Free article: 3G LTE is set to dramatically enhance 3G networks

As new broadband wireless and broadcasting technologies emerge, 3G may need a major boost in its capabilities in order to remain competitive. Although high-speed packet access (HSPA) and multimedia broadcast and multicast service (MBMS) bring important enhancements to W-CDMA’s capability, they cannot rival WiMAX and DVB-H in supporting certain service mixes.

However, the relatively unknown 3G long-term evolution (3G LTE) standard, often called Super 3G, should provide the support necessary for a range of new services, from 2009. The aim of 3G LTE is to achieve a peak downlink data rate of 100Mbit/s, representing an increase in capacity of three to five times compared to HSPA (in the same bandwidth), with latency as low as 20ms.

While the performance of 3G LTE in a real network implementation remains to be seen, its target high data rate and low latency would help mobile operators to compete directly with fixed broadband services. It may also support a wide range of mobile TV and video services and might at last allow mobile operators to offer voice over IP (VoIP) services profitably.

Fixed–mobile substitution, when customers completely dispense with fixed voice services in favour of mobile, is a big opportunity for mobile-only operators but competition with DSL in terms of performance and pricing places great demands on wireless technology. HSPA fails to achieve the capacity, latency or cost per Mbyte necessary to compete head on with fixed DSL services but 3G LTE could bring the improvements that would allow mobile operators to offer a realistic alternative to fixed services.

Mobile operators increasingly see mobile TV and video as ‘must have’ services but the services they can offer currently are constrained by the limitations of 3G. HSPA will only be able to support a few minutes of unicast viewing per day once the majority of 2G users have migrated to 3G networks. MBMS will bring broadcasting capability on 3G but will offer only a small number of channels within the confines of current paired-frequency allocations. 3G LTE’s capabilities could enable mobile operators to offer a compelling mix of both broadcast and unicast content, without the need for DVB-H.

Finally, the advent of 3G LTE could make cellular VoIP commercially viable for the first time, as shown in Figure 1. High IP overheads damage the business rationale for using VoIP over HSPA, but there is a much stronger case with 3G LTE. VoIP could bring major benefits for mobile operators, including cost savings and the ability to integrate voice and multimedia services.

Table 1: Relative cost per minute of VoIP over different wireless technologies, compared to 3G Release 99

However, 3G LTE will have to deliver on its promises, on time, and must be relatively cheap if it is to circumvent the need for operators to deploy WiMAX and DVB-H. While vendors are focused on providing a cost-effective infrastructure evolution for 3G operators, 3G LTE will require new spectrum, such as the IMT-2000 extension bands, in order to support some services. This could be expensive.

The Sound Partners report Prospects for the Evolution of 3G and 4G reviews the evolution options for 3G networks, focusing on the forthcoming 3G LTE and 4G standards. It evaluates the realistic capabilities of 3G LTE, in terms of throughput, capacity, latency and cost per Megabyte. By modelling a typical network, it quantifies the practical gains that will be achieved by 3G LTE and the service mixes that it will be able to support.