USA to have LTE leadership, but a bumpy road ahead, says research

While LTE is destined to become the dominant wireless airlink, several formidable challenges will make its widespread adoption slower than many expect, according to analyst In-Stat. Spectrum has to be cleared, licensed, and either allocated or sold off before LTE takes hold. As every country has its own telecommunications regulations, these factors will take varying periods of time to be resolved. However, despite this difficult path, In-Stat forecasts that the number of LTE subscribers will approach 115 million by 2014.

“US operator LTE CAPEX spending will drive wireless leadership from Asia and Europe to North America,” says Chris Kissel, Industry Analyst for In-Stat. “From 2009 to 2014, more than one quarter of global LTE CAPEX spending will occur in the US.  As a result, the US will have more LTE subscribers than the entire Asia/Pacific region by the end of 2014, even though it will have less than half the POPs.” 

Recent In-Stat research found the following:
•    Although the vast majority of LTE subscribers will be FDD-LTE, TD-LTE will have a CAGR through 2014 of almost twice that of FDD-LTE.
•    Working through technology partners, Huawei and Ericsson, Vodafone purchased 1,500 LTE  base stations in Germany  in 2010.  
•    LTE networks will have better than half of all last mile backhaul capacity in North America by 2014.
•    Despite the potential for LTE services in China and India, Japan is very likely to have the most LTE subscribers in Asia/Pacific by the end of 2014.

The State of the LTE Market: CAPEX, Deployments, Subscribers, and Services

Our work here is (nearly) done: minimum of three interop-tested vendors for equipment and devices; S1 IoT almost completed

The LTE SAE Trial Initiative (LSTI), a  collaboration between vendors and operators, is close to concluding “nearly all LTE trial Milestones”, according to a statement. LSTI said it has reached Milestones for Interoperability Development Tests (IODT), Interoperability Tests (IOT) and for Friendly Customer Trials (FCT). With these Milestones complete, LSTI said it could move to its last working phase and “finish all LTE trials in a timely manner”.

Following on from the Proof of Concept tests, which was the first testing phase of the LSTI alliance, and which was completed a year ago, LSTI has now completed all Interoperability Development Tests (IODT) for both FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) and TDD (Time-Division Duplex). Furthermore, penultimate Milestone for Interoperability Tests (IOT) has also been passed. That means that the LSTI members have proved that at least three vendors for each case are about to deliver to the market interoperability tested access network and terminal equipment.

The Core Network Interface S1 (Connection Access Network to Core) IOT is almost completed and more results are expected to be delivered soon.

“Overall these results are well aligned with the previous results shared in the LSTI PoC phase. This testing and the co-operation of the vendors and operators involved have brought forward the growth of the LTE ecosystem and enabled a accelerated commercialisation of LTE-EPC by fostering technology alignment across all parties”, said Christian Kuhlins, LSTI Activity Manager IOT, Ericsson AB. “We can now see that the telecommunications industry is about to launch LTE/SAE equipment. More and more commercial network and terminal equipment will be available on the market very soon.”

Eleven LSTI operators have set-up their LTE/EPC trials and have already delivered reports built on a common testing methodology. The Trial Group has achieved one major step in passing the “Radio Access Testing” milestone which includes: Latency, State Transition, Throughput, Cell Capacity, Mobility, Basic Quality of Service and User Experience testing domains.

“End-to-End Field Trials are an important step towards realising the performance of LTE as it will be experienced by end users in real networks. Notably, LSTI operators use the LSTI commonly agreed set of test domains which are based upon NGMN requirements. The current LSTI results meet or exceed NGMN requirements on most of the testing domains”, explains Rémi Thomas, Director of the LTE/EPC Programme of France Telecom Orange and member of the LSTI Steering Board. ”The End-to-End Field Trials are an essential step in testing the technology. Now the operators can prepare the rollout of the commercial LTE/EPC networks.”

LSTI said that last results are expected during the next few weeks and will be presented at the Mobile World Congress 2011.

Movius Interactive Corporation, has appointed Dominic Gomez as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

The appointment follows a three month period where the company operated with an interim CEO, following the departure of previous CEO Oscar Rodriguez in March 2010. Rodriguez was succeeded by Board Chairman Augie Cruciotti on an interim basis.

Prior to joining Movius, Gomez was President of Purple Communications, a provider of text and video relay and on-site interpreting services and as Chief Operating Officer of Hanaro Telecom, an integrated telecommunications provider in Korea.

“I am excited to be joining the team at Movius,” said Mr. Gomez. “Our innovative applications for mobile and fixed-line carriers in the areas of Converged Messaging, Notification Services, Unified Conferencing and Virtual Communications have us well positioned to meet the needs of carriers around the globe.”

Movius operates in the Value Added Services (VAS) space, marketing solutions for converged messaging, unified conferencing, virtual telephony and notification services.