A Primer on LTE

LTE or Long Term Evolution is a 4G wireless technology and is considered the next in line in the GSM evolution path after UMTS/HSPDA 3G technologies. LTE is espoused and standardized via the 3GPP or 3rd Generation Partnership Project members. 3GPP is a global telecommunications consortium having members in most GSM dominant countries. 3GPP specifications are based on GSM evolution path of wireless communications. GSM is the most prevalent wireless standard in the world and has maximum number of subscribers globally.

The impact of LTE is so big that even powerful carriers which were on the alternate CDMA path like Verizon Wireless of United States, have decided to go with LTE in their next generation 4G evolution. Firms like Verizon and MetroPCS of USA have all but dumped the CDMA technology path almost dealing a blow to the CDMA owner Qualcomm, although the latter is much more diversified so it is not really short of business models.

LTE vs WiMAX
Whereas WiMAX emerged from the WiFi IP paradigm, LTE is a result of the classic GSM technology path. LTE is behind in the race to 4G with WiMAX getting an early lead with the likes of Sprint ClearWire and several operators in Asia opting to go with WiMAX in the near term. So where WiMAX has a speed to market advantage, LTE has massive adoption and GSM parenthood to back it up.

It is widely believed by market analysts that LTE will win ultimately but WiMAX will find adoption in frontrunner communities and niche business models which tend to take up technology faster. WiMAX vendors will have you believe that speed to market is too important to ignore. History suggests otherwise in case of wireless industry. It is also believed that ultimately, wireless industry will figure out a way to wed the two 4G technologies so the end product in few years might be a nice amalgam.

So ultimately, what standard an operator uses might be a moot point in the long run. The inter-operability would be just too great to get hung up on the wireless standard. The fact that both WiMAX and LTE are all-IP means that a cross-connection will be a piece of cake at some point in future.

In terms of speed, Fixed WiMAX lacks LTE in speed but Mobile WiMAX may catch up with LTE on this front. For an overview on WiMAX, refer to our post “A Primer on WiMAX“.

LTE Technology
LTE builds on 3GPP family which includes GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) etc. LTE is an all-IP standard like its peer WiMAX. LTE allows for rich applications and business models which include ultra-high speed voice, video and data. It also enables integration with the classic internet infrastructure which is all-IP based.

HSPA (High Speed Packet Access), the 3G GSM standard popular over near-term, offers uplink speeds of 11.5 MBPS and downlink of 28 MBPS. Whereas LTE offers 75-100 MBPS Uplink speeds and 250-300 MBPS downlink speeds. Compare this with 20 MBPS U-verse speeds of AT&T wired broadband network U-verse and 50 MBPS speeds in Verizon FIOS TV service. In a nutshell, LTE will beat the fastest wired broadband delivery High Def TV today (in USA) by order of 1 to 4 or 1 to 2 depending on which wired broadband we are talking about. That said, many carriers like AT&T believe that HSPA and its faster cousin HSPA+ will compare well with early WiMAX speeds and so there is no rush to LTE yet for these kind of carriers.

Some key characteristics of LTE are described below :

• Increased Data Rates and High Efficiency : LTE is based on OFDM Radio Access technology and MIMO antenna technology (just like its cousin WiMAX) which offer excellent modulation technique for achieving powerful spectral efficiency.  Think of the OFDM wireless spectrum as a series of very fine and narrow wireless  bands and each band gets allocated to various service providers.  LTE offers higher data transmission rates while utilizing the spectrum more efficiently. This translates to an ability to support many more multitude of subscribers than is possible with pre-4G spectral frequencies. LTE is 2 to 5 times more efficient in spectrum utilization than the most advanced 3G networks.
• Radio Planning : LTE signal goes far and wide and covers a larger geographic territory. LTE signal is way faster than the existing wireless transmission resulting in higher user response times.
• IP environment : LTE is all-IP which permits new enhanced applications like real time voice, video, gaming, social networking and location-based services.  The concept of wireless ubiquity comes alive with LTE processor chips in everything from netbooks to mobile phones to consumer devices; all these devices talk to each other seamlessly and effortlessly.
• Inter-operability : LTE IP network co-operates with circuit-switched legacy networks resulting in a seamless network environment and signals are exchanged between traditional networks, the new 4G network and the IP-based internet seamlessly.

LTE Applications
LTE will enable applications previously unheard of. Wireless ubiquity is a given. All consumer devices. communication and computing resources may be enabled on the wireless network courtesy of chipmakers like Intel who are eagerly building in WiMAX and LTE in future chipsets which will be embedded in all sorts of technology devices that one can imagine.  Social Networking and human-technology interaction (HTI) will take on a new meaning. Human-technology interface and resultant communication could be as seamless and as effortless as the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report makes it out to be (ok we are bragging a bit now).

Web 4.0, if you will, may just comprise the Wireless as an integral element of the hyper-connected world via LTE and WiMAX enablement.  Broadband TV might not need wired cables anymore and new MVNO service providers may emerge who enable wirelessly driven TV and broadband internet. Business users might exchange massive amounts of data while on the go at the flick of a button (or touch). Interacting with your Flickr and Picasas photo streams from mobile devices might be a breeze. Games will cross wired / wireless domains and mobile location will figure in the gaming context naturally. Location-based may take a new meaning with location being the true IP beacon determining the application context in a flash, thereby offering a ultra-personalized mobile experience to the user.

LTE Timeline
Operators are just now fully deploying 3G using WCDMA or UMTS/HSPDA. WiMAX is coming in via ClearWire in USA and several operators like BSNL in India and many others in Middle East and Africa. The first LTE deployment in USA is with relatively tiny MetroPCS which may just beat the big 3 LTE carriers (AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile) in the race to 4G. Verizon is claiming 2010 LTE deployment and AT&T is taking a more patient approach and states that LTE is in 2011-12 timeframe. China is unique, as usual. They have taken the TD-SCDMA 3G route which is a “unique to China” standard.  Chinese 4G strategy is not clear still. India is more LTE centric like the West with major carriers like Airtel and Vodafone adopting the LTE route. LTE in India is many years away as India’s regulator TRAI has not even awarded the 3G spectrum licenses yet.

Japan, we won’t even go there..

Panel participation at Telephony Live 2008 conference panel “Service Gets Personal”

I had the pleasure of participating in a panel at the prestigious Telephony Live conference hosted by the editors of the Telephony magazine in Chicago last week. The conference titled “Telephony Live-The Telecom Summit 2008″ was a great success and I thoroughly enjoyed the excellent event, the panel participation and hobnobbing with some distinguished luminaries of the telecom and wireless industry.

Kudos to Editor-in-Chief Carol Wilson, marketing chief Kim Brower, all the editors including Rich Karpinski, Kevin Fitchard, Sarah Reedy, Ed Gubbins and the entire cast of Telephony magazine for doing a stupendous job on what I believe is the second time for this conference. Congratulations Carol and team !! Great job and I look forward to more of these in the future.

First on the panel I participated in :

I was in the panel “Service Gets Personal” along with some other distinguished telecom execs – Nancy Kaplan from SECOR Consulting, Ken King from SAS and David Allred from SezMi, a stellar team of telecom experts from blue chip firms. The panel was moderated by the Chief Editor of Telephony magazine Carol Wilson.

Carol, Nancy, Ken and David - It was a pleasure and I appreciate the opportunity. I whole-heartedly enjoyed the spirited discussion and felt enriched by the keen insights offered.

The topic concerned the implications and importance of service personalization in telecom and mobile offerings. Pretty much all panel members agreed that with brutal competition in telecom industry and commoditization of the old bread and butter voice revenue, service personalization is all but inevitable.

Broadly, service personalization means taking customer demographics, customer’s location, customer’s permission, customer control etc into account while disbursing relevant services and / or rendering marketing messaging to the customer base. Service personalization allows providers to create new revenue streams, retain existing customers and keep their offerings differentiated and innovative in midst of what is a highly competitive and fast-moving communication services market. The various techniques used to achieve personalization include :

- location – to render location-sensitive mobile advertising, in-proximity marketing or media

- customer demographics from social networks or customer profiles

- customer opt-in permissioning ( as opposed to spamming )

- reviewing customer’s past usage history or buying patterns such as used by telco operators to determine what new services should be offered

Interestingly iPhone, the new game-changing mobile phone has shown that mobile web can get 10 times the adoption with the right ecosystem and device support. This has created a race to capitalize on this new channel from all members in the ecosystem. Amid this application, device and media frenzy triggered by mobile web as on an iPhone, personalized services promise to get the customer’s attention, thereby creating new revenue streams and brand new players like Apple, Google, Loopt, in the mobile ecosystem.

Business Intelligence firms like SAS are sitting on prime customer intelligence data which can be mined for detecting customer patterns and offering more personalized services. SezMi has a breakthrough internet TV product soon to be launched which promises to bring internet style control to the TV experience. Consulting firms like SECOR and CellStrat stand ready to help CIOs, CTOs and CMOs sort through the service jungle and create viable and compelling solution offerings.

Challenges to service personalization are many, eg privacy concerns including location and data privacy, risk of spam, regulatory hurdles (eg FCC penalizing Comcast on Deep Packet Inspection), device and technology fragmentation (too many devices and standards).

On Telephony Live Conference :

The conference had some great keynote speakers, viz Daniel Kelly (Exec VP, Tellabs), Hardik Bhatt (CIO, City of Chicago), Andrew Lippman (Fellow, MIT Media Lab), Jeong Kim (President of Bell Labs). All offered immense insight into the future of communications and the role of communications industry in modern society. Hardik Bhatt presented some interesting use cases from the way the City of Chicago is using communication services and technology to enhance the lives of city dwellers. Andrew Lippman offered some really insightful advice on how it is about “We, not Me” anymore. Essentially he sought to convey that one must always think of social aspect rather than individualistic service (I don’t believe this conflicts with service personalization before as some might suggest, we are on two different planes here). Jeong Kim discussed innovation and its role in modern world and how innovation has a slightly different perspective in research and industry circles.

There were many other panel discussions with some excellent industry thought leaders and executives. All in all, a great and enriching experience for all and me in particular.

Carol and team – Awesome job. Look forward to other events like this from the Telephony team.

Traffic Shaping in telecom networks

On the subject of Net Neutrality, the editorial team at Telephony Online (www.telephonyonline.com) wrote an interesting note on “traffic shaping”, or the practice by telcos to inspect packet traffic and do bandwidth prioritization. User-generated content or P2P traffic like Video (YouTubes of the world) are congesting the global network and telcos want to control this kind of traffic and police it. The telephonyonline article can be accessed at :

http://telephonyonline.com/software/commentary/dpi-p2p-traffic-0519/

Editor Carol Wilson at telephonyonline.com writes “By enabling ISPs to identify P2P traffic and employ “traffic shaping” that prevented that traffic from taking over available bandwidth during times of congestion, DPI was supposed to give ISPs greater control over the quality of their networks.” DPI stands for “Deep Packet Inspection” or an ability to inspect data traffic and apply throttle control above certain loads. “Latency-sensitive traffic such as voice and video would get one level of QoS, best-effort data another, and P2P another. “, according to Wilson.

Wilson gives example of BCE, Canada which resorted to traffic shaping causing a headache for various ISPs. This has angered independent ISPs whose traffic is being policed by BCE.

Network Congestion and Traffic Shaping are vexing problems with great ethical and regulatory implications. We feel telcos should be able to recoup their heavy return on investment in the core network and have a right to resort to some bandwidth control eg we disagree with the idea that a couple of apps like YouTube and others should hog the bandwidth on the internet and all other low volume apps are left hanging high and dry with regards to bandwidth availability. But a balance is needed via regulation where carriers cannot control the internet traffic to the extent that they inhibit internet from functioning and end up throttling innovation instead.

MT

Net Neutrality : “Managed Internet” vs “Free-use Internet”

AT&T Vice President of Legislative Affairs, Jim Connoni, warns that by year 2010, internet will hit full capacity. Says Connoni : “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute”. Whew. That sounds almost ominous. How will internet traffic flow – countless businesses, corporations not to mention daily lives of people would be effected. Well may be, I am exaggerating a bit. By that time, the truth is that our capable internet backbone providers would have added tremendous amount of bandwidth firepower in preparation for this coming internet congestion. Firms like Cisco are busy churning out heavy duty routers which will allow heavier and heavier load to be carried on the IP network.

Point is that firms like AT&T want to use such arguments to overcome the network neutrality camp led by likes of Google, Microsoft, video transmitters, user-generated content (UGC) and other high bandwidth hogs which run large amounts of video and content on the internet. These firms and individuals would not want to see backbone providers like AT&T charge a premium to carry their bandwidth gobbling content like YouTube videos, online gaming etc. Whereas backbone providers want to prioritize the internet where higher bandwidth users have to pay more to use the IP backbone. Internet firms like Google which thrive on high bandwidth applications like YouTube would like legislation which bans such prioritization arguing that such priority access control is against the tenets of a free internet and that all traffic must be considered equal and should compete for bandwidth. Vint Cerf, co-inventor of Internet Protocol, supports a light legislation to ensure net neutrality. Of course, Google’s preferred solution would lead to bulk of the internet capacity being utilized by few high usage firms or individuals causing slowness or lack of service for bulk of the population.

What is the right answer. Depends on whom you ask. We feel this issue still needs some analysis before one take sides on this. We feel that backbone providers deserve some way of ensuring that internet continues to provide a reasonable QOS (Quality of Service) for the larger population instead of being jammed by a few big network hogs. On the other hand, internet was founded on the premise of true democracy and free flowing content and its sheer growth is attributable to lack of regulation and control. Hence one has to tread a delicate balance between a “managed internet” and a “Free-use internet”.

Your thoughts are welcome.

MT