Is the industry ready for LTE?
JAN 21, 2010 9:05 AM,
By Kevin Fitchard
connectedplanetonline.com
Excerpt:
That might sound odd coming from a vendor that prides itself in beating its larger competitors to market with commercial grade 4G silicon, but Eshed said Altair is merely being realistic. Even with silicon shipping in volumes, there is still a long period of device development and testing that needs to be coupled with large-scale network deployment and intensive application development before any technology ecosystem can fully emerge. If any further evidence is necessary, one need turn only to the Clearwire WiMax network. Though much earlier to the market, WiMax faced the same demand for mobile broadband as LTE and its vendors carried the same lessons over from the deployment of 3G. The first large-scale WiMax networks weren’t deployed until three years after the standard was approved and there hasn’t been a proliferation of new applications and devices in the WiMax ecosystem. “They offer pure Internet access services,” Eshed said.
That’s why it’s so impressive that the radio access vendors have managed to produce commercial equipment so soon after the LTE standard was passed, an accomplishment all the more impressive considering that capital expenditures in telecom all but dried up during the recent economic downturn, said Keith Higgins, vice president of global marketing for telecom consulting and software development outsourcing firm Aricent. But Higgins also fears that the radio aspects of the ecosystem may have outpaced all of the other elements necessary to develop a full 4G service. All of the work necessary to create an operational network – from billing and support systems to device silicon – is still under development. Basic questions like how voice and SMS will be handled on LTE remain unanswered. The network radios are definitely ready, but it will take time for other elements to catch up, Higgins said.
“There will be a lot of LTE deployments in 2010, but LTE will be more of a marketing initiative this year,” Higgins said. “The fact is that a lot of work done on LTE so far has been on the radio.”
Analysts are also skeptical that LTE will have an immediate impact on the industry. “What I believe is in 2010 we’re going to see LTE networks deployed in a meaningful way that will put us on a trajectory that will see 4G services delivered to us in the next few years,” said Phil Asmundson, vice chairman of Deloitte and leader of its US technology, media and telecommunications practice.
Wide-scale adoption of 4G services is unrealistic in the next few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry will have to wait four or five years for the ecosystem to develop, Asmundson said. LTE will probably take just as long as 3G to mature, but its development along that curve may be front-loaded. In 3G, the industry had to create a business around mobile data. It took years of trial-and-error before the right networks, the right devices and the right services converged to create the massive market we have today for smartphones and mobile broadband.
“I think the device makers will be quicker on the uptake with LTE because they have more experience in the business models surrounding data-enabled phones,” Asmundson said. “They don’t have to do an awful lot to stimulate demand for these things.” On the software development side, there’s also a precedent. Application developers have now been building robust applications for 3G networks for years and have a much clearer understanding of what services and software the market wants. Unlike in the 3G world, they aren’t inventing a market from scratch.
So far device makers seem much more aggressive in their support for LTE. Samsung had USB dongles ready for TeliaSonera’s early launch of LTE in Oslo and Stockholm and has committed to producing dual-mode handsets next year. Almost all of the silicon vendors have begun sampling or shipping their first-generation LTE chipsets, many of which are still single-mode 4G platforms designed for data cards, but all of them have dual-mode and handset silicon in the pipeline. When LTE silicon is mentioned, though, most eyes turn to Qualcomm, which is not only the world’s largest 3G device chipmaker, but will play a crucial role in early LTE launches, since many of the first LTE carriers have CDMA networks. Qualcomm, however, has been taking it on the chin from critics about its development timelines, which have lagged many of its competitors; at least as far as single-mode silicon is concerned. Their concern is valid—without Qualcomm a major piece of the LTE ecosystem is missing—but their conclusions are off, said Peter Carson, senior director of product management for Qualcomm CDMA technologies.
Qualcomm has sampled its first chipset, the MDM 9000 aimed at data cards, which is on target to support the 2010 launches, Carson said. And it’s more advanced handset silicon, with embedded software and application processor, is on track to support smartphone releases in 2011. Qualcomm may be a bit later to market, but Carson said Qualcomm in both cases has created a far more integrated dual-mode solution while its competitors are using single-mode solutions to get to market more quickly. The utility of a single-mode solution is questionable in a network where 4G coverage is a long way from ubiquitous, Carson said. |
