LTE: Another Way to Estimate when It Will Be Real

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LTE: Another Way to Estimate when It Will Be Real

	By Brough Turner Founder & CTO at netBlazr
	September 01, 2009 Views: 9,304 Add Comment

Hardly a week goes by without a press release touting how soon we’ll be using a Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless network. Verizon has promised a major commercial launch in 2010 and a two-city trial before the end of 2009.

Let me show you a little chart I put together for my 3G Tutorial and have repeatedly updated (e.g. for my 3G / 4G Tutorial and for the cellular wireless history “Our G-enealogy” presented at 4G Wireless Evolution. This tracks the different releases of wireless specifications by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the body that controls the GSM family of wireless specifications.

Release	Specs complete	Commercial deployments	Major new features defined
98	1998		Last purely GSM release
99	1Q2000	2003	W-CDMA (UMTS) air interface
4	2Q2001	2004	Softswitching & IP in core network
5	1Q2002	2006	HSDPA and IMS
6	4Q2004	2007	HSUPA, MBMS, GAN, PoC & WLAN integration
7	4Q2007	Future (2010 seems likely)	HSPA+, Better latency & QoS for VoIP
8	4Q2008	Future	LTE, All-IP

If every other release has taken ~3 years from specs complete to commercial deployments, why is LTE going to be so much faster? Especially when we remember the 3GPP Release 8 specification freeze was .

Based on this chart, an sane person would project LTE in 2011 and wouldn’t be surprised if substantial deployments didn’t begin until 2012.

Now it’s true, I define commercial deployments as at least two operators (somewhere in the world) selling commercial services to the general public who also have access to an assortment of compatible mobile devices. On the other hand, if Verizon has just one or two USB modems that receive data from the LTE network and they deploy that LTE network beyond their first two cities, Verizon will declare they’ve met their plan. So most likely we’ll both be “right.”

By Brough Turner, Founder & CTO at netBlazr

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