Inside The World’s First LTE Network

• Posted: Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: LTE

As part of the world’s first commercial LTE contract – awarded by TeliaSonera earlier this year – Huawei Technologies will be building a LTE network in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

According to head of Huawei’s wireless network branding, Lu Xingang, the company will deliver the network to the Scandinavian and Baltic operator later this year. TeliaSonera officials have indicated they will launch commercial LTE services by 2010.

So what will the world’s first LTE network look like? The network will be built using the Huawei’s multi-standard base station platform and IP core network. Huawei is not the operator’s 3G network supplier, so despite the fact that the term LTE infers evolution, the Huawei LTE network is not an evolved version of the operator’s existing infrastructure.

“This is a completely new network,” Lu said.

While he did not disclose the exact configuration of the TeliaSonera network, Lu revealed to CommsDay that Huawei has conducted extensive trials of LTE technologies.

“Huawei has conducted LTE trials in Europe, North America and Japan with several global leading operators. We have also completed field tests including throughput, latency, MIMO, high-speed multi-user access, cell hand-off and multi-service QoS,” he said.

“Huawei is also one of the main contributors to LTE standardization in 3GPP, NGWN, and LSTI organization. Since 2006, Huawei has delivered 900+ LTE contributions and 550+ SAE contributions to 3GPP, and has achieved great progress in developing key technologies, including MIMO, 64QAM, SON and QoS mechanism, etc.”

The initial Huawei LTE equipment will support the FDD version of LTE at 2.6GHz and 700MHz spectrum bands. The company is also developing TDD-LTE at 2.6GHz, Lu said. TeliaSonera acquired 2 x 20MHz of 2.6GHz spectrum back last year. The spectrum would allow the operator to deploy LTE at its maximum configuration using the maximum 20MHz carrier size.

The final configuration has not been revealed but Lu added that Huawei has achieved peak download data rates of 173 Mbps, and peak upload data rate of 84 Mbps in its trials.

At the same time, TeliaSonera awarded a LTE contract to Ericsson to build a network in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Ericsson will deliver to TeliaSonera an end-to-end LTE system, includ- ing LTE radio base stations, an Evolved Packet Core network and mobile backhaul solution including Redback’s SmartEdge 1200 routers and the latest EDA multi-access aggregation switch, Ericsson said.

Ericsson says that it has already started the roll out of the network and is readying the network for a 2010 launch. - Tony Chan, Commsday

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