Forward texts to your email account

In the past few years text messaging has really grown especially with the young people like me although it’s a different matter I prefer to call instead of texting.

It’s not a rocket science that texting is cheaper and sometimes keep people going on their mobiles and also it’s a way of passing time for today’s youths.

I came across some interesting thing called txtForward earlier today, which I thought was worth a mention here.

LG causes a stir with the first LTE handset modem chip

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LG recently announced that it has independently developed the first handset (user equipment) modem chip based on 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology standards. The modem chip can theoretically support wireless download speeds of 100Mbps (megabits per second) and upload speeds of 50Mbps. This represents a significant step toward creating a market-ready 4G phone.

LG demonstrated the chip at its Mobile Communication Technology Research Lab in Anyang, Korea, achieving wireless download speeds of 60 Mbps and upload speeds of 20 Mbps. The fastest phones currently on the market use HSDPA technology and download at a maximum speed of 7.6 Mbps.

For the past three years, LG have been pursuing 3GPP LTE standardization, working to develop and test commercially viable LTE technology with approximately 250 of R&D staffs. The result is a 13 by 13 mm modem chip, perfectly sized for the next generation of slim-yet-powerful handsets. For its demonstration today, LG used a test terminal running Windows Mobile to play back high quality, on-demand video. In addition to this handset modem, LG is also developing the first preliminary LTE-based data card, which can replace the wireless cards currently used in computers.

“Now that LG has developed and tested the first 4G handset modem, a commercially viable LTE handset is on the horizon,” said Dr. Woo Hyun Paik, CTO of LG Electronics. “This latest breakthrough gives us a strong technology advantage that we will use to bolster our industry leadership.”

Dr. Paik added, “Our successful development of this LTE handset modem signals the start of the 4G mobile communications market. LG will continue to advance this technology and develop further technologies to maintain global leadership.”

Mobile phone carriers have now built LTE test networks and are currently working on early stage handsets. The first LTE mobile phones will likely reach the market in 2010.

If you remember, LG was one of the partners with T-Mobile and Nortel when they tested LTE some months back.

Anyway, LG also caused a stir with this announcement because it boasted of having 300 patents related to the technology.

The report, in Korea Times, caused ripples of nervousness because LG is not a participant in the patent pool that several large vendors formed last spring for LTE. The aim of this group is to create a cross-licensing framework, and sign up sufficient numbers of IPR holders, that it will achieve “fair and non-discriminatory pricing” amounting to a single digit percentage of the cost of a handset, and single digit dollars for a laptop, for all associated intellectual property, commented Arstechnica.

Patent pools are gaining in popularity as new standards emerge with ever larger numbers of patents involved, but with rising pressures to be cost effective. The WiMAX community created the Open Patent Alliance earlier this year, and this week, the IEEE standards body struck a two-year deal with Via Licensing, one of the most prominent patent pool administrators. This agreement will create one or more patent pools for key IEEE communications standards, including Wi-Fi. The standards group believes this will help drive its specifications into the market more quickly because vendors will have greater confidence that IPR licensing will be fair and patents declared upfront before standards find their way into commercial products.

There were some interesting discussions on IPR framework in the LTE World Summit that i will hopefully blog soon about.

Metro Femtos another option for LTE.

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Around six months back, Unstrung article mentioned that Vodafone dreams of Metro Femto. Now Doug Pulley of picoChip s all set to champion this concept. In the recently concluded LTE World Summit, he said “The macrocell is dead. It’s a fallacy to think you can reuse existing cell sites to get LTE services. That whole premise is broken.”

Both China Mobile and T-Mobile have said they plan to use existing 3G cell sites for their LTE networks. But Pulley contends a traditional macrocell deployment won’t work because of the basic laws of physics.

Here’s the deal: “User throughput rolls off the further you get from the base station,” says Pulley. “[With] increased throughput, the signal becomes more sensitive to noise and interference. The further it has to travel, the weaker it gets.”

So that means LTE cell sites need to be small and a have smaller radii than traditional macro sites to get the full data throughputs that LTE can offer, which will be up to three to four times higher than 3G HSDPA release 6, according to Adrian Scrase, CTO at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) .

“You’ve got to have new sites, and the capex implications of that are potentially horrible,” says Pulley.

So future LTE femtos have to be cheap. PicoChip is developing a system-on-chip (SoC), code-named Feynman, that will enable a dualmode HSPA/LTE residential femtocell with a bill of materials of $70 in 2011. A lamp-post mounted, dualmode HSPA/LTE version of the femtocell will have a bill of materials of about $170.

“This is orders of magnitude cheaper than doing it any other way,” says Pulley.

For equipment suppliers, though, the concept of small, cheap base stations, especially those that might supplant current base station models, is causing some tension, according to Pulley.

T-Mobile is keen on LTE femtocells. “Femtocells [will be] an important measure to supplement LTE for indoor coverage and capacity scenarios,” says Frank Meywerk, senior vice president for radio networks at T-Mobile.
And China Mobile suggested that operators outside China could use the TD-LTE (Time Division LTE) version of LTE for capacity-enhancing femtocell deployments. That’s an option for many European operators that, as part of their spectrum allocations for 3G UMTS services, have been awarded 5 MHz of time-division duplex (TDD) spectrum, along with their primary allocation of frequency-division duplex (FDD) spectrum.

TD-LTE would be a particularly useful choice for operators looking to maximize coverage in dense urban areas, as such deployments would “not interfere with FDD spectrum,” according to Bill Huang, general manager at the China Mobile Research Institute. “I’ve heard that without having fixed spectrum allocated to femtos, it’s not possible to deploy femtocells” because of interference issues.

Canada’s Telus presented findings that femtocells do indeed have better performance in metro deployments.

“We’re all here today to determine if there is a performance difference with going with very small cells,” said Sam Luu, associate director of technology planning and strategy at Telus. “There is a significant performance difference at the edge and at the site.”

But Luu cautioned that metro femtos are, for now, still only an interesting idea. “You can talk about technical better performance,” he says. “But it still requires the R&D to get it off the ground. We’re still in the early stages of evaluating the technology.”

I have mentioned here and here that Femtocells can be considered as starting point for LTE rollout. Thinking about all the posts, it may be a better that an enhanced version of Femtocell or Femto++ is used. By this i mean that traditionally HSPA/LTE Femtocells are to allow max. 4 calls (more correct would be 4 radio links because the users could be in multi-call with CS and PS connection … I know there is no CS for LTE but I am talking about HSPA) simultaneously and the Femto++ would allow 16 calls simultaneously.

In fact Huawei has a 16 channel Femtocell that is being trialled but not everyone is happy to refer to it as a Femtocell. A better term suggested is Picocell or my personal view is that depending on the power output, it could be classed as Femto++ or Picocell.

Operators can also reduce the cost of rolling out Metro Femtos by encouraging users to keep the access open on their Femtocells open and giving them a reward for every originating and terminating call made on their Femto.

It’s Aeroflex turn now to launch it’s LTE product

As the competition is spicing up for the LTE race, companies have now started to launch their LTE products.

Continuing with the trends and keep the competition alive it’s now Aeroflex which launched the TM500 TD-LTE test mobile.

This latest LTE test mobile is designed to support Time Division Duplex for 3G LTE (TD-LTE) and will definitely compliment Aeroflex’s TM500 LTE-FDD for 3G LTE Frequency Division Duplex quite well.
Ever since China mobile announced its plans for TD-LTE there was immense pressure on the equipment vendors to meet the demands. TM500 TD-LTE test mobile is designed to enable infrastructure equipment vendor’s match that demanding timescales for TD-LTE trials in China.
The TM500 TD-LTE’s extensive Layer 1, Layer 2 and higher layer test features make it an indispensable testing peer that provides complete visibility even into the lowest layers of the radio modem by generating the detailed diagnostic data needed for engineers to verify the required functionality and optimize network operation and performance.
Following are further characteristics of TM500 TD-LTE:

* Support MIMO,
* Handover testing is simple and supported well,
* The test mobile can support 20MHz channel bandwidths and downlink data rates of upto 150Mbit/

All the above characteristics if the test mobile will enable comprehensive development and test support of base station and network infrastructure for the next generation of Chinese mobile technology.

The TM500 TD-LTE can co-exist in the same unit as the TM500 LTE-FDD protecting investment and maximizing test flexibility for engineers working on both standards.
Aeroflex will provide full in-country support for the TM500 TD-LTE so that technical questions and integration issues can be dealt with in Chinese and Aeroflex engineers can get on-site quickly, if needed, without having to fly in from Europe or the USA.

The TM500 TD-LTE will be available for customer shipment in late 2008.
It will be available both as a standalone unit and as an upgrade to existing TM500 LTE-FDD systems.

LTE functionality frozen as part of Release 8

According to 3GPP website: 3GPP has approved the functional freeze of LTE as part of Release 8.

There is significant commitment from operators to deploy this technology, and this landmark achievement will allow them to realize their early deployment plans.

But the 3GPP decided to give more time to the work on SAE -– a.k.a. evolved packet core (EPC) –- because the specs weren’t complete enough. The standards body has drawn up a list of “exceptions” that will have until March 2009 to be finalized in order to be included in Release 8.

“There are a number of pieces of work which we thought should be included but weren’t quite ready,” says Scrase. “[There are] quite a number of parts for SAE, the work [on which] still lags behind LTE work. We have a high level of confidence that the items will be completed by March, otherwise we wouldn’t have included them on the list.”

Scrase says that it is common to extend deadlines in this way and that the 3GPP allowed a similar extension for Release 7.

The decisions about LTE and SAE took place at a 3GPP meeting in Athens last week, where the group definitively agreed on what is contained in Release 8 and what’s not, according to Scrase. The group also agreed on what should be included in Release 9, which is scheduled to be frozen in December 2009.

And there is more to Release 8 than LTE and SAE. For example, some of the specifications for femtocells — or “Home Node B” in 3GPP terminology — are included in the release.

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