Tuesday October 27, 2009
LTE standard is the future, telcos told
KUALA LUMPUR: Surfing the Internet via mobile phones may not be commonplace yet, but it will get so popular in two years time that telecommunications companies will have to start upgrading to the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard to cope with the increased traffic.
The LTE standard, which supercedes the current High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), would allow the telcos to squeeze more data into available spectrum, said Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a manufacturer of cellular base stations, core networks and related infrastructure.
NSN claims that LTE is a natural, evolutionary step-up from the current HSPA standard that is used to enable mobile access to the Web.
Markus Borchert, head of sales and marketing for radio access at NSN, said HSPA is adequate for the demand for mobile broadband now.
However, he said, demand will eventually reach a critical level and LTE will need to come into play. This is about two to three years away.
“The three big telcos (in the country) have already deployed LTE-compliant base stations and the chipset manufacturers are making LTE-compliant smartphones,” he said.
Borchert, who is based in Munich, claimed that the telcos would enjoy immediate cost savings if they deployed NSN’s LTE-compliant base stations while waiting for the LTE ecosystem to develop.
The costs savings would come from having to employ less storage space to house base stations because the NSN base stations are compact — only about the size of a desktop PC.
“There’s is no need to rent a lot of land to hold these base stations and this will bring down base station storage costs by 70%,” he said.
He said the technology used in the base stations would also help decrease latency problems, which would translate to faster Internet surfing speeds for consumers.
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