Claims Tier One operator trial to go live in first half of 2012
Samsung Telecom will announce an LTE trial with a multi-national European operator in the first half of this year. It will be the equipment vendor’s first LTE deployment outside of its strong markets of the USA (Sprint), Japan (KDDi) and South Korea (SKT, KT).
IP Hong, vice president and head of global sales and marketing at Samsung’s Telecom Systems Business, said that one of the major Tier 1 European group operators is lining up a trial with the Korean vendor. Samsung will put is equipment through its paces in trial 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2,GHz spectrum, he said.
The company will be in “a couple of other trials” in Europe, Hong said. The momentum is reward for investments Samsung has made in its European operation, based in the UK, he added. Samsung’s LTE solution is called Smart LTE, it includes a macro solution and a small cell solution that will be commercially available later in the year. The company has a contract for intelligent small cells with KDDi, that is due to go live commerically in October, Hong said.
The company will also announce in later this year that it will start manufacturing GSM equipment, to give it full 2/3/4G single RAN capability. The company using a reference software design from one of the “incumbent vendors” Hong said, with Samsung’s hardware.
“We were the first to deliver commercial LTE, and we are the last to deliver GSM,” Hong said. The late deployment means that Samsung can implement the latest GSM features, Hong added.
Hong claimed that Samsung is the number 3 LTE vendor globally.