3GPP Happenings: 'True 4G' LTE-Advanced & IMS Status
Note: Both articles below are over a week old and I'm not exactly sure yet what happenned in the 3G plenart .
• Pre-Standard LTE-Advanced: Several vendors and institutions are already claiming LTE-Advanced products - Nokia Siemens offered a compelling demonstration of the pre-standard, complete with multicarrier support across non-contiguous bands, at MWC, while Korea's ETSI research body has carried out several demoes of its own.
>> LTE-Advanced Could Be Finalized This Week
Caroline Gabriel
Rethink Wireless
25 February, 2011
LTE-Advanced managed to take a prominent role at last week's Mobile World Congress, even though its predecessor is only deployed in a dozen places and it is not yet officially a standard. The wireless community aims to put that right this week, though, in a conference in Taiwan aiming to bring the purportedly 1Gbps system to completion. That could see the specs frozen as early as Friday, opening the way for companies to design their first products.
About 800 representatives from all the main mobile vendors - and many more - will attend a 3GPP standards meeting in Taipei, looking to accelerate the progress of the next LTE specification, one that has already been accepted by the ITU as an official IMT-Advanced platform, along with WiMAX2. These technologies are supposed to achieve 1Gbps when stationary and 100Mbps when mobile, though of course it remains to be seen just how ideal the conditions need to be to make that happen in real life. It is clear, however, that the appetite for 'true 4G' (as opposed to the various systems now marketed under that banner) may be whetted earlier than expected, given the race to add mobile data and broadband capacity while adopting more affordable and modern network designs - LTE-Advanced is heavily focused on small cells and the kind of deconstructed RANs that Alcatel-Lucent and others were showcasing in Barcelona.
Indeed, the standards setters need to move quickly, since several vendors and institutions are already claiming LTE-Advanced products - Nokia Siemens offered a compelling demonstration of the pre-standard, complete with multicarrier support across non-contiguous bands, at MWC, while Korea's ETSI research body has carried out several demoes of its own.
Another government sponsored laboratory with significant LTE-Advanced activity, Taiwan's ITRI, is hosting the 3GPP summit and its wireless communications director, Feng Wen-Sheng, pointed out that LTE-Advanced applications will go far beyond consumer services and handsets or tablets. The technology will be important in giving machines a new way to communicate among themselves, he said, for instance by using temperature sensitive sensors in emergency situations.
"Mobile voice technology is pretty advanced already, so this time it's all about data transfers," Feng told IDG News. "We've been trying to get LTE-Advanced out there for some time, and in Taipei we expect to confirm a final version."
>> IMS Will Finally See Mobile Growth This Year
Caroline Gabriel
Rethink Wireless
25 February, 2011
rethink-wireless.com
The 24% increase in Q410 was down to fixed networks but LTE will start to spur cellcos into action, says analyst
The industry has waited for years for IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) to fulfil its potential, but while it is the key 3GPP standard for supporting carrier IP services, its complexity has deterred many from taking the plunge. Some cellcos even question whether its network-centric approach is still appropriate in the era of web services. But others see it as the main way to leverage the functionality of their new IP networks, especially as they move to LTE, and to fend off the over-the-top model.
This driver will finally see IMS coming into its own, says a new report from analysts at Infonetics, and progress will be closely associated with LTE roll-outs, with the heavily IMS-based Verizon Wireless as the flagship. "The watershed moment in north America will be the activity around voice over LTE and the fact Verizon Wireless will be the first mobile operator of any size committed to IMS for next-gen wireless," said directing analyst Diane Myers in an interview, following Verizon's demonstration of Voice over LTE at last week's Mobile World Congress - and aggressive timeline for implementing VoIP.
In the fourth quarter of 2010, IMS saw a 41% increase in global revenue compared to the third quarter, and a 24.4% year-on-year rise, to $503.6m. Q4 is usually the strongest for this kind of product category. However, despite the expected fillip from LTE from this year, in 2010 spending on IMS for purely mobile services like mobile IM was "minimal", and the market was driven by fixed line network deployments, including those by mobile operators. This year, mobile apps such as SKT's video calling and Vodafone's Rich Communication Suite will shift the balance, says the report.
In 2010, the strongest territories for IMS were in Asia-Pacific, especially China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. The top IMS vendors were Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens, in that order, with ALU the big winner, gaining about 25% of the market in Q4.
However, IMS will still be a slow burn, Myers believes. "While IMS may not make sense for smaller companies like CLECs and the like, as it is not a 'plug-and-play' technology, it will be well suited for any larger players trying to replicate the telephony they have today. IMS will be an enabler to transferring subscribers over different interconnected networks from different operators," added Myers.
Despite the focus on Verizon, the real role model for IMS cellcos will be SKT of Korea, which already has several innovative apps, including a voice-to-video call service. It is planning to use IMS to support many services beyond voice, including enriched file sharing and video apps. ###
- Eric - |
