{"id":642724,"date":"2013-02-17T11:00:08","date_gmt":"2013-02-17T16:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=611265"},"modified":"2013-02-17T11:00:08","modified_gmt":"2013-02-17T16:00:08","slug":"the-newest-overhyped-mobile-industry-buzzword-lte-advanced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/642724","title":{"rendered":"The newest overhyped mobile industry buzzword: LTE-Advanced"},"content":{"rendered":"

Admittedly, mobile technology evolves at a very fast pace. But somewhere along the way we seem to have skipped an entire generation of networks.<\/p>\n

This week Broadcom unveiled its first LTE chipset for mobile devices<\/a>, but it wasn\u2019t\u00a0just any LTE chip, it was an LTE-Advanced<\/i> chip. Sprint<\/a> and T-Mobile<\/a> were late to the LTE party, but that\u2019s okay. They aren\u2019t building any old LTE networks. They\u2019re building LTE-Advanced<\/i> networks.<\/p>\n

Everywhere you look, some infrastructure vendor is bragging about its LTE-Advanced base station or some carrier is talking up its LTE-Advanced-capable network. With these claims, it\u2019s hard to imagine that just two years ago that plain Jane LTE was on the cutting edge of mobile technology.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all hogwash.<\/p>\n

\"celltower2\"<\/a>There are no true LTE-Advanced networks, chips or devices in the market today and there won\u2019t be for many years. The mobile industry is playing an old game: technology inflation.<\/p>\n

You may remember that a few years back T-Mobile and AT&T magically transformed their HSPA networks<\/a> from 3G systems into 4G systems<\/a>\u00a0by waving their marketing wands. That technology inflation, however, began years began years before when Sprint first attached the 4G moniker to its WiMAX networks.<\/p>\n

Even today, mobile technology purists would argue the world has yet to see its first 4G network<\/a>, since no carrier system yet meets the original 4G guidelines established by the International Telecommunication Union. Instead of condemning the industry\u2019s fast-and-loose play with the term, the ITU simply caved<\/a>, retroactively defining 4G as pretty much anything the carriers wanted it to be. 4G has always been an iffy term, but after the ITU dropped the ball it became a meaningless one.<\/p>\n

Now the same thing is happening with LTE. In an effort to seem more progressive than their competitors, carriers, infrastructure vendors and chipset makers are finding loopholes in the technical standards to elevate their LTE technologies to the rarified status of LTE-Advanced. Basically, the industry is carrying around a Cadillac keychain but it\u2019s really driving a Buick.<\/p>\n

For a more detailed explanation of what LTE-Advanced actually is,<\/i> you can check out these posts from\u00a0Stacey Higginbotham<\/a> and me\u00a0about the technology\u2019s nuts and bolts<\/a> (If you\u2019re a GigaOM Pro subscriber there\u2019s also this more in-depth piece<\/a>). Here\u2019s the general twist: LTE is an iterative technology much like 3G HSPA before it. Just as the industry started out with slower UMTS networks and migrated to faster HSPA and HSPA+ systems, LTE will go through the same evolution process over the next decade or so.<\/p>\n

\"Nokia<\/a><\/p>\n

Nokia Siemens Networks\u2019 conception of a heterogeneous network<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

With each new step on that evolutionary path, downlink and uplink speeds will get faster and more resilient, latency levels will drop and overall network capacity will balloon. At some point we\u2019ll follow that path into a set of technologies and techniques that the mobile standards bodies have defined as LTE-Advanced.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll start seeing big changes in how cellular networks and devices are designed. Infrastructure and handset makers will start bolting multiple pairs of antennas onto their towers and devices. Carriers will be able to bond disparate bands of spectrum together to create super-connections<\/a>. Small cells and Wi-Fi access points will merge into the fabric of our big umbrella cellular grids creating the heterogeneous network<\/a>. But we\u2019re nowhere that point today.<\/p>\n

The devil is in the technical specs<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s important to note that LTE-Advanced isn\u2019t a monolithic technology, it\u2019s really a collection of technologies. You can think of LTE-Advanced as a menu, from which carriers will order from depending on their needs. Some will order up the improved air interfaces, while others will munch on multiple antenna or advanced interference mitigation techniques \u2014 many operators will do all of the above.<\/p>\n

One operator\u2019s LTE-Advanced is going to look very different from another operator\u2019s LTE-Advanced, but there are some minimum guidelines. One of those guidelines is the amount of capacity the network will support over a single 20 MHz swathe, or \u201ccarrier,\u201d of spectrum. According to the standards group that defines these things \u2014 the 3GPP \u2014 at the very least an LTE-Advanced carrier should deliver more than 300 Mbps of downlink capacity or more than 50 Mbps of uplink capacity.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to pick on Broadcom for a minute, only because it happens to be the most recent offender. In its materials, Broadcom clearly states its super-chip supports 150 Mbps on the downlink and 50 Mbps on the uplink.\u00a0Impressive, yes, but it\u2019s not LTE-Advanced. What Broadcom has built is known in industry parlance as an LTE\u00a0user equipment category 4 chip. LTE-Advanced doesn\u2019t start until category 6. This is fairly technical but take a look at this chart of user equipment categories\u00a0compiled by Wikipedia editors<\/a> (A quick reference guide: Release 8 is LTE and Release 10 is LTE-Advanced):<\/p>\n

\"LTE<\/a><\/p>\n

Broadcom is only halfway to even the minimum definition of LTE-Advanced\u2019s speed specs of 300 Mbps. The same goes for Qualcomm and any other LTE chip vendor. In fact, today\u2019s networks are right smack in the middle of the regular LTE standard (maxing out at 100-150 Mbps on the downlink), and they\u2019re probably going to remain that way for some time.<\/p>\n

So how is everyone getting away with calling their products LTE-Advanced? Why, through marketing of course. They\u2019ve latched onto a single spec in the LTE-Advanced standards, a technique called carrier aggregation. Carrier aggregation is the super-connection technology I mentioned earlier, and in truth it\u2019s older than the hills. T-Mobile and many other global carriers already use it in their networks to support their 42 Mbps services<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"menu_engineer\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By boasting technical support for carrier aggregation on LTE networks, marketers have made the huge leap the LTE-Advanced, which is ridiculously misleading. It\u2019s the equivalent of ordering a Coke and then claiming you\u2019ve indulged in a full meal.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re going to get to LTE-Advanced eventually, and those networks will be truly awesome. But the industry isn\u2019t doing itself any favors by promising us technology it can never deliver. It\u2019s 4G\u2019s overhype all over again, and it needs to stop.<\/p>\n

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock<\/a> user B & T Media Group Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n

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