China Mobile, Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone, and Vodafone has said that they have taken significant steps in developing the next-generation technology LTE as a truly global radio access technology, following yesterday's LTE FDD/TDD Convergence Summit at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
As part of their ongoing three-way trials, the operators have successfully demonstrated in laboratory conditions the time division version of LTE (TD-LTE) showing that the technology is capable of operating effectively in both unpaired as well as paired spectrum.
In addition to these initial results, a range of chipset suppliers including ST-Ericsson and Qualcomm are developing equipment capable of supporting both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) flavours of the LTE technology in a single device.
The trials are a step towards the goal of developing a single device capable of operating on TD-LTE technology in the case of unpaired spectrum or LTE FDD technology in the case of paired spectrum
The availability of a converged LTE FDD and TD-LTE system is set to enable an effective solution for both paired and unpaired spectrum. This also raises the prospect of providing greater interoperability between different global operators offering customers greater levels of convenience.
The TD-LTE portion of the trial, which involves seven vendors, will progress to full field trials in the second half of 2009. The locations for these field trials have been agreed in China, Europe and India.
The corresponding LTE FDD trials are progressing as planned and are now well into the final field trial stages where peak download speeds of up to 50 to 60 Mbps using 10 MHz bandwidth have been demonstrated. These field trials, which will also be introduced for the TD-LTE trials, create real-world loaded network conditions by using multiple base stations and terminal devices.
LTE's potential as a flexible global technology with a strong eco-system was the core theme presented at yesterday's LTE FDD/TDD Convergence Summit. The event attended by regulators, operators and vendors, was jointly hosted by China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone with an endorsement from the GSMA and TD Alliance.
LTE technology is designed to deliver a range of customer benefits including higher speeds and enhanced throughput performance and lower latency thanks to improved spectral efficiency.
LTE is an evolution of existing 3G (WCDMA, TD-SCDMA and CDMA) cellular networks and has the advantage of offering inter-working with existing 3G technologies.