LTE aims for cost-reduction while WiMAX goes back to its roots at MWC 2009

Posted by Julian Bright Thursday, February 26th, 2009

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Attendance may have been significantly down on 2008, but there was still enough industry news and technology buzz at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to dispel the economic gloom, at least for a couple of days. The major debate for network professionals was undoubtedly about the technology choices facing operators, and whether to move to LTE early, or to delay and opt for HSPA+ in the interim.

Verizon made its decision clear at a show keynote, with executive VP and CTO Dick Lynch confirming a 2010 launch of LTE and an aggressive rollout program. By contrast, some European operators appeared to be reviewing their plans - Vodafone, France Telecom and T-Mobile were all reported to have delayed their LTE deployments for 2 to 3 years.

TeliaSonera, which plans to launch LTE networks in Stockholm and Oslo in 2010, has been readying its sites for LTE for over a year according to Mats Lundbäck, the operator’s head of technical development, mobility services. Speaking at the NGMN’s Technology Evolution conference stream in Barcelona, Lundbäck said LTE would initially supplement TeliaSonera’s hotspot coverage.

Achieving cost reductions through LTE was a major theme of the discussion, as was the re-use of existing cell sites. Lundbäck said that much of the civil works at TeliaSonera’s existing cell sites would be re-used, but that new antennas would be required for LTE.

Huawei, which is supplying TeliaSonera’s LTE network in Oslo, is promoting a converged single RAN concept as the basis for migration to LTE. Its VP of global wireless product line management, Tan Zhu, said that rather than expecting LTE to boost revenues, which would be difficult to achieve, operators should look for cost benefits. Reducing transmission costs would also be essential if LTE was to be profitable, said Tan.

Speakers were less than enthusiastic about network sharing for LTE. T-Mobile Europe’s head of radio networks, Emin Gurdenli, thought that operators would initially be reluctant to share networks, while Lundbäck said that despite the financial benefits of TeliaSonera’s current 3G network sharing arrangement in Sweden, LTE was an important differentiator for the company, and for that reason it was adopting “a more defensive rollout plan” for 4G.

On the exhibition floor, the trend towards greener, more sustainable networks coupled with efforts to drive down total cost of ownership meant that vendors were keen to play up issues such as power consumption, equipment size and weight, ease of installation, and other so-called “green engineering” considerations.

Nokia Siemens Networks claimed the lowest power consumption in the market for its newly-launched Flexi Multiradio software defined radio (SDR) base station, while China’s ZTE claimed a world’s first with the supply of a converged 2G/3G SDR network for Hong Kong’s CSL, which will also provide a platform for the operator’s HSPA+ offering. ZTE’s Richard Lihe Ye said that CSL’s combined capex and opex for the new SDR network was lower than the combined opex cost of the operator’s previous 2G and 3G networks.

Also featuring widely in Barcelona, in conceptual terms if not yet in a real-world incarnation, was the self-optimising network. The SON pulls together a number of components that exist today, such as network planning and diagnostic tools, specifically for 4G networks such as LTE, explained Christopher Lamour, CMO of Actix.

The SON automatically prioritizes network problems, rectifying faults and reconfiguring the network where necessary in minutes, saving massively on engineering effort and duplication, according to Lamour. The standards are still immature, although some elements have been defined in 3GPP Release 8. The requirements for SON will be more fully defined in Release 9, which is due to be completed by the end of 2009.

T-Mobile is one of the more vocal operator supporters of SONs, believing that they are a critical part of the cost reduction process. Nortel, which is engaged in a SON field trial with T-Mobile, was demonstrating SON technology in Barcelona, claiming that the technology can deliver substantial opex savings.

Far less in evidence at this year’s event was WiMAX, although a group of vendors elected instead to hold a breakfast briefing close to the main Congress to talk about the WiMAX ecosystem.

All were playing down the mobility aspects of WiMAX and any suggestion that the technology could compete in the mobile broadband space with LTE. Notable by its absence from the discussion was any mention of Clearwire, the one-time poster boy for 802.16e mobile WiMAX, which has so far deployed its network in just two US cities.

Instead, the emphasis was strongly on the technology’s strengths in fixed and nomadic applications, for DSL-type services and hotspots.

Intel, along with Cisco, Huawei and Motorola all pledged further investment in the technology during 2009, while Karim El Naggar, VP of Alcatel-Lucent’s WiMAX business group, said that the company was still “100% committed” to WiMAX, despite a decision late last year to focus its investment primarily on LTE.