Transition to LTE-Advanced Expected 2013; Standard Approved by ITU
U.S. carriers are expected to replace their LTE technologies with LTE-Advanced starting 2013, standards experts told us. The enhancement of LTE technology was approved by the ITU Wednesday as an International Mobile Telecom-Advanced (IMT-Advanced) technology. The new specification is expected to bring better speeds, power consumption, capacity and spectrum efficiency. According to ITU, the target rates for IMT-Advanced were set at 100 Mbps when used in a high mobility environment, and 1 Gbps in a stationary environment.
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Once the U.S. carriers complete their LTE deployment, they would move to upgrade their networks to LTE-Advanced, said Farrokh Khatibi, Qualcomm’s director of engineering. The standard, developed by 3GPP, is expected to be a global standard, said Steve Barclay, director of standards development at standard body ATIS. That’s because countries that don’t participate in 3GPP’s standard process generally follow ITU’s standard path, Khatibi said. It’s very positive for the U.S. because it enables international roaming, he said.
The major enhancements comes down to capacity, power consumption, speed and spectrum efficiency, Barclay said. The advanced standard supports scalable bandwidth use and spectrum aggregation where non-contiguous spectrum needs to be used, said Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas. Carriers are expected to start the transition by the end of 2013, he said. AT&T plans to deploy LTE-Advanced in 2013, a spokesman said.
Khatibi expects a natural migration to LTE-Advanced. There should be a smooth transition, which requires hardware and software upgrades, he said. Once LTE-Advanced chipsets and devices become available, the upgrade should be an easy one, he said. Khatibi expects high-quality multimedia applications within a wide range of services and platforms enabled by the new standard. For example, there would be improvement in performance and quality of real-time video services, he said. According to ITU, IMD-Advanced systems support a wide range of data rates in multiple user environments.
IMT-Advanced would be like “putting a fiber optic broadband connection on your mobile phone, making your phone at least 500 times faster than today’s 3G smart phones,” said François Rancy, director of ITU’s Radio Communication Bureau. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré expects LTE-Advanced-enabled access to Internet, streaming videos and data transfers anytime, anywhere to be better than most desktop connections today.