In the near future, operators will be presented with, and challenged by, new and exciting opportunities to deploy LTE based mobile broadband services but like with any new network technology, comes the question of spectrum.
Radio frequency is a valuable and finite resource and, today, there is simply not enough to satisfy demand. The need for spectrum is being driven by the pervasive convenience of mobile communications and increased penetration combined with improved performance and the falling costs of wireless devices & services.
This is where LTE can help – in effect, LTE boasts leading radio spectral efficiency, meaning that LTE operators will make the most of their existing and new spectrum assets and provide significant capacity to support existing and future services.
In addition, LTE’s ability to take advantage of new spectrum allocations with bandwidth as large as 20MHz and the opportunity to potentially re-farm existing legacy spectrum with spectrum bandwidth as low as 1.4MHz is one of LTE’s key feature that will enable early LTE deployments and open up markets that were previously inaccessible.
Over the next several years the spectrum landscape will change along with the complex industry dynamics, subscriber migration and spectrum auctions in the 700MHz or 2.5-2.6 GHz bands will have a direct influence on the LTE ecosystem and in which band LTE will be deployed. Furthermore the identification of new IMT mobile bands at WRC-07 (450-470 MHz, 2300-2400 MHz, 698-862 MHz and 3400-3600 MHz) will help fulfill the projected need for future bandwidth as well as facilitate global roaming.
Figure 1: LTE potential bands
Compared to HSDPA/HSDPA+, LTE is expected to substantially improve end-user throughputs, sector capacity and reduce user plane latency while delivering a significantly improved user experience and lower cost per bit. As such it is very likely that operators in the 3GPP market will wait to deploy LTE in the re-farmed 900/1800 MHz and newly licensed 2.5-2.6 GHz bands. Operators in the 3GPP2 market will deploy LTE in the recently auctioned AWS and 700 MHz bands and then will possibly deploy LTE in the re-farmed 850/1900 MHz bands after the former spectrum is consumed.
As with any new networks, the early availability of highly functional and cost effective handsets and infrastructure equipment is essential to the success of LTE. As with the legacy network technologies, it is expected that the industry will agree on a unified LTE candidate band list in order to maximize availability and economy of scale as well as enable an LTE global roaming experience similar to what subscribers are enjoying today with GSM.
Motorola’s LTE roadmap supports a wide range of frequencies, aligning with the growing needs of service providers globally as new bands receive the necessary regulatory approval and service provider allocation.