way we get to LTE is different from Verizon. For us we see it as a capacity expansion exercise.”
The idea behind LTE is “to drive the cost per bit down”, he said. For wireless networks, much of the capital cost is in towers. “If you have a tower, lower the cost of more bits,” he said.
Bradlow backed Telstra’s decision to go to LTE rather than WiMax because the “beauty of the GSM track is you keep your authentication and the OSS”, he said. “WiMax is much more computer-like than telephony-like. WiMax is like wifi for a wide area.” And LTE is a 4G follow-on of the family that started with 2G GSM and its 3G variant, WCDMA.
“But I hate the term 4G for LTE and WiMax,” said Bradlow. “If you change generations you’ve got to change the service. From the user’s perspective there’s not a dramatic change.”
However, some at Barcelona were talking of at least one perceptible change with the introduction of LTE — high-definition voice, something that an older generation would call hifi or CD-quality.

Operators announced a solution for voice over LTE — see GTB report here  — which is likely to be taken up by many of them.
However Verizon’s Lynch expressed reservation about using it in the short term. “We’re serving 91-92 million users today on our CDMA network. We will provide voice in the early days over CDMA. But I think we’ll move more quickly to voice over LTE than any one of us are prepared to think. Voice is more readily doable than we thought.”
The Fraunhofer Institute, Europe’s largest R&D organisation — and the place where MP3 audio was invented — was on hand to demonstrate the quality of HD voice over LTE, with an audio bandwidth of 14 kilohertz and very low latency. “It’s three or four years away,” suggested Fraunhofer spokesman Matthias Rose.
But Orange is already offering HD voice on some of its 3G networks, starting with Moldova in the far east of Europe in September 2009 and then rolling out into the UK. “We’re looking at France and Spain now,” said Olaf Swantee, the member of the France Telecom main board who’s responsible for Orange’s mobile operations. “It’s demonstrating our focus on building the best network,” he told GTB. “You need to provide more capacity,” he added. And LTE will have that capacity. GTB