LTE World Summit 2011 - Pics and Notes from Day 2

Continuing my notes for the 2nd day of #LTEWS.

Mark Newman from Informa reminded us that there have been lots of hype in the early days of 3G about the revenue, etc. and nowadays he is seeing similar hype about M2M.

CTO of Vodafone Germany, Hartmut Kremling spoke about their their LTE launch that was in Dec. 2010. They launched the LTE in 800MHz band and it has been convenient for them as they are reusing the existing GSM infrastructure.

Since they already support other technologies and spectrum, he was worried initially that LTE 800 was be the 5th network and LTE 2.6GHz will be their 6th network but due to the use of SDR and Integrated antennas in the network that support GSM/UMTS/LTE, they have managed to keep the cost and complexity down.

With LTE, Speed is the killer as the users can get high speed access to their services. Right now they have 20K customers that are using LTE.

They have also launched Easy Box that contains Voice and Integrated services. They have received positive feedback and the download speeds is generally 5-6 Mbps.

Yegor Ivanov of Yota, Russia spoke about how they moved their existing infrastructure from WiMAX to LTE. They already have 1million+ customers on their WiMAX network.

Yota is going to build a shared infrastructure for all the big 4 russian network operators. He is expecting to have 70 million people covered by 2016. Right now the LTE revenues are 4 times lower than their existing 3G revenues.x

Finally, Andrea Folgueiras from Telefonica Germany had an interesting presentation and sense of humour. When she started her presentation she mentioned that she has been with them for 20 years. So as to not give her age, she said she started with them when she was 10 :)

Telefonica believes in LTE for best mobile and data experience. They have 800MHz which would be used for national rollout and also 2.6GHz that would be used for dense areas. They will prioritise the services based on different QoS.

Finally they think that the paradigm has changed from 'Always on' to 'Always in touch'

There is more information available on the twitter conversations.