What you need to know about 4G LTE
Mobile operators are grappling with a number of technical and marketing challenges associated with LTE’s rollout, which could mean the market is in for a period of trial and error, according to industry watchers.
In 2011, mobile operators will reinforce their initial LTE footprints and add more markets here and there, Jude said. “They’ll essentially be trying to establish a market for LTE service and determine what the service will look like. They’re groping their ways toward a value proposition.”
Of course, mobile operators will have some kinks to work out. For example, on the Verizon network, delays of up to two minutes have cropped up in the transition between 4G LTE and 3G Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO) connections. Verizon acknowledged the handoff delay, saying it was not unexpected and that it has been working on a fix. It is unclear when an update will be ready.
“If you have a 4G device that starts roaming, and you’re talking a matter of minutes on a handoff to the 3G network, is that reliable enough to call a viable service?” Jude asks. “Well, maybe -- if that’s a definition of service that works for a given market, but that looks more like fixed mobile to me. I certainly wouldn’t expect to pick up my laptop and go running down the street with it.”
Beyond technical quirks, voice is the bigger issue that mobile operators have to contend with. While the GSMA has embraced a standardized way of carrying Voice over LTE (VoLTE), it is working on the interfaces required between the customer’s equipment and the operator’s network, between the home and visited network of a subscriber not on their normal home network, and between the networks of the two parties making a call. Until the LTE voice standards are finished, mobile operators must figure out how they will handle voice (and text) calls that cross from 2G/3G to LTE networks.
“Getting VoLTE to work reliably, especially across different networks for roaming, will be challenging,” Jude said.
Getting this right will be crucial, given that for the bulk of the market, LTE devices would be about being “a telephone first and a data terminal second,” Jude said. “To get any traction, LTE has to address this existing market. Then we can expect that it will be about new types of services that will ride the data stream.”
The good news, Jude added, is that carriers, vendors and standards bodies all have vested interests in working on getting LTE deployments up to snuff.
Beth Schultz is a freelance technology editor and writer based in Chicago
This article originally appeared on SearchTelecom.com