RFSTUF

Mobile World Congress: LTE trials mount up but mood is still cautious
Story by Caroline Gabriel. Submitted on February 24, 2010
In the home of the 3GPP carriers at Mobile World Congress, there was less hype about LTE than many had expected, though there was plenty of talk of trials and pre-commercial products. ...
...First, the good news for LTE. It really is achieving a unified operator community worldwide, mending the old CDMA/GSM divide for good. This was highlighted by the decision of three CDMA majors - China Telecom, KDDI and Verizon Wireless - to join the GSM Association, which also represents carriers using W-CDMA/HSPA and now LTE. And in the most symbolic move of all, Qualcomm joined the GSMA as an associate member - no surprise given its likely market lead in LTE device silicon and its huge participation in HSPA, but nonetheless, offering a final laying down of arms in the mobile war.

Then, the bad news. Unity is not what drives the mobile industry to greater lengths and LTE is already facing wars of its own. One is with ‘the other 4G standard’, WiMAX - boasting over 550 commercial deployments and with its next generation iteration, 802.16m or WiMAX2, due to be finalized this year, keeping its headstart over LTE-Advanced (these two standards hope to achieve ‘true 4G’ capabilities like 100Mbps mobile download rates, and both are submitted as candidates for the ITU’s IMT-Advanced set of official 4G platforms). What is really important is how much ground WiMAX will take from LTE before the latter becomes commercially mainstream, which most - despite a host of first stage deployments - think will be 2013. WiMAX, for its part, hit that point last year, after several years of work on certification, device ecosystem and service models, all of which still lie ahead of LTE. ...