3GPP’s Scrase puts LTE-advanced in perspective

While 4G networks are capable of delivering bandwidth as high as 1 gigabit per second, those performance figures shouldn’t be blown out of proportion, warned Adrian Scrase, head of the 3^rd Generation Partnership Project in an ATIS Technology Conference LTE presentation at Supercomm Wednesday.

“It’s always dangerous when you extract one or two headline figures performance figures from a specification,” Scase said. Data rates per user will vary based on a host of factors, ranging from the number of users within and the size of the cell, interference conditions and the device used, he said.

The 3GPP has submitted its LTE-advanced proposal to the International Telecommunications Union, stating that with new technologies such as eight-by-eight multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) antennas, network MIMO techniques, and channel sizes as large as 100 MHz, the next-generation of wireless technologies would theoretically achieve uplink speeds of 500 Mb/s, downlink speeds of 100 Mb/s in high mobility environments and downlink speeds as high as 1 Gb/s at low mobility (when the user is stationary or walking). While those kinds of capacities may seem outlandish when compared to the 3G speeds of today, Scrase said, he pointed out that live LTE-advanced systems are still two global network builds removed.

“It will be three or four years before we see widespread LTE deployments so we won’t see the first LTE-advanced networks for another six or seven years,” Scrase said. “We’re looking quite far out into the future.”

And while those high-data rates may seem unachievable today, Scrase said the data rates projected for LTE seemed unreasonably optimistic a few years ago. “When we first started on LTE, we published some big figures,” Scrase said. “It turns out the first LTE products have exceeded those figures.”