NordVPN Promotion

Home / Blogs

LTE: Another Way to Estimate when It Will Be Real

BLACK FRIDAY DISCOUNT - CircleID x NordVPN
Get NordVPN  [74% +3 extra months, from $2.99/month]

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.

ReleaseSpecs completeCommercial deploymentsMajor new features defined
981998
Last purely GSM release
991Q20002003W-CDMA (UMTS) air interface
42Q20012004Softswitching & IP in core network
51Q20022006HSDPA and IMS
64Q20042007HSUPA, MBMS, GAN, PoC & WLAN integration
74Q2007Future (2010 seems likely)HSPA+, Better latency & QoS for VoIP
84Q2008FutureLTE, 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

Filed Under

Comments

Comment Title:

  Notify me of follow-up comments

We encourage you to post comments and engage in discussions that advance this post through relevant opinion, anecdotes, links and data. If you see a comment that you believe is irrelevant or inappropriate, you can report it using the link at the end of each comment. Views expressed in the comments do not represent those of CircleID. For more information on our comment policy, see Codes of Conduct.

CircleID Newsletter The Weekly Wrap

More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.

Related

Topics

Brand Protection

Sponsored byCSC

DNS

Sponsored byDNIB.com

Domain Names

Sponsored byVerisign

New TLDs

Sponsored byRadix

Threat Intelligence

Sponsored byWhoisXML API

Cybersecurity

Sponsored byVerisign

IPv4 Markets

Sponsored byIPv4.Global

NordVPN Promotion