Beyond 4G

Russian WiMAX specialist Yota has announced that since its commercial launch it has added 60,000 net new subscribers to its wireless internet services, giving it a total of 100,000 active subscribers, including customers that bought into the service during its test phase. The company launched its services in Moscow and St Petersburg on 1 June and has since opened a test network in the southern city of Ufa; the trial is scheduled to end on 30 September. The company claims that in July the average traffic per customer was equivalent to 10.3GB, reportedly the same as most fixed line broadband customers in Moscow. ‘The milestone of 100,000 active users was exceeded by Yota within just two and a half months of the launch of commercial operations’, said Yota sales director Igor Torgov, ‘We would like to thank our clients for believing in the new technology and supporting us. In the beginning of autumn new Yota access devices will appear on the market. Thus, in September, under the agreement ...

Korea’s leading electronics maker and the central government-financed research institute succeeded in demonstrating the newest and fastest version of wireless mobile Internet technology. Now, people can use faster high-speed Internet on their mobile phones and other digital devices. Due to the new technology’s enhanced data transmission speed, Korea is expected to gain an edge over European rivals. Industry officials are currently competing to make their own wireless mobile Internet technology the global standard to be used for fourth-generation mobile phones. Samsung Electronics and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, or ETRI, released a joint statement yesterday, saying that they demonstrated Mobile WiMAX Evolution at the JW Marriott Hotel, Banpo-dong, southern Seoul yesterday in the presence of members of the Radiocommunication Sector, a division of the International Telecommunication Union. The ITU is an international organization specializing in deciding sta...

Mobile WiMAX Release-1 products based on the IEEE 802.16e-2005 Air Interface Standard are already field-proven with deployments having begun in 2008. Independent studies have predicted that there will be over 130 million WiMAX subscribers by the year 2013 The close cooperation between the WiMAX Forum Technical Working Group and the IEEE 802.16m standards team, has enabled early work on a Mobile WiMAX Release-2 specification to begin. Given this early start, the Release-2 specification is expected to be completed soon after the 802.16m-2009 amendment is ratified in 2010. This will pave the way for the WiMAX Release-2 certification process to begin in 2011. The LTE-Advanced specification is not scheduled for completion until the end of 2010.

LTE subscriptions will reach 100m in just over four years, faster than any previous mobile standard. LTE subscriptions will grow at a CAGR of 363% from 2010 to 2014, when there will be 137m subscriptions worldwide. Growth drivers include extensive vendor and operator support, aggressive equipment and network deployment targets, non-traditional embedded devices, a high likelihood of declining prices, demand for higher bandwidth and Chinese acceptance of the standard. The earliest LTE deployments will mostly come from developed markets, including Japan and the US. The latter boasts the most operators currently expected to deploy the standard in 2010 and 2011. Going forward, emerging markets will grow faster, led by China, which will account for more than 25% of LTE subscriptions in 2014.

KDDI announced that it would start deploying LTE and is looking to complete the deploymenr by 2012. The contract was awarded to Motorola and NEC a few days ago. The deal includes base stations from Japan's NEC and although the announcement gave no idea of the breakdown of the orders, but most analysts seem to think that Motorola will get the lion's share of the order. KDDI's network is a full two years behind that of NTT DoCoMo. The news lifted KDDI's stock, which had previously not made its LTE schedule clear as it is also a major investor in Japanese mobile WiMAX with UQ Communication which has an aggressive WIMAX rollout schedule. The operator has set itself a target of more than 90% population coverage nationwide by the end of March 2010. By that time, UQ says it will have 1,161 cities covered through 38,000 base stations, which includes 19,000 femtocells. KDDI will deploy its LTE network in both 1.5GHz and 800MHz bands and will conduct LTE trials in mid 2010. At th...

Source: Heavy ReadingPacket Backhaul: Carrier Strategies & Real-World Deployments examines how much progress has been made in deploying packet backhaul at cell sites worldwide, using information from 50 highly detailed examples of live packet backhaul deployments submitted by nearly two dozen of the world's leading backhaul equipment vendors. The report provides the first insight into what today's live packet backhaul deployments really look like – where they are, what architecture they conform to, what technologies they use, and critically, how many cell sites were actually in live service as of the second quarter of 2009. By presenting and analyzing this first large and reliable sample of live packet backhaul deployments, this report provides a unique and timely perspective on whether mobile operators are reducing their backhaul costs at the rate they need to as they make the transition from voice-centric service and revenue models to data-centric models.

Source: Global mobile Suppliers Association press releaseA new survey by the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) just released confirms there are now 39 LTE network commitments worldwide. This is an increase of 50% compared to a similar survey undertaken by GSA in March 2009, and confirms the growing commitment and support for LTE as the next generation mobile broadband system of choice. Mobile broadband services enabled by HSPA systems are a great success and commercially available in 115 countries worldwide. LTE will further boost network throughputs significantly, improve spectrum and operational efficiencies and performance, and reduce latency for the next step in the user experience.