The world may soon have its first ever global mobile phone standard.
Not since the early years of GSM has there been such excitement in the mobile phone industry.
This is creating significant investment by manufacturers around the world even in China.
Analyst IHS iSuppli estimates that global spending on wireless infrastructure equipment will rise by 7.7% this year to reach $43.2bn.
Electronics Weekly spoke to Christian Leicher, member of the executive board at Rohde & Schwarz at the recent Future of Wireless Conference in Cambridge and asked him how important the emergence of LTE(long term evolution) a the 4G mobile standard is to the industry.
“The biggest investment is in LTE right now, US operators are looking to trial it,” said Leicher.
“China is also investing in LTE,” said Leicher.
Leicher believes this is an even more exciting time for the industry than with the emergence of GSM over a decade ago.
“It will be the first truly global standard and what is interesting is the convergence path from existing technologies to LTE,” said Leicher.
Even network technology adopted in China is now expected to compatible with LTE.
China Mobile, China’s biggest mobile operator, is expected to launch LTE this year, according to market watcher IHS iSuppli.
China Mobile has joined with Verizon and Vodafone in a cooperative LTE trial.
The trial aims to deploy more than 100 base station sites in each of six cities, covering more than 100 million subscribers.
China Telecom and China Unicom, the country’s two other carriers, will be deploying LTE between 2012 and 2013.
“It is a global standard for the first time,” said Leicher.
The economy of scale advantages this brings to manufacturers and operators is obvious. But Leicher also points out the challenges to creating systems based on a single global standard.
The wide range of frequency bands which must be supported for the global standard will put new pressure on systems design and especially chipset complexity.
The 4G mobile technology is still in its development stages, but there is what Leicher calls “true momentum” behind it. He expects production to start next year with 2013 being the big year for LTE.
According to IHS iSuppli, by 2013, 4G networks will account for the largest portion of the wireless infrastructure market.
This does not mean that development in existing 2G and 3G systems will stop overnight with the launch of LTE.
This year is expected that there will be still more investment by operators 3G/3.5G technologies, rather than LTE, in order to extend the life of their investments.
“The big question is ‘which technology do you phase out?’ the industry has yet to decide that,” said Leicher.
According to Leicher, the obvious choice of phasing out the old 2G technology may not be that desirable, to a mobile industry trying to support the rapidly growing use of data services.
“LTE should solve the data issue from an access point of view, so why not phase out 3G (which is struggling to meet data demand) and keep 2G networks for basic voice services,” said Leicher.
There are still technology challenges and operational issue ahead.
For example, says Leicher building networks that provide access in both rural and urban areas will be more of a challenge with LTE.
The use of small cells and femtocells could play a part in the rollout of 4G networks, but Leicher said his has yet to be fully convinced how important femtocells will be in the rollout of LTE.
An area where he thinks there could be future developments in the network is in some level of integration of mobile and broadcast networks for the provision of TV services.
“Integrating broadcast and mobile networks; there is some thinking about this,” said Leicher.
“This is not happening now,” said Leicher. “It will require new business models, but at sometime in the future I could imagine an integrated network architecture.”