Long Term Evolution gaining momentum

There is lot of activity going on regarding the 3GPP Long Term Evolution popularly known as LTE (and i also refer to this term as Long Term Employment).

There have already been couple of high profile announcements this month on LTE. A press release from Nokia announced, “A group of world leading telecom technology manufacturers and network operators comprised of Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, France Telecom/Orange, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, T-Mobile, and Vodafone have announced a joint initiative aimed at driving forward the realisation of the next-generation of high performance mobile broadband networks based on 3GPP Release 8 “Long Term Evolution / System Architecture Evolution” (LTE/SAE) specifications.”

I suppose this initiative is more of a reaction to the advancement of WiMax. There have been some high profile announcements about operators adopting WiMax as the technology of their choice rather than 3G and its evolution. The press release also said: “The companies participating in this initiative will collaborate on demonstrating the potential of 3GPP LTE/SAE mobile broadband technologies through a series of joint tests including radio transmission performance tests, early interoperability tests, field tests and full customer trials. Joint activities will commence in May 2007, and are expected to run for a period of 18-24 months.“

Another press release, from Nokia-Siemens networks told us that using virtual MIMO the UL data rate has been increased in LTE from 54Mbps to 108Mbps. At present i cannot think of why we would need these high speeds but i am sure its always good to have the facility.

An Interview in a Indian newspaper with Nokia-Siemens networks head for the region gives an indication that Nokia is trying to play down WiMax card and promote LTE (which i think is sensible anyway).

At present it looks like only Nokia but i am sure other major players like Nortel, Ericsson and Qualcomm are not far behind.