The board of the GSM Association voted to back LTE (Long-Term Evolution) as the mobile broadband standard to succeed HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), the CEO of the group said Tuesday.
The vote is an indication that GSM operators are unified in their support for LTE, and gives them a united front as LTE competes with Qualcomm's UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband) and with WiMax, backed by the computer industry, to become the next mobile broadband technology.
LTE is several times faster than HSPA and could help spur demand for more downloading over cellular networks. Japan's NTT DoCoMo may become the first operator to widely deploy the new technology, which is expected to be ready by the end of this decade.
LTE is now part of the GSMA push to promote the use of mobile broadband on cellular networks.
Rob Conway, CEO of GSMA, announced the association's backing of LTE during a speech at the GSM Association's Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, China, and called on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the leading United Nations agency for communication technologies, to ensure the industry wins the spectrum needed to offer mobile broadband.
GSMA said it will work with other companies and organizations developing LTE technology, and start working with the NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks) initiative.
NTT DoCoMo is pushing aggressively ahead with plans to speed up its mobile broadband services in Japan, and is looking to LTE to take care of the job. The company counts over half of Japan's mobile subscribers as its customers and has already started running tests on LTE technology to become its "Super 3G" offering. One advantage to LTE is that it can be used on existing 3G networks.
Download speeds on Super 3G could reach up to 300Mbps (megabits per second), Masao Nakamura, the CEO of NTT DoCoMo, said in a speech, a huge improvement over HSDPA. A 500-page magazine, for example, takes 3 minutes to download on HSDPA. On Super 3G it takes only three seconds, he said.
That means people will be able to download larger file sizes, including videos, music, and more over their mobile phones.
A problem for NTT could ultimately be government allocation of the radio spectrum that operators need to deliver wireless broadband. There may not be enough bandwidth available on some of the spectrum the Japanese government is considering for mobile network operators, said K. Jay Miyahara, corporate chief engineer of the mobile network operations unit at NEC.
"What technology [DoCoMo] ultimately uses depends on the spectrum they get," he said. Certain technologies, including HSPA and LTE, can be used only in certain spectrum. The 800MHz spectrum would be ideal, but most Japanese companies expect to be allocated 700MHz, Miyahara said.
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