Carriers are increasingly deploying elements of the complex menu of standards which makes up LTE-Advanced, with carrier aggregation the most immediate concern for most as it will deliver a sharp boost in speeds and capacity. The past week’s LTE-A announcements came from Zain in Kuwait and EE, the UK’s leading cellco.
Zain is rolling out LTE-A capabilities in selected areas, with a particular eye on offering enterprise services. Like most carriers, it will target LTE-A on certain hotzones while first-stage LTE provides broad coverage.
The main barrier for Zain, as for most operators ‘ especially those without a captive device ecosystem like those in Japan and Korea ‘ is shortage of handsets to support the new services. Some carriers, as with original LTE, will get around that by using LTE-A initially for fixed broadband, enterprise and personal router applications (where the devices are quicker and easier to develop than smartphones). Zain is testing such data-only gadgets for release later this year, with handsets to follow from mid-2014, according to CEO Omar Saud Al-Omar.
Zain is using LTE-A specs to aggregate two spectrum bands, 1.8GHz and 800MHz, in a standards-based way, in order to deliver higher speeds and future-proof the network.
In the UK, EE switched on a 300Mbps LTE-A network in a select area of London, laying a no doubt shortlived claim to having the world’s fastest mobile broadband network. The operator had already doubled the speed of its LTE services in some urban areas by increasing the amount of 1.8GHz 2G spectrum it was refarming. This enabled it to match the 150Mbps speeds which others, like SK Telecom, were achieving using carrier aggregation, but this is the first time EE has harnessed CA and LTE-A itself.
It is combining 20MHz of 1.8GHz spectrum with 20MHz in 2.6GHz, and also has 800MHz in reserve. CEO Olaf Swantee told a Huawei technology event in London this week that ‘we are moving into the next age of 4G’, predicting that data traffic on the EE network would rise by 750% over the next three years. Like Zain, he is seeing the investment in LTE-A as a way to be prepared in advance for such an upsurge, rather than a way to boost revenues in the immediate future ‘ and also a way to target enterprise users, particularly in the period of waiting for consumer smartphones. EE said switching on LTE-A would help it “to stay one step ahead of the demand” from businesses with high speed connectivity needs, such as financial institutions and broadcasters.
For now, the ‘world’s fastest’ network is really just a showcase, with London-wide availability not due for 6-9 months. The first area covered by the new EE capabilities is the Tech City district of east London, where selected triallists will receive a Huawei personal router with Cat-6 support, capable of using the maximum network speeds and linking to up to 20 Wi-Fi devices. These routers will be generally available next summer, with smartphones to follow in the second half of the year. EE’s standard LTE network now covers 60% of the UK population and has 1.2m customers. Along with rival O2, it recently announced the country’s first prepaid 4G offerings.