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By
Sean O’Reilly
Current networks are more than sufficient for any foreseeable voice traffic, but with the number of people who are dispensing with their home connections and going completely mobile, data access has now become the prime requirement. With the advent of more powerful phones, greater storage capacities, and higher speed mobile data, there is an expectation of being able to get the information you want, whenever you want, and wherever you are, without having to wait for your home or office network.
Email on the move used to be the greatest driver for mobile data, but new applications such as social networking sites are also driving huge demand. The ability to take a photograph wherever you are, publish it to your friends, and then engage in near live commentary, is a powerful inducement for an up and coming generation of users with disposable income. The popular success of Apple’s IPhone has driven the message about mobile multimedia capabilities, and led to a surge in the development of applications to use on the move.
To be able to provide the network to support this, Operators will have to continue investing in the latest technologies, and vastly increase the data capacities of their networks. The technology has moved to allow a completely IP-based core that has been thoroughly proven with 3G services, and now the operators are moving to increase the backhaul capacity in preparation for the new E-UTRAN (Enhanced UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network) |
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There is an expectation of being able to get the information you want, whenever you want, and wherever you are, without having to wait for your home or office network. |
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LTE (Long Term Evolution) which has evolved from the original UMTS specification and is being promoted by the 3GPP. Although an evolution of UMTS, the LTE air interface is a completely new system based on OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) in the downlink and SC-FDMA (Single Carrier FDMA) in the uplink that efficiently supports multi-antenna technologies. The architecture resulting from this work is called EPS (Evolved Packet System) and comprises E-UTRAN (Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network) on the access side and EPC (Evolved Packet Core) on the core side.
In recent tests in Germany, conducted by T-Mobile and Nortel Networks, LTE
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The Technology
There were three competing technologies that were trying to benefit from the consumer’s requirement for mobile data. These have now shrunk to two, as Qualcomm announced on November 13th 2008, that they were halting any further development of UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband) and concentrating on LTE instead.
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downstream data rates of 170Mbps and upstream rates of 50Mbps were achieved. All this happened in a car travelling at 41mph between 3 towers. This was a controlled environment, but shows the possibilities that are available using this technology.
Mobile WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is based on the standard 802.16e-2005 and uses scalable OFDMA as
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