News CenterLTE: an introduction. What mobile operators need to know Sep 29, 2011 Categories: Industry
The massive consumer engagement with mobile broadband devices and demand for data on the go is increasing at incredible rates. An estimated 5 billion subscriptions will have mobile broadband by 2016. Delivering quality user experiences requires quality technology. That’s why the majority of those people will have their experiences delivered by the evolution of High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). So what exactly is LTE?
Hundreds of millions of subscribers across the world are already familiar with mobile broadband, whether surfing the internet or sending emails using HSPA-enabled notebooks; sending and receiving videos or music using 3G phones; or by replacing fixed DSL modems with HSPA modems or USB dongles.
LTE will improve the user experience for such activities and other more data-hungry and demanding activities such as interactive TV, mobile video blogging, advanced gaming and professional services.
While LTE will evolve over time, downlink speeds of 100 Mbps can already be achieved via current devices (on a 20MHz bandwidth). In fact, Ericsson has already demonstrated speeds of 1.2 Gbps.
LTE infrastructure is designed to be as simple as possible to deploy and operate via flexible technology that can be used in a wide variety of frequency bands. As of August 2011, LTE is available in more than 160 devices, mainly smartphones, dongles, mifis, tablets and built-in modems.
Our Lite paper – LTE an Introduction – goes into further detail on why LTE is the technology of the future as we move towards the mobile-broadband driven Networked Society.
