GSMA Mobile World Congress Serves Up Latest Technology

You will get to digest fully what was on the menu at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week in my Wrap-up article that will be posted when the show comes to a close. For now though I can give you a tapas selection of the technology that has been whetting the appetites of the attendees this week.

To start, building on the past few years LTE is the key technology being discussed and although opinions vary as to the timescale for deployment it is a focus of activity and investment. The buzz though surrounds 4G TD-LTE, a time division duplex (TDD) version of LTE, which is the next evolution for TD-SCDMA. Although driven by the Chinese market this technology is envisaged as having global applications.

Femtocells came under the spotlight too in a special Femtozone featuring a programme highlighting research, business cases etc. If this tapas has given you food for thought, look out for my full report soon.

Richard Mumford (International Editor)

Verizon 4G LTE Service Coming Soon!

Speed, speed and more speed -that is what I want. Verizon has answered this demand by announcing it will begin testing 4G wireless service using LTE this year and launch it in at least 25 to 30 markets in the U.S. in 2010. This is based on their roll-out of EV-DO, assuming they will get to about the same level in the first year of deploying LTE. Verizon will continue to build out the 4G wireless network and expects to blanket the continental U.S. and Hawaii with the new wireless network by 2015.

The new network will use the 700 MHz wireless spectrum that Verizon acquired in the Federal Communications Commission's auction last year. The company announced in 2007 that it had planned to use LTE for this market which will be available after the US broadcasters finish transitioning to digital TV signals. Several GSM operators around the world have also announced plans to use LTE which means that Verizon 4G wireless subscribers might eventually be able to roam globally.

Verizon has been testing the service in several areas in the U.S. including Minneapolis, Columbus, Ohio, and northern New Jersey. It's also been working with Vodafone (their co-parent) and China Mobile to test deployments in other parts of the world, including Budapest, Hungary, Dusseldorf, Germany, and Madrid. In its initial trials, Verizon says it has demonstrated peak download speeds of around 50- 60 Mbps. But average download speeds are likely to be lower since the wireless spectrum is a shared. The network will certainly be much faster than the average speed of Verizon's 3G EV-DO service which typically gets up to 400-700 Kbps.