By Peter Briscoe

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is being driven by the ever-growing demand for mobile broadband and need by communications service providers (CSPs) to capitalize on and realize the potential of this revenue stream while balancing costs. The existing systems used today to plan and manage the service quality will need specific focus and improvement to achieve this end game.  This article explores the main drivers for LTE as well as the impact on some of the technology and services that CSPs will face with the introduction of LTE. Finally we’ll explore LTE’s effects to the CSPs business processes and the systems used today within the operator.

Market and Commercial Drivers

Within the last six months the introduction of mobile Internet services by many of the wireless service providers has added a large level of traffic to the networks and, in most cases, means that more data traffic is transported than traditional voice traffic or messaging traffic over the network.

Various industry reports on world wide mobile trends show that global data usage will continue to grow year-over-year and in some markets reaching as high as triple digit growth in the near term.

A large majority of the current data use has been driven by new social network services including Facebook and Twitter. Some social groups (aged between16-25) are starting to use these services as the primary method of communication with their friends. Additional applications driving demand are email (Blackberry and others) and location-based services (Google maps, Bing) that require data connections to obtain map information. The evolving applications and communication ecosystem with continue to demand more bandwidth usage over time.

With this increased demand, the existing network requires massive additional capacity. It is predicted that most networks require three times the existing data network capacity to meet current demand forecasts.

demands. The impact of this is that the radio interface limits the amount of data traffic within the current spectrum and the backhaul network restricts the level of data that can be transported from the cell sites. If existing technologies were used to support the level of projected demand long-term, the amount of additional equipment both in the numbers of cell sites and backhaul network devices would make the service un-economical.

LTE technology aims to address this through the combination of simplifying the backhaul network, removing the need for complex and expensive control functions, and the use of cheaper transport technology (IP and Ethernet) that reduce the price per port for connections from the cell sites to the core.

Technology Impact of LTE

A major focus within the deployment of LTE technology is in the radio interface. LTE requires, in many cases, new equipment due to the mixed time and frequency multiplexing