The LTE World Summit 2012 proved to be a great success

The curtain has come down on another successful LTE World Summit event, which took place this week, in Barcelona, Spain. More than 2,000 delegates attended the event, representing more than 100 countries from around the world, indicating LTE’s impact the world over. There were over 100 exhibitors and also a series of masterclasses for the more technically minded to enjoy.

There was a wide range of speakers across the packed 11-track program and those attending the main keynotes were treated to speeches and presentations from some of the leading operators and vendors in the industry. They addressed some of the big topics and issues of the day, including signalling issues, strategies for lowering rollouts cost, the use of small cells, the problems with wifi offload, pricing strategies and general concern over LTE monetisation.

The actual event was prefaced by a Signaling Day that, as the name implies, focused on the signaling issues that are affecting all operators. It was well received and by the end of the day the phrase, ‘signaling storm’ had clearly taken over from last year’s ‘data tsunami’ as the buzz word of choice.

There was also the Operator Mindshare, a new format that involved executive from major operators hosting round table discussions on key topics to encourage new innovative thinking. There was much lively discussion and it all went off without any fisticuffs, with is either a relief or a disappointment, depending on your point of view.

The main event in the Catalan capital was opened by a welcome from Spain’s telecommunications minister, Mr Victor Calvo Sotelo, and followed by comments by the CTO of Orange Spain, Eduardo Duato. After admitting that operators in the region were having a particularly hard time, Duato called on the communications minister to make things easier for local operators, by freeing up more spectrum and helping to promote site sharing.

Also beamed via a live video link was the CTO of Deutsche Telekom, Germany, Bruno Jacobfeuerborn.  Jacobfeuerborn admitted he didn’t have to worry about bandwidth, with a 70MB/s LTE connection in his office. “But what about the rest of Germany?” the host Informa’s chief research office Mark Newman, cheekily quipped.

Other key figures appearing on stage included the CTO of 3, UK, Ed Candy, the CTIO of Etisalat Marwan Zawaydeh and the animated Yoshiki Chika, the CTO of Japan’s SoftBank. In his keynote speech Chika gave an animated talk highlighting the benefits of using TD-LTE spectrum as the most suitable technology for mobile broadband.

Another keynote highlight was the chief policy officer of Russian LTE provider Yota, who revealed that it was learning to deal with being one of the most congested network in the world with ouver 100 users per cell.

Meanwhile, Sung Man Kim, president of the network business unit for Korea’s KT Corporation said that the industry needed a paradigm shift in its approach to dealing with data traffic, and put forth its cloud-based RAN as the way to go forward. With speeds of 35Mbps and rising at its busiest location in Seoul Gangnam area, it seems to be doing a good job.

Clearly the event was a major success for the industry and all now look forward to the next one, LTE Asia, taking place on 18-19 September 2012 Marina Bay Sands, Singapore.

The LTE Awards 2012 took place in the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona

The Telecoms.com LTE Awards 2012 were held this week to celebrate and give recognition to the achievements made by those in the LTE industry.

Now in its third year, the show took place at LTE World Summit 2012 in the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona, this week. The Telecoms.com LTE Awards have now become a symbol of recognition to the industry as a mark of leadership, quality and innovation.

The entries were examined by an independent panel of judges over a two week assessment process.  The judges agreed on the criteria of qualification and marking in the context of these entries, and with advice from Informa. The awards winners were:

Category 1 – Best LTE Device/Handset

ZTE Corporation

Category 2 – Best Test / Measurement LTE Product

Actix

Category 3 – Most Significant Development for Commercial LTE Network by an Operator

KT Corporation

Category 4 – Most Significant Development for Commercial LTE Network by a Vendor

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Category 5 – Most Innovative LTE Commercial Launch

Samsung Electronics

Category 6 – Best LTE Core Network Element

Huawei Technologies

Category 7 – Best LTE RAN Product

Alcatel-Lucent

Category 8 – Best Contribution to R&D for LTE

Gemalto

Category 9 – Best LTE Traffic Management Product

Bytemobile

Category 10 – Best Chipset / Processor Product

Freescale

The LTE Awards 2012 are taking place on May 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona.

Now in its third year, the annual LTE Awards, in associated with Telecoms.com, are now established as the leading event of its kind. The LTE Awards are designed to recognise, celebrate and reward the great innovations that are being made in the industry, and this year are co-located with the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the evening of the 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona. The event is sure to be a glamorous and entertaining evening for all participants.

The winners, from a varied selection of 10 categories and 48 shortlisted companies, will be picked by an independent panel of judges, consisting of leading industry experts, during a two week assessment process.

To whet your appetite for the event here is a preview of Category 10: Best Chipset/Processor Product.

This award is for chipsets and processors that are exceptional in their area. The processors are judged on their success in the market and how they contribute to making LTE more attractive for operators and device manufacturers.

Freescale: QorIQ Qonverge B4860 Baseband Processor

The QorIQ Qonverge B4860 is new to the market, and was announced on 27 February 2012, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It is designed for LTE and LTE-Advanced base stations and is single-chip product supporting three 20MHz sectors of 300Mbps downlink and 150Mbps downlink per sector. Designed to replace channel cards with up to six discrete devices it provides a 4x cost reduction and 3x power reduction compared to similarly deployed channel cards with discrete devices thanks to a simplified architecture. It is first SoC to comply with the LTE-Advanced standard supporting up to 60 MHz of carrier bandwidth and LTE-A, LTE and WCDMA standards simultaneously. The six cores of the SC3900 StarCore DSP registered the industry’s highest performance benchmark score of 224,760, nearly 2x higher than its closest competitor. Alcatel-Lucent and Fujitsu have announced plans to use this device as well as other top-tier OEMs to come.

GCT Semiconductor: GDM7240

The GDM7240 is a single chip LTE FDD solution introduced to the market in Q2 2010. It offers a highly integrated full band design supporting all FDD LTE bands. By integrating baseband + RF, GDM7240 offers a small form factor and low power consumption, as well as optimal BOM. Being fully compliant with LTE specification (3GPP Release 8), the GDM7240 supports LTE Category 3 with high performance throughputs of 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink.  It is commercially available in several LTE devices, including the LG Esteem on MetroPCS, the LG Revolution on Verizon Wireless as well as the USB dongles LG VL600; available with Verizon Wireless, and the LG Adenaline, available on AT&T.  In addition, Vodafone offers a CPE with GCT’s GDM7240.

Renesas Mobile Corporation: MP5232

This platform is targeting the $150-300 market and will enable operators and device manufacturers to drive LTE to new price points without compromising the user experience. The fully certified platform is a world first as it contains connectivity, power management, RF subsystem and communications processor integrated on a single piece of silicon. It contains a 1.5GHz dual-core applications processor, a graphics accelerator and a Cat-4 triple mode LTE modem supporting FDD-LTE, TD-LTE, DC-HSPA+ and GSM. The single chip integration results in reduced power consumption delivering increased battery life for the consumer. The graphical processor Imagination Technology SGX544 delivers leading-edge performance with optimised power consumption. The LTE modem performance exceeds LTE Category 3, enabling operators to move to Category 4 without delay. As a result of the performance, integration and feature set of the product Renesas  is seeing considerable interest from Tier 1 OEMs.

Texas Instruments: TMS320TCI6636 wireless infrastructure System-on-Chip (SoC)

The Texas Instruments: TMS320TCI6636 is designed to maximise the use of the spectrum that is available to operators. Based on TI’s innovative KeyStone II multi-core architecture, the TCI6636 is designed to reduce costs for true multi-standard products scalable from small to macro cells. The TCI6636 is a fully integrated system-on-chip (SoC) that through functional integration eliminates the need for a separate network processor, and an array of switches and FPGAs. TI estimates that the implementation of this SoC results in a savings of $625 in BoM cost and reduces power consumption on a typical base station board by 75 watts over existing solutions. Announced in February 2012, the TCI6636 SoC will begin sampling in the second half of 2012. The TCI6636 has been designed into base stations under development by most of the major manufactures and several of the leading new entrants. And TI anticipates anticipate high volume ramps in 2013.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.

John Blakemore is director of European regulatory affairs, Hutchison

John Blakemore is director of European regulatory affairs, Hutchison and will be speak on the topic on, “Growing the data roaming market” on Day 2 of the LTE World Summit, taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. We catch up with him to see what the spectrum challenges are for 3, his views on roaming charges, and on innovation in the industry.

What are the main challenges as you roll-out LTE across your territories?

The main challenges are getting the right spectrum to enable us to deploy LTE. Besides that, there are concerns around planning permission in some countries, particularly for the large antennas. Deploying 800Mhz in some of our countries is a challenge as getting permission for a two-metre mast is not easy. Now a lot of operators will already have 900MHz so for them putting an 800MHz antenna may not be so problematic, but for us it could well be more difficult and time consuming to get the 800 ones up. On the commercial side, dongle availability is not going to be an issue – they’re already in the market where we’re already running LTE. The regulatory barriers are the main ones. We are a 3G-only operator so the only spectrum that we’ve got at the moment for our 3G at the moment is at 2.1GHz.

Are you bidding on other spectrum?

In Europe, where spectrum has become available, we have been bidding. What we’re seeking to do in common with all operators is to get low frequency spectrum but also to get sufficient contiguous blocks to provide the best LTE capacity. For example in Austria we have acquired 2.6GHz and we’ve also acquired 2.6GHz in Italy, Sweden and Denmark. We’ve also acquired some 1800MHz in Denmark and Italy – some of that has come up as its refarmed spectrum that has been made available. We have 800MHz in Sweden and an auction will be coming up in Denmark.

What about the situation in the UK?

There are ongoing consultations and discussion. I think that this process has gone on for a long time in the UK and in other countries it seems to have been resolved more easily. In other countries  some of the existing 900 and 1800 spectrum has been redistributed, whereas in the UK there has been no redistribution of spectrum held by the incumbent GSM operators, so that’s made it more difficult. For example in Sweden we’ve managed to get 5MHz of 900; we’ve managed to get 1800 in Denmark and 1800 in Italy. That’s made it easier to get all operators to have both low frequencies and large blocks of higher frequencies. In the UK the regulator has decided not to reallocate, which means there’s much more emphasis on the 800 and 2600. There are four operators and a limited amount of spectrum available so I think that’s the problem in the UK. In other countries, Demark and Italy, certain spectrum was reserved for operators that didn’t have existing holdings.

In Denmark some of the operators had to release an amount of 900 and 1800 spectrum to make it available to a new entrant to the band, it needn’t necessarily have been us – it could have been other operators, though we were in pole position to get that, but there has been a forcible distribution of existing holdings.

Is there a possibility of you refarming your 2100MHz spectrum?

I believe the legal position is that the European Commission is currently in the process of drafting a decision which would allow refarming of 2100 spectrum. Would we as an operator refarm? The current situation is that the only spectrum we have is 2100 and that is heavily utilised for 3G services so I don’t think that using the 2100 for LTE would be our best option. Of course, in the future, having the legal ability to do that refarming is obviously welcome.

Are roaming charges too high or is lowering them an unfair imposition?

We’ve been pretty strident on that actually. And we’ve said that for years the prices for roaming are too high and we’ve supported regulatory moves to force down prices and this has been our position since I’ve been working on it for at least the last six years.

A typical smartphone customer uses around 1GB of data per month, which in most of our countries will cost around £10, but a GB of data when roaming – well I don’t even want to make a calculation. We’ve always said that if you look at the kind of applications that people are using – mobile access – the value of it is greatest when you’re away from home. And LTE will bring this into sharp focus.

There are whole issues around how you actually charge for a services when you’re moving to an LTE roaming world because of course voice is going to be data, and if data roaming stays at current levels ( i.e. very expensive) then you won’t be able to use your phone at all!

I think that we need to step back and decide what is the service we are providing customers here? We’ve not providing voice, or SMS or whatever – what we provide is a mobile service, a whole bundle of different things that consumers use on their mobile handset. Now what we want to do as an operator is to increase the value to the consumer of that overall bundle.

If you imagine that you only bought a handset that you could only use in London then it’s not very valuable. It’s more valuable if you can use it across the whole of the UK, and even more valuable if you can use it across the whole of the EU. So we need more sensible roaming prices.

Why did 3 then remove its free roaming on its partner networks?

Some of our businesses, such as Austria still have ‘3 Like Home’ and we still offer it between Denmark and Sweden. The problem from the UK perspective is that it was causing quite a bit of confusion with customers. As soon as they went off one of our networks we were being charged high wholesale rates which we had to pass on to our customers.

Do you feel that there’s enough innovation in the mobile operator industry?

My observation here is, does it really matter where the innovation is coming from? We don’t have a problem with innovation coming from the OTTs. A few years ago, we had a service called ‘X-Series’, where we worked with Microsoft and Yahoo, and Skype to put their services on mobile devices. We did that when it was still early days and the services weren’t out there in the market. If you look at the industry as a whole, our record of developing services is not that strong. As operators, what we’ve been really good at is deploying efficient networks and making sure our networks support services – and that’s fine. We’re a little bit more relaxed about the content and applications not coming from within the industry.

What sort of changes would you hope to see in the industry over the next few years?

Quite a lot of industry moves are still quite defensive. As an industry, we’re still making money out of voice and SMS and, of course, the industry wants to maintain those margins. But we’ve got to grasp the changing world. There is this question of how we make money out of data but we need to embrace the world of data and applications. I think that as an industry we need to change from being a little bit defensive to being a bit more open to the new.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.

Talmon Marco, founder & CEO, Viber Media

Talmon Marco, founder & CEO, Viber Media is speaking on Day One of the LTE World Summit, taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Just ahead of the conference we speak to him about why LTE is important to Viber and why roaming issues need to be resolved to ensure OTT services can prosper.

How did you come to create Viber and what was your motivation?

As users of other solutions we were frustrated by the lack of an easy to use mobile voice and messaging solution. We felt that both the network and the phones were getting to the point where such a solution was feasible and yet none was in existence. So we decided to build it.

How important are technologies such as LTE to disruptive technologies such as Viber?

The quality of the network is extremely important to a service like Viber. While Viber has multiple mechanisms in place designed to improve user experience on sub-optimal networks, a good quality network is essential to a good service. LTE improves network quality thereby making services like Viber significantly more appealing to end users.

Have you any concerns about spectrum harmonisation issues and poor LTE device availability hampering take up of technology such as Viber?

As with all new technology, LTE has its growing pains. Spectrum harmonisation is one such challenge. Device availability is another. That said, there is no doubt that LTE is happening. It can always happen faster. We are quite happy with the take-up rate of Viber, but obviously it can always be better.

Viber brings free voice, text and photo messaging to users, and thus removes revenue opportunities for networks. Does this make for a difficult relationship with operators?

Not necessarily. In the long term we believe Viber will help operators streamline their operation and services by focusing on improving their network and providing a great user experience. We see great opportunity for both operators and Viber in partnering to deliver innovative OTT services to their users. OTT can help carriers differentiate their services.

Many network operators believe that OTT players are a burden on networks and should in some way be made to contribute to costs. Where do you stand on this?

OTT players do not burden the network. They do not behave in an “abusive” way. Users are paying for the bits that they transfer and choose to use these bits via OTT services. A 20kbps voice conversation or a 200 byte transmission of an OTT text message represents far less burden on the network than a three-minute YouTube clip.

There’s been some pressure recently by the EU to lower roaming prices for voice and data. Is enough progress being made on this?

We’re seeing some nice progress in this field as multiple European operators are now offering more reasonable roaming packages. In the long term, we believe that roaming charges are an artificial cost that should go away. At the end of the day the added costs of providing roaming services are minimal.

Do you think technologies such as Viber will render VoLTE redundant, before it is even introduced by operators?

This is difficult to predict. It’s possible that services like Viber will end up powering VoLTE.

Innovation is clearly key to your company. Do you feel there is enough innovation in the mobile industry and if so, can you provide examples?

If you compare the state of the mobile world in May 2007 to May 2012 you can’t avoid the conclusion of a massive transformation in mobile. Innovation is everywhere. A good example would be a service like Waze that uses the power of the masses to generate a real time traffic map (and also the map itself) of the world by observing the location of its users and the speed at which they are moving . Such services were not possible before the smartphone revolution.

What changes would you hope to see in the industry in the next five years?

We hope to see continued improvement in networks combined with a simplification of local and roaming tariffs, making a high quality network available to everyone all the time.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.

The LTE Awards 2012 are taking place on May 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona.

Now in its third year, the annual LTE Awards, in associated with Telecoms.com, are now established as the leading event of its kind. The LTE Awards are designed to recognise, celebrate and reward the great innovations that are being made in the industry, and this year are co-located with the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the evening of the 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona. The event is sure to be a glamorous and entertaining evening for all participants.

The winners, from a varied selection of 10 categories and 48 shortlisted companies, will be picked by an independent panel of judges, consisting of leading industry experts, during a two week assessment process.

To whet your appetite for the event here is a preview of Category 9: Best LTE Traffic Management Product.

This award recognizes the best LTE Traffic Management Product. They are judged on how the traffic management product contributes to making LTE more attractive for operators to deploy and contributed to the success of a commercial LTE deployment.

Alcatel Lucent: Intelligent Traffic Management solution

Neither traditional RAN probes nor DPI can provide the end-to-end, in-context information needed to deal with the wide range of devices now on networks and the large amounts of traffic they drive. The Alcatel Lucent Intelligent Traffic Management solution can provide this intelligence. It leverages a centralised policy engine to incorporate this intelligence into its business rules and by receiving real-time intelligence updates from the network, it enables the service to act on threatening network events in real-time before they impact the QoE of subscribers or compromise the integrity of the network. Alcatel Lucent’s Intelligent Traffic Management solution has been selected by 16  service providers.

Allot Communications: Service Gateway Sigma E

Mobile operators are now realising that LTE will not provide unlimited bandwidth: congestion and bandwidth limitation still plague subscribers and operators alike in LTE.  The Service Gateway Sigma E has been on the market since January 2011 and detects network congestion on parts of the network and can rate-limit the traffic of all subscribers in that part of the network, or can apply different rate limits, depending on the SLA in individual subscribers’ service plans. Once the congestion has subsided, rate limits are lifted. Throughput and QoS enforcement return to normal for all subscribers. The Allot Service Gateway Sigma E has been successfully deployments of by a number of Tier 1 LTE operators across the globe.

Bytemobile: T3100 Adaptive Traffic Manager

The T3100 Adaptive Traffic Manager is an appliance based (hardware and software) platform designed for highly distributed mobile network deployments. The platform combines Bytemobile’s market leading optimization with deep packet inspection (DPI) capability to provide a fully adaptive traffic management solution designed to deliver the best possible user experience to all mobile subscribers. The aim is to a deliver better service for all subscribers, helping to reduce churn, generate revenue and create efficiencies beyond current optimisation techniques. The company’s technology has been deployed with over 130 operators in more than 60 countries, serving nearly two billion subscribers. Operators across all regions have shown interest in the T3100 Adaptive Traffic Manager and there are currently multiple live trials.

Comptel Corporation

Officially launched in April 2009, Comptel Policy Control is based on the company’s patented, highly scalable Comptel Control and Charge platform. The solution gives CSPs the levers they need to transform their LTE technology investments into profitable new business—it helps them to combine sophisticated charging rules with the real-time application of network and business policy. This allows the utilisation of scarce network resources to be optimised and revenue to be maximised, while maintaining a consistent level of service quality and customer satisfaction.

Metaswitch Networks: Perimeta Session Border Controller

The increase in signalling is one of the biggest challenges facing operators today. Perimeta Session Controller features a distributed architecture comprising two distinct components: a Signalling Session Controller (SSC) and Media Session Controller (MSC).  This stands Perimeta SBC alone in its market with the ability to cost-effectively scale to meet these new demands in both the access and interconnect points of LTE networks. Perimeta SBC’s distributed approach enables LTE operators to grow signaling border control, media border control and transcoding independently – according to the actual demand for each, rather than in the fixed ratio imposed by integrated, appliance-based SBCs. More than 60 network operators have already validated this approach and purchased Perimeta SBC to fortify their communications networks and Perimeta SBC is in trials with numerous LTE operators globally.

Openet: Charging Suite (OCS)

Compared to mobile traffic, wireless data revenue is growing at a slower pace, but LTE networks have provided operators with a more efficient data transport at a much lower cost than existing networks. With more and more consumers interested in LTE services, Openet’s Charging Suite (OCS) solution, is fully 3GPP compliant, and provides operators with innovative solutions for charging for LTE networks, effectively controlling and monetising this new capability. OCS offers real-time collection, and charging of mobile data from a range of network equipment vendors including Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and Allot, the management of usage and volume tiers and notifications to manage bill shock, real-time usage, and spend notifications. Openet has five live LTE customers using its OCS including Bell Canada, Omintel Lithuania and a large Tier-one operator in North America.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.

The LTE Awards 2012 are taking place on May 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona.

Now in its third year, the annual LTE Awards, in associated with Telecoms.com, are now established as the leading event of its kind. The LTE Awards are designed to recognise, celebrate and reward the great innovations that are being made in the industry, and this year are co-located with the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the evening of the 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona. The event is sure to be a glamorous and entertaining evening for all participants.

The winners, from a varied selection of 10 categories and 48 shortlisted companies, will be picked by an independent panel of judges, consisting of leading industry experts, during a two week assessment process.

To whet your appetite for the event here is a preview of Category 8: Best Contribution to R&D for LTE

This award recognises the contribution towards the research and development of LTE and are judged on the nature of the investments made into R&D and research projects undertaken and how the R&D activities have had a positive impact on making LTE commercially successful.

Gemalto

Gemalto’s R&D has sought to find ways for operators to montise their subscribers.  Its research has looked into protecting Mobile TV content, balancing roaming traffic over 3G, LTE and wifi, managing Mobile NFC transactions and M2M, specifically by putting LTE modules in cars, mobile health and other verticals. Gemalto has helped CDMA operators extend their networks to LTE by providing 4G SIM cards and subscription management servers (Advanced OTA platform), and by adapting to legacy activation and IT systems. Gemalto R&D also works closely with the whole ecosystem to ensure interoperability.

Huawei Technologies

Huawei’s industry-leading position for LTE is the result of continuous investment in innovation. It has 5,200 engineers dedicated to LTE with eight R&D centres and 12 joint innovation centres dedicated to LTE. Huawei’s labs have produced end-to-end solutions for LTE eNodeB, EPC, OSS, terminals, and chipsets and along with its SingleRAN platform it has the industry’s only LTE TDD/FDD co-platform. It is at the forefront of industry activity in standard developments for ITU, 3GPP, 3GPP2, OMA, ETSI, IETF, and NGMN. According to the GSA, Huawei has ranked first among wireless infrastructure vendors in terms of LTE contributions since 2010. Success has then followed and out of 57 commercial LTE networks launched globally, 28 of them were deployed by Huawei. Of the 27 operators launching LTE commercial services in Europe Huawei built 15, more than any other company.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.

Now in it’s fifth year, LTE Outlook (formerly LTE Supplement) is established as the primary magazine for Informa Telecoms & Media’s series of market-leading LTE events including LTE World Summit 2012.

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Thierry Dupont is telecom project manager, for TDF Group

Thierry Dupont is telecom project manager for TDF Group, the largest broadcast network operator in Europe with 11,000 sites. Ahead of his speaking role at the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain, we speak to him about the impact of LTE on TDF’s operations.

What are the main milestones you have reached with relation to your LTE deployment?

As far as TDF is concerned, we have setup an LTE trial showcasing the opportunity to build a shared network using Multi Operator Core Network (MOCN) concepts.

What are the main challenges you have faced, or expect to face, as you roll out LTE?

Using the 800MHz, one of the main challenges was to get a plethora of devices from the infrastructure manufacturers due to the need to maximise Inter-operability Testing (IOT). The other main challenge was to get network elements, as this can help provide dynamic QoS and consequently help with implementing VoLTE.

With so much attention paid to the radio access network is there enough focus on backhaul?

As TDF is also a broadcast operator, we have already upgraded both our backhaul and transport networks. We are aware of the necessity to design the backhaul network due to the traffic increase and the idea was to segment broadcast and telecom output within a single link.

What’s your view on FDD vs TD-LTE spectrum?

It will not have to be an either or situation. We see them as two complementary sources for offloading data traffic. Key issues will be first to define clear engineering rules for the deployment of these two heterogeneous networks and then to have dual-mode devices coming from the market.

Do you think that VoLTE will have an impact and if so in what time frame?

MNOs will first deploy and tune their LTE Networks and then implement IMS enabling them to propose RCS services (if standardisation occurs) like VoLTE.

Is there enough innovation occurring in the mobile network industry? Can you provide some examples?

Rich Communications Services (RCS) and Location Based Services (LBS) services are innovations coming in the mobile network industry.

What changes would you hope to see in the industry in the next five years?

On the infrastructure manufacturer side only two or three players will survive. On the engineering side, evolution of the RAN towards base-band clouding will force MNOs to dramatically upgrade their backhaul networks but also to become and/or work with Content Distribution Network (CDN) operators.

Why are you attending the LTE World Summit and what are you looking forward to most?

I am firstly looking forward to presenting TDF’s work on the LTE network sharing and then to exchange ideas with major players in the market from MNOs to device manufacturers.

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your http://ws.lteconference.com/interest.

The LTE Awards 2012 are taking place on May 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona.

Now in its third year, the annual LTE Awards, in association with Telecoms.com, are now established as the leading event of its kind. The LTE Awards are designed to recognise, celebrate and reward the great innovations that are being made in the industry, and this year are co-located with the LTE World Summit 2012, taking place on the evening of the 23rd, at the El Xalet, Montjuic, Barcelona. The event is sure to be a glamorous and entertaining evening for all participants.

The winners, from a varied selection of 10 categories and 48 shortlisted companies, will be picked by an independent panel of judges, consisting of leading industry experts, during a two week assessment process.

To whet your appetite for the event here is a preview of Category 7: Best LTE RAN Product.

This award recognises Radio Access Network elements that are exceptional in their area. The judges look at how the product contributes to making LTE more attractive for operators to deploy and how it contributed to the success of a commercial LTE deployment.

Alcatel-Lucent: LightRadio Metro Cell

LightRadio cube-based Metro Cells solve the fundamental problem of cost-effectively satisfying users’ demand for more capacity and a better quality of experience, while ensuring community acceptance of new equipment. The LightRadio Metro Cell is a small cube that weighs about 300g and has a very low power draw. The LightRadio Metro Cells uses a unique frequency selective scheduler and a Bell Labs innovative enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) to effectively manage interference. As a result, LTE Metro Cells may be successfully deployed using either dedicated or shared carriers. It’s also one of the first cellular network solutions to minimise environmental impact in terms of both carbon footprint reduction and aesthetic acceptance. LightRadio Metro Cells are in trials with many operators today, most notably with Telefonica as announced in February.

CellMax Technologies: Antennas

CellMax range of ‘next generation’  high-efficiency antennas for base stations use patented technology that eliminates energy losses in the internal feed network inside the antenna, increasing energy efficiency to 96 per cent compared to the 25-60 per cent energy heat losses of traditional antennas. Results from live LTE networks (2600MHz) show a data throughput increase of +25-100 per cent bit rate just by replacing standard LTE antennas with high efficiency LTE antennas from CellMax. Results also show up to 30 per cent increase in geographical coverage, a 10-20 per cent increase in net traffic, and a 20 per cent reduction in costs per call for the same amount of power consumed. CellMax antennas are used today by many operators including T-Mobile, Huawei, Hutchison, Ericsson, NSN, and ZTE. The LTE product line was launched in 2010.

Huawei Technologies: GigaSite

Huawei’s GigaSite solution is designed for operators to build the next generation of mobile broadband. It includes the ARU (Adaptive Radio Unit) and the AtomCell. The total size of its integrated antenna and radio unit is comparable to a standalone antenna, and its modular design can be easily configured. It can simultaneously support three separate bands over three different modes (typically for LTE, including GSM and UMTS), and supports cell splitting to improve overall cell capacity by up to 80 per cent. The ARU features the world’s highest single-unit throughput with 1.6Gbps on the Downlink. The ARU is specifically designed to meet the challenges of ever increasing upload with its 4-way receiver technology, which is capable of boosting gain by up to 40 per cent to help uplink throughput reach 850Mbps. The Huawei ARU was deployed by UK operators at the end of 2011 on commercial networks.

Nokia Siemens Networks: Flexi Multiradio 10 base station

The Flexi Multiradio 10 base station is the evolution of the Flexi Multiradio base station, the first LTE-ready Single RAN base station in the market. It provides for ten times higher baseband capacity and reduces power consumption by 30 per cent. It offers the industry’s highest integration density for achieving maximum throughputs in a minimum amount of space. For example, just one Flexi Multiradio System Module has been used to perform the world’s first LTE-Advanced demonstration with throughputs exceeding 1.4Gbps over 100MHz of aggregated spectrum. Site capacity can be scaled to beyond 10Gbps by pooling of system modules.

Samsung Electronics: Smart LTE Networks

Smart LTE Networks is a RAN solution for LTE that utilises an advanced radio resource management technology to significantly reduce the interference between sectors and cells. It uses a virtual server connected to a large number of base stations through Ethernet. Working in real-time environment, the virtual server receives LTE radio channel information (from all connected base stations simultaneously and sends back most optimal radio resource allocation pattern. Thus all BTS in the LTE network work in coordination to provide best QoS for every user. It boasts up to double the number of users than conventional LTE networks, and based on figures from Korea Telecom Samsung claims OPEX and CAPEX reductions of up to 26 per cent. Deutsche Telekom also successfully conducted a Smart LTE Networks trial in Q4 of 2011.

ZTE Corporation: is ZXSDR R8884 RAN

ZTE’s ZXSDR R8884 RAN product was launched in September 2011 and is designed to help operators solve issues around scare spectrum resources, which often means using frequency blocks that are less than optimal. The ZXSDR R8884 RAN can accommodate carrier aggregation, continuous or non-continuous, both in intra-band and inter-band. For example if an operator owns 10MHz frequency band in 1.8GHz and another 10MHz in 2.6GHz, but needs wider band for building LTE network, then ZXSDR R8884 can help to get 20MHz band in total through inter-band carrier aggregation. Thus, more throughput is obtained and less RRU’s are used. ZXSDR R8884 is the only RRU in the industry that can support inter-band carrier aggregation. ZTE is currently working with several operators including Hong Kong CSL, an operator in Russia, China Telecom and China Unicom.

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