LTE Femtocells: Stepping stone for 'killer apps' presentation

This is my presentation from last year. I added this because some people asked me for this. Please feel free to comment.

Lte Femtocells: Stepping stone for killer applications

View more presentations from Zahid Ghadialy

LTE World Summit - Day 3 Pics

Some Pics from day 3.

This is from my breakfast briefing session.

The above are Signallion Test UE. Check the 'SORBAS Test UE' flyer here.

Thats the Signalion's test engineer running some simulations ;)

Thats Manish Singh from Continuous Computing explaining about their LTE protocol solutions.

Qasara's LTE Protocol stack. See their presss release.

Everyone enjoying the break on the last day.

LTE World Summit: Day 2 roundup

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.

LTE World Summit - Day 2 Pics

Here are few Pics that I took today.


The R&S CMW 500 is seen to be doing MIMO testing with LG UE. The throughput was reaching upto 60Mbps.

Thats the LG LTE UE being used by R&S.

Thats the Anritsu MD8430 LTE Network Simulator and MD8435 UE Simulator. They were showing throughputs of 100Mbps DL and around 45Mbps in UL. The RTD tool (I am going to cover that in a seperate blog in few weeks time) can be seen on top right.

Anritsu engineer working ;)

Tektronix simulators. Apparently they have a solution for everything from drive testing to Femtocell test equipment. Hopefully more later

I also went to Ericsson Demo/Roadshow for LTE, HSPA and IMS Technologies. Unfortunately they didnt allow anyone to take any photographs.

LTE World Summit - Day 1 roundup

Before we start, I should mention that there have been no discussions showing LTE is better than WiMAX, etc. It is now assumed that WiMAX is no longer a threat and a competitor. There is also missing a discussion on Femtocells. I suppose that some Femto related discussions are planned for day 3.

I am going to cover the discussions in detail in the coming days (months) but here are some interesting tidbits.

It started with a presentation from Marc Fossier, France Telecom. An interesting fact about France he mentioned is that 40% of voice traffic is VoIP. They are present in 30 countries (generally by the name Orange) and they have 128 million customers. LTE rollout is planned for post 2011. They will be deploying WiMAX in some markets like Romania and some African countries. The main reason being that there is no 3G network there. Another key point of his presentation was that Mobile TV should be independent of the technology being considered and TDD works fine for that. Also SON (Self Organising Networks) will be very important feature that is needed when LTE is rolled out.

Klaus-Jurgen Krath from T-Mobile Germany gave T-Mobile statistics of 148 million customers and revenue of 9.2 Billion Euros. One of the things he mentioned is that at 2.6GHz, the cell radius is 0.3Km but if we move to 800MHz then the cell radius is around 3Km. Personally I am not sure if the frequency is something we should worry too much about. WiBro in Korea is I think using 2.3GHz and is working fine. Another thing mentioned is that the Backhaul is generally quite bandwidth limited so that needs to be improved. The operators should use Microwave or Fiber to overcome this backhaul problem. LTE Migration will also take time and initially it would be the third layer on top of GSM and 3G/HSPA but by 2020 it should be dominant technology. Right now Voice and SMS problem has to be solved asap. Personally I think SMS is not much of a problem and SMS can work on CS as well as PS. Operators can use SMS over PS for the moment. Femtocell according to Klaus is very important for LTE but Femtos will be successful only if they are Plug and Play for both operator and the consumer. His final point was that we should not dissapoint the customer by showing the peak rates, rather we should focus on average rate.

Ulf Ewaldsson from Ericsson mentioned that 80% of broadband subscribers by 2014 will be mobile. Another thing he said is that for LTE, it is possible to deliver 1GB for < 1 euro. (Capex only). Ericsson vision is that by 2020 there will be 50 Billion mobile broadband connections. Ericsson will be ready with LTE soon and by the year end peak rate of 42Mbps will be possible.

Alex Sinclair from GSMA talked on expanding the LTE ecosystem. There were lots of interesting facts and figures that I will have to mention seperately. There was also an intersting mention of the GRX (GPRS Roaming Exchange) that will need a completely new discussion.

In the Panel Discussion, Marc mentioned that Orange is not considering Femtocells for Residential market because of many unsolved technical problems like Price, Security, Spectrum Management, etc. On the business side they may have Femto, Pico or Micro depending on the need. Ed Candy from '3' mentioned that operators should focus on Macro rather than Femto because lots of spare capacity available. He mentioned that there is a business problem because somebody has to subsidise Femto, also too many Femtos can cause RF blackspots and operational dynamics are yet to be worked out.

Elio Florina from Telecom Italia (TiM) talked about LTE and HSPA deployment in Brasil. The main point being that initially they want to have complete 3G/HSPA coverage and then in future think about LTE.

Alan Hadden from GSA mentioned about GSA activities. I was surprised to hear that only 55,000 people view their website annually. This is because a simple blog like mine regularly gets between 20,000 and 25,000 views per month. Again there were lots of stats that I will write about later. Interesting point from his discussion was about the Digital Dividend band that can be used by LTE to increase the coverage.

Dave Marutiak, Microsoft spoke about Bearer Aware Applications. Dean has blogged in detail about this.

Ed Candy from '3' in his presentation highlighted an important point about the user experience. He said that for any service, user experience should be memorable so even after 2-3 years if the user has to use the same application than he should remember how it works. I think that there are hardly any services like this except those that are intutive to use. In Dec. 08, '3' saw people using 34million skype minutes and 68 million Facebook page views. It should be remembered that Facebook phone was launched in Dec itself. His message was that '3' will not be moving to LTE anytime soon because the current network is delivering whatever is required.

Roberto Di Pietro from Qualcomm spoke about the challenges faced by the chipset manufacturers. The main challenges is due to the fact that there are millions of combinations of different bands that the UE may need to support which is not practical and possible. They are focussing mainly on 2.6GHz at the moment and when the Digital Dividend band is available then they will implement chipset in that band as well.

Jorgen Lantto from ST-Ericsson and Sami Jokinen from Nokia gave their views on chipsets and handsets implementation respectively. According to Nokia, LTE handsets will be available by 2010. Initial deployments will be in FDD but later in TDD-FDD both.

Liesbet Van der Perre from IMEC discussed about the SDR implementation for LTE devices. Her presentation was more of updates on the previous IMEC info I have covered here.

Finally, I managed to squeeze myself into an Agilent workshop called 'LTE at the movies'. There were two parts to that 'MIMO MIA' and 'Honey who shrunk my mega bits'. The workshop lated 2.5 hours and I got a free Agilent LTE book. Lots of technical details that I will post seperately.

Please feel free to comment or correct me if I made any mistakes. You can also read Dean Bubley's take on the first day here.

I shouldnt finish without thanking the organisers who have done a good job in organising the event and for such wonderful hospitality (and food :).

LTE World Summit - Day 1 Pics

We had an interesting first day at the LTE World Summit in Berlin. There were no breaking news though. Summary coming in the next post after the Pics.

The lunch was sponsored by Starent Networks. Here is a Pic of their cake. Nice cake but I dont like chocolate cake. I would have preferred strawberry ;)

This above is Agilent's test mobile that can be used for drive testing.

Agilent has a massive and impressive presence here. I attended their workshop yesterday, will report the details later.

Ericsson are showing off the new TEMS that can be used for LTE drive testing, etc.

mimoOn are showing their Test Mobile and their complete solution for eNodeB, etc.

Very interesting to see LTE Test Mobiles from 3 companies already available.

Setcom is a new entrant (even though they have been present for long time but I never heard of them before) in Network Simulator area. They have plan to do Conformance tests for the LTE mobile. They claim to be ready already with basic test functionality. Till date the Conformance test market have been dominated by Anritsu, Agilent (Anite), Aeroflex and R&S. I have already heard of AT4 Wireless being active in this area for LTE. It would be interesting to see one more player.

In Berlin for LTE World Summit

Just a day in Berlin to look around is not enough, especially if you are a bit tired due to your journey. I managed to go round to few places though and Berlin does look like a place that need to be explored.

Here are some photographs from Berlin:

All the above photographs are from The ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, destroyed by Allied bombing in Second World War and preserved as a memorial

The final pic is of the Berlin Aquarium. Maybe the next visit, I will go and check it out.