Wireless internet access is going to be a better, richer
experience than fixed link access Professor Michael Walker, group
R&D director at Vodafone told today’s Wireless 2.0 conference
in Bristol, organised by Silicon South-West.
“People think wireless can’t compete with fixed link, but it can”,
said Walker, pointing out that the 100Mbit/s of FTTH is the same as
the theoretical maximum throughput of LTE.
“LTE capacity on 20MHz is an order of magnitude higher than
HSPA,” said Walker. He said that, “in the first real field trials,”
average downlink speeds of 15Mbit/s, with 4.5 spectral efficiency,
were achieved. “Wimax takes three times more spectrum”, he
said.
At the centre of the cell LTE was delivering 20Mbit/s in the
field trial, at the edge of the cell it was delivering
1.3Mbit/s.
The object of Vodafone’s LTE strategy is to learn from the
negative experiences of deploying 3G. “3G was a disappointment,”
said Walker, “3G was going to give 1Mbit/s but in some places you
were lucky to get 300kbit/s. It’s not going to be like that with
LTE.”
Stung by its experience of paying billions for spectrum in the
3G auction and then not using that spectrum for over a year while
they tried to get the technology to work, Vodafone took a different
tack with LTE.
“We decided with LTE that we would make sure the technology
works before we buy spectrum,” said Walker.
To that end, Vodafone has been working with China Mobile and
Verizon to make sure LTE has compatible standards.
Walker regards talk of a killer app as silly for LTE as it was
for 3G. “LTE is just about access,” he said.
He predicted the gradual relative demise of the person-to-person
phone calls, referencing data that showed 11 times more wireless
traffic is being generated by community chatting than by
person-to-person calls.
See also:
Vodafone launches first UK femtocell