BEYOND 4G

Executive Summary

Verizon’s LTE Plans on track, all set to launch services in November 2010. Verizon is all set to launch LTE in 25-30 markets before year end (Boston and Seattle by 15^th , November) , covering about 100m citizens.  It is expected that operator will launch 4G iphone in Q1, 2011. Verizon and AT& T now controls over 69% of US mobile data market and  has seen biggest jump in data revenues along with Softbank, AT&T and DoCoMo(11%) in first Half 2010.

AT&T announced their 4G partners to build LTE network. AT&T announced their plans to build LTE network, and contracted Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson as their LTE equipment suppliers.  However the operator believes that LTE has its own time to come and Read more…

New generation 4G systems like LTE and WIMAX is designed to support frequency reuse-1 mechanisms to enable a universal frequency reuse pattern providing operators with best achievable use of their valuable spectrum. Ever increasing interest is shown by companies and operators to find mechanisms to allow reuse1 deployments. This article will cover one of the key enabling technologies i.e. ICIC and its application in allowing universal use of Reuse 1 networks.

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By BP Tiwari (Beyond4G)

The LTE camp is euphoric about Qualcomm wining four circles which further got comprehensive media attention as Reliance controlled Infotel expressed their interest towards LTE. All the other players like Aircell ,Bharti, Augere and Tikona is watching Reliance controlled Infotel’s move for BWA deployment

The WiMAX camp spearheaded by Samsung, Hauwei and ZTE will try to convince Infotel for immediate WiMAX deployment to enter market in similar timelines as 3G. The strategy is not impending from the fact that they do not have a LTE roadmap, but rather their eagerness to enter the agreement with Infotel and secure their mobile data business. Read more…

By BP Tiwari

The industry around 4G FDD is clearly evolving towards LTE as major operators committed their plans or intentions to move into LTE. However, the 4G TDD path for LTE is not going to be an easy ride owing to the competition from WiMAX. Most of the current WiMAX deployments are in TDD and operators would certainly like to recover their investments before migrating to any other evolving technologies in near future.

Operators have also realized that the investments made in building network based on WiMAX TDD cannot be turned in to LTE-TDD overnight even if they like to. Clearwire for instance acquired more than 300k subscriber last quarter marking its entry to 1 Million mobile broadband clubs. If they choose to migrate to LTE, what will happen to those 1M wimax devices? By the time TDD LTE matures clearwire will acquire anywhere between 3 to 5 Million subscribers and upgrading a 5 Million serving WiMAX network to a new TDD LTE RAN might just not be a practical case. I am sure Yota , UQ, Atheeb, Taiwanese WiMAX operators and new WiMAX deployments expected in India would also face with similar dilemma. Read more…

It’s been an enthralling opening week for iPad . Over 500,000 iPads were sold during its first week, and we found apple mentioning “demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad™. We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April.”
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I think QUALCOMM and Ericson are making a lot of effort to accelerate the market of TD-LTE in Indian BWA spectrum. I have high regards to their outlook and also respect their companies view and strategy; however I also have some facts to report which might give you data points to form a practical opinion.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to meet executives from Qualcomm, Ericson and Nokia as the spectrum auctions are approaching. We discussed range of interesting topics especially their intentions for pushing TD-LTE and maturity of TDD-LTE for a commercial deployment in a very price sensitive market.

Data Point 1 : China Mobile is shifting from their current plans of 2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz as 2.3 GHz is extensively used by military of China and hence suppliers claim that CMCC will provide enough ecosystem development opportunity for India to achieve economics of scale is not very rosy. This is a fresh development and will have impact on TD-LTE products in 2.3 GHz frequency. Immediately, CMCC, Clearwire and other TDD proponent submitted new work item in 3GPP group to prioritize the development of TD-LTE in 2.5 GHz. Read more…

India Wireless Market Update

• The Indian wireless market grew at 32% Y/Y in the period between December, 2008 to 2009.
• India continues to be the hottest market on the planet in terms of net-adds with (again) a world record-setting month in Jan 2010 with 19.9 million net adds.  For the year 2009, India added 177 million subs vs. 106 million for China. Combined, one year of growth in these two market is equivalent to the size of the third largest market – the US, to date.
• Total Wireless customers in India surpassed 575 Million in Feb 2010.
• India became number two wireless market and the world order is : China, India, US, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, Pakistan and Italy. Read more…

I got a request to present difference between WiMAX and 3G. Please find couple of slides which will give perspective of 3G vs WiMAX .If you have particular question, do email me at admin@beyond4g.org .

Thanks,BP

With over 70 mobile WiMAX deployments worldwide in 2.3 , 2.5 and 3.5 GHz and continuously growing , the role of WiMAX 2.0 is pivotal for operators to support humongous projected growing data demands and stay competitive in mobile data networks. The time to market and early competitiveness of WiMAX release 1.0 was successful in getting initial attraction from operators but there triumph will largely depend in continuous innovation and new suite of standards which will enable affordable and reasonable data services for their consumers. Read more…

16m supports several advanced multi-antenna techniques including single and multi-user MIMO (spatial multiplexing and beamforming) as well as a number of transmit diversity schemes.

SU-MIMO: Single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) schemes are used to improve the link performance, by providing robust transmissions with spatial diversity, or large spatial multiplexing gain and peak data rate to a single AMS, or beamforming gain.

Both open-loop SU-MIMO and closed-loop SU-MIMO are supported for the antenna configurations presented above.

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