Mobile World Congress Kicks Off

Next week the big mobile industry event, the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona and expect LTE to be the topic of choice.

It seems clear that Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology will be the main topic on display for the Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona. There have been recent going on with the technology that have many prospective show goers abuzz.

There are reports that Vodafone Group Plc want to talk with one and all about LTE plans; and this coupled with recent testing reports that LTE achieved speeds of 300 Mbps has everyone wanting to talk about this year's new disruptive technology. Sound familiar? It sure does to me. It reminds me of all of the hype of a couple of years ago for WiMAX.

But is LTE really hype? I don't think so. And frankly the two technologies are really similar. Vendors have already spoken out about how parallel the development tracks are in some ways. Work done on WiMAX has applications with LTE.

The recent LTE testing was based upon using MIMO antennas, but even baseline systems achieved 100 Mbps downloads. And all with latency results around 10 milliseconds. Is this impressive? Yes, until you remember that this was done in a lab. The real world is a whole different kind of cat. But then again, the same is true for WiMAX.

So what is the big difference between LTE and WiMAX? That might be on the time division duplexing (TDD) side (WiMAX) and the frequency division duplexing (FDD) approach which is LTE. However, the WiMAX Forum seems bent on offering an FDD version of WiMAX so….what does it all mean?

Well, for now it means that you still have two camps both bent mightily toward building two different technologies---and none of this will settle out into a winner any time soon.
 

Tim Sanders,
www.TheFinalMile.net

Friday, February 08, 2008 in Business  | Permalink |  Comments (0)