News - LTE inflection point expected late 2012

[HEXUS]

4G technology pioneer Altair Semiconductor shines some light on LTE.

Read more.

[kingpotnoodle]

LTE is pointless unless they work on the capacity and backhaul... I have NEVER seen anywhere close to 14Mbps on 3.5G, it's barely better than 3G in most areas of London.

My 2Mbps (yes 2, in London, pathetic) ADSL2+ line is always better than 3.5G on my phone.

[ajones]

The mobile communications god is turning in his grave now that the marketting men have finally got their way and the terms 2.5G/3.5G/3.9G are receiving widespread adoption even on technical forums.

[miniyazz]

The mobile communications god is turning in his grave now that the marketting men have finally got their way and the terms 2.5G/3.5G/3.9G are receiving widespread adoption even on technical forums.

Better that than confusion between totally different '4G' speeds/technologies all sharing the same name.

[ajones]

Better that than confusion between totally different '4G' speeds/technologies all sharing the same name.

/rant

Actually, I'd argue the opposite. 3GPP specs make it perfectly clear what the differences are in the technology, but the marketting folks "don't need to understand the technicalities" so just want some terms that show the difference using a bigger number.

It used to be that neither the initial LTE or WiMAX solutions could be considered 4G because of the definitions specified in the 3GPP specs. 3.5G is UMTS (that's 3G) with support for enhanced capacity, new codecs, new radio channels etc... in other words, a feature set, not a new release. This is the same distinction as the addition of the GPRS to GSM (that turned 2G into 2.5...., but it's still GSM!). These are all clearly defined in 3GPP releases.

OK, changes to release naming convention didn't help matters, eg 3GPP release 4 was produced after release 99 and after GSM phase 2.... But the bottom line is that WiMAX is a completely difference technology from 3GPP, just as the US CDMA networks were completley different to our GSM networks.

Now though, both can be termed 4G and not work with each other without changes to the network architecture. We've enough on our plate with mobile convergence without having the add-men involved.

My point is that it's sad that these terms are being used now by the suppliers of the technology because of marketting [spit], and are themselves making a distinction that does not exist in order to make things easier for them to understand.

/rant off

4G is a massive change for the networks, but how much of that impacts the end user will require work to the transmission backbone in order to handle the capacity. My mentor when I first started in the business once said to me "Telecoms is all about getting something for nothing"...