Commercial deployments of LTE are underway but they remain in the pioneering stage and there are far more trials and tests happening than true, commercial deployments, writes George Malim 
 
 
 
Although much secrecy surrounds trials and deployments of LTE technology, several operators and vendors have publicly announced trials and deployments.
LTE equipment vendors include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks and ZTE and many claim to be rolling out their LTE systems to operators now.
NSN, for example, reports it is involved in 13 commercial LTE deals. The company has been selected by NTT DoCoMo, Zain Bahrain, Telenor Denmark, TeliaSonera in the Nordic region, Mobily in Saudi Arabia and Elisa in Finland. The company was also selected by Verizon for IMS for LTE.
Ericsson has deals for deployments in place with AT&T and NTT DoCoMo, among others, and is the vendor to the live TeliaSonera network.
Huawei is reaady to deploy TD-LTE with China Mobile and claims to have been awarded more than 60 LTE contracts, nine of which are commercial.
“There will be several more launches this year,” says Kai Sahala, head of mobile broadband marketing at NSN. “How many depends on operator strategy and the availability of devices. There will be a handful.”
For Zhu Xiaodong, CTO of the ZTE’s western Europe marketing platform, it’s a similar story. “We’re involved in over 12 trials worldwide, including CSL in Hong Kong, Telefónica and the Telenor subsidiaries in Hungary and Montenegro,” he says. “Our trials list also includes SingTel, MTN, China Mobile, China Telecom and we are testing an 800 megahertz LTE network with one global leading mobile operator in Europe at the moment.”
“Mobile operators worldwide are looking at LTE as the best approach to address future capacity issues and provide a more flexible and cost-efficient network,” he adds.
The handful of deployments now active is driven by operators’ strategic decisions to deploy LTE to promote the perception that they are innovative, claims Dr Karim Taga, managing director of consultancy firm Arthur D Little’s Vienna office. “The first trigger is that LTE provides a new opportunity for a mobile operator to position itself as leading edge, as an organisation bringing users the latest technology,” he says. “DoCoMo, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile and Verizon have decided to be first but you need to be careful about what is noise and what are true deployments.”
No one is claiming that the world has suddenly gone LTE. After all, many countries are still building 2G networks and 3G roll out is ongoing across the globe. “From an LTE perspective and given my position, I’m comfortable with where we are now,” says Ken Wirth, president of 4G/LTE wireless networks at Alcatel-Lucent which, in addition to its Verizon deployment, will supply AT&T with LTE equipment and is involved in more than 40 trials.
 
 
One throat to choke
 
“We’ve announced our second significant LTE contract and we’re clearly the leader in deployments with customers that matter. Verizon’s network is now being deployed in significant volume and when we deliver and they turn it up it’s going to work and they’ll only have one throat to choke. We’ve focused on ensuring we’ve delivered a certified release and we’ve got more than 45 trials going on globally.”
There’s a process to go through when it comes to deployment and Wirth sees three key stages involved in that. “The first thing is that if you haven’t provided significant bandwidth with IP routing for your backhaul you need to do that today. If it isn’t a bottleneck, it will be soon,” he says.
“The second step is to work with your marketing organisation. You can’t buy spectrum for hundreds of millions of dollars and use it to provide what you’re already offering on your 2G and 3G networks.”
Finally, a company needs to engage with third parties. “We’ve established our Ng Connect programme which now involves more than 40 partners that we utilise to help customers to understand new services and new revenue streams. With this kind of approach you start paying back the investment you made as you build it out.”
Jon Morgan, senior manager of solutions marketing at Cisco Systems, which focuses on the non-radio aspects of next generation wireless networks, certainly agrees with the first point and thinks operators are becoming well-prepared for LTE in that regard.
“We’re involved in a lot of deployments,” he says. “A lot are still in trial stages and officially there are very few commercial deployments.”
The true early adopters will come to market in 2010 to 2013, he suggests. “Operators need to work with next generation core solutions to enable the mobile tidal wave of bandwidth. It’s not just about traffic. Signalling is going to hit operators’ networks so the core is going to fundamentally enable them to monetise their traffic.”
LTE deployments require a very different approach than 3G deployments, as NSN’s Sahala attests. “The world is different to how it was in early 3G deployment,” he says. “In 2000 and 2003, no mobile broadband practically existed and the question was why would we need it? The whole industry suffered for a long period before 3G really took off; before people understood that the internet is the application. Now LTE comes and the world is ready. The user base is ready and the use case is there.”
 
 
Re-using transport
 
It’s just a case of deploying the networks, he adds. “The good news is that LTE deployments will happen using the same hardware. Operators can run the same hardware and a lot of things like transport can be re-used. The step to deploy LTE is less than the step to deploy 3G was.”
That’s a strong advantage for the technology, as a Huawei product line spokesperson, explains: “LTE offers significant advantages to operators. IP-based, flat architecture networks reduce capex and opex and incorporate quality of service with VoIP,” said the official. “LTE also provides enhanced spectrum utilisation to support more users per cell, and has open interfaces for 3GPP and non-3GPP technologies.”
It provides considerably higher data bandwidth, translating into more data capacity per user, as well as more total data capacity per cell than all earlier technologies.
“LTE enables operators to supply enterprise data networking, HDTV-quality and other intensive bandwidth applications,” the Huawei executive adds. “With LTE, end users will benefit from access to a wide range of richly innovative new multimedia applications. LTE will facilitate the introduction of new services in areas that have not yet been fully explored for wireless services interaction, including consumer electronics and appliances, health care, public utilities, and telematics.”
 
 
Staged deployments
 
In spite of the capability LTE has to support new services, its deployment will not be an overnight phenomenon and the spectre of 3G, as a network in search of an application, will not be revisited. Instead staged deployments addressing the needs of the operator will be the standard approach to roll-out.
“The cell size of LTE is smaller than the 3G cell from a purely technical point of view,” says Sahala. “But when it comes to the capabilities of deployments especially in the urban environment cell size is not the determining factor. You don’t do the maximum size of a network. When we look at capacity we look at coverage.”
That view certainly fits with that of Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at PicoChip, a company that makes the core technology within base stations. “Our belief and development strategy is optimised around small cells for LTE,” he says. “We’re not saying macrocells won’t exist: capacity is the reason for LTE’s existence. The sole business case for LTE is predicated on high speed broadband and that has a couple of inevitable issues.”
The data rate falls with range, so distances of 200 metres to one kilometre are the only relevant LTE areas, says Baines.
“It will happen more slowly than expected,” he adds. “Everything in telecoms takes longer than you expect. LTE is really complicated and there are an awful lot of things to get right. It’s great that we’ve got TeliaSonera, Verizon and others pushing, it’s great to have pioneers but I think it will take until 2015 until LTE is widely deployed. From an economic aspect is now the right time for operators to be issuing a rights issue for a few billion to build a new network?”
 
 
Competition from HSPA
 
Taga, at Arthur D Little, shares that view. “HSPA will continue to do the job for the next two to three years, at least, and introduction of new deployments will be slowed because of that,” he says.
In spite of others’ comments about the move to LTE from 3G representing a smoother evolution than the 2G to 3G migration, Diederik Hoekema, senior roaming business specialist at MACH, sees the shift as much more complex to execute effectively. “Moving from 2G to 3G was relatively straightforward for operators as they use the same core network,” he says. “However, the move to 4G will be much more radical. Offering stable high-speed data connections at low rates poses risks for operators that fear becoming like traditional ISPs.
Legacy and new LTE infrastructure will need to work in tandem for many years, increasing operator maintenance costs, adds Hoekema. “For the next 15 years, there needs to be a controlled migration, ensuring that subscribers have a seamless experience.” GTB