I had been enjoying some delicious Thai food yesterday night and as a result didnt wake up on time for the Breakfast briefing. Adrian Scrase, the 3GPP VP started and managed the morning session. I have always enjoyed him speaking and chairing events as he is full of knowledge and quite practical about the technologies.
Hans Erik Karsten from Telenor, Norway, spoke asbout the Norway market and gave some interesting facts and figures. For example, 2% of users are using 40% of the capacity and these are the PC users. 10% of the users use 80% of the capacity. In fact one person downloaded 230GB of data in a month (flat pricing schemes ;). N95 users use 10 times the data of an average phone. From Telenor point of view, LTE is an evolutionary step. The main advantage of LTE is flexible spectrum usage. They are also exploring Femtocells and Self Organising Networks (SON) will be the key. There are many upgrade paths from GSM/UMTS to LTE but there is no single solution for all different markets. Sweden will rollout LTE asap in 2.6GHz and 900MHz in future. Norway will be 2nd.
Julius Robson from LSTI (and Nortel) spoke about Industry wide trials and IOT. LSTI have now done real world analysis rather than the peak rate analysis and there were lots of interesting facts and figures that I will dive in later.
There has been lots of mention of refarming of 900MHz band and 'Digital Dividend' band. It was mentioned couple of times in the Panel discussion as well. Deploying LTE in 1800 band is not favioured by some as it wont provide much advantage over the 2.6GHz band regarding the coverage. Nakamura-san from NTT DoCoMo mentioned that none of the operators in Europe use Tx-Diversity and it is possible that MIMO will be deployed selectively in higher bands initially. There is a new initiative in Femto forum to open up Femtocell API's to third party and we may see in future that these API's may be opened up on Macro cells as well. See this blog post I did earlier.
Paul Steinberg from Motorola discussed about the cost and capacity. Again lots of facts and figures that I will dive in later. Interesting fact mentioned was 75% of users watch online video. According to him, LTE satisfies capacity and decreases TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). One of the advantages of OFDM is that there is no cell breathing (unlike WCDMA), there is SON and spectral efficiency is 3-4x. He also mentioned about the green advancements that Motorola have achieved. They are able to show 8x reduction in power requirements. There was some discussion about the bands and they think the first bands to be used would be 2.6GHz followed by 800, 900, 700 (Digital dividend bands which are different in different parts)
Doug Wolff from Alcatel Lucent talked about the US market. He mentioned that Verizon and AT&T has 60% US coverage. I will have to go in detail on this one later.
Adrian Scrase talked about 3GPP release 8 features and mentioned about the other main non-LTE features in Rel-8 namely ETWS, eCall amd ICE. I have talked about ETWS here and ICE here. Will discuss eCall in a future post.
Stephen Hayes from Ericsson talked about Rel-9 features. There are lots of things I want to talk about but it will have to wait for another post. I have already mentioned some of Rel-9 features here but will have to update the list soon.
Takehiro Nakamura from NTT DoCoMo talked about Release-9 and LTE Advanced and about Relay features in LTE Advanced. This presentation will probably end up on my LTE-Advanced page.
Charles Brrokson who is ETSI Security chair spoke about security in LTE and Rel-8 and how its different from UMTS. Its too technical to be covered in this post.
Giovanni Romano from Telecom Italia in Italy talked about their strategy and plans in Italy. He mentioned that there are already 1409 HSPA form factors available and hence they plan to have atleast 80% coverage in Italy for HSPA first. Later they have to think about moving either to HSPA+ or to LTE. The move to LTE will also depend on if Spectrum decisions have been made and the status of LTE device test certification.
Finally, Eiko Seidel spoke about LTE-Advanced and Rel-10. Will have to wait for another post though.
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