LTE needed sooner rather than later

WITH 3G MOBILE TRAFFIC expected to continue soaring, analyst firm Unwired Insight reckons that large scale deployments of Long Term Evolution (LTE) need to come sooner rather than later to cope with demand.

In its Will 3G Networks Cope? report, the researchers reckon that mobile traffic volumes are set to increase by a factor of 20 by 2015.

"Pricing of mobile data has changed dramatically since the days that SMS was the dominant service," said Alastair Brydon, co-author of the report.

"Mobile broadband pricing has fallen as low as $2 per gigabyte, which is nearly half a million times smaller than the price per gigabyte of an SMS message."

The increased adoption of smartphones and other devices using mobile data connections is already placing strains on operator networks and Brydon reckons that this will only get worse over time.

As 2G users continue to migrate to 3G services, the available capacity per 3G user will decline rapidly in networks utilising HSPA, to less than 100MB per user per month in some cases.

With WiMax viewed by many as nothing more than a niche technology, the report points to LTE as an essential element of countering this decline.

Although LTE will be a vital part of helping deal with increased traffic loads, Brydon does warn against getting carried away with headline speeds and feeds. While LTE promises peak data rates of over 100Mbps, this is only possible with wide allocations of spectrum, and even then will only be experienced with excellent radio conditions.

The other major hurdle is that of spectrum allocation. In order to offer that kind of bandwidth, operators will develop an insatiable appetite for LTE spectrum in order to keep up with forecast traffic demand.

According to the report, for some operators 10MHz of spectrum will be able to support forecast traffic levels only until 2011, with a further 10MHz needing to be added every year.

"LTE's ability to relieve the capacity constraints of HSPA networks will be limited initially, until operators can acquire additional spectrum and seed a sufficient number of LTE devices in the market place," added Mark Heath, another co-author of the report.

"We don't expect to see LTE handsets until 2011."

A free whitepaper associated with the report is available here (PDF). µ