Feb 3, 2011 5:49 PM,

MWC: Nokia Siemens Networks prepping product line for LTE-Advanced

By Kevin Fitchard

New Single RAN Advanced architecture will double down on baseband processing and radio capabilities in order to support upgrades beyond LTE

When long-term evolution (LTE) was still in the standards process, it was de rigueur at Mobile World Congress for infrastructure vendor to declare that their base stations could easily handle the upgrade to LTE, no matter what form the technology might take. Now the same trend has started with the next phase of mobile network evolution. Today Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI) announced it would take the wraps off a current-generation base station platform that can support the full upgrade to LTE-Advanced.

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NSN is definitely looking toward a long-term horizon with this product, since the first LTE networks have just barely switched on. But as in the case of long-term evolution itself, long-term can quickly become short term as exploding mobile data traffic quickly eats up capacity on the wireless network. LTE Advanced may still be several years away from commercialization but many operators already know they’re going to need it.

LTE-Advanced will add a host of new features to the current LTE standards and theoretically will be able to support speeds as high as 1 GB/s. But since those enormous capacities will require channels as big as 100 MHz in width, few operators—if any—will be able to take advantage of its full potential. But NSN appears to prepping for whatever possibilities the base station may be presented with in the future.

Called Single RAN Advanced, the architecture builds upon NSN’s Flexi Multiradio base station, which uses software defined radio to support multiple air interfaces simultaneously. The original kit emerged in 2009 to handle GSM, high-speed packet access and LTE. For the new Single RAN Advanced portfolio, NSN has souped up the base station to handle 10 Gb/s of combined capacity over multiple radio interfaces—basically whatever LTE-Advanced can throw at it and then some.

Called Flexi Multiradio 10, NSN will display its new monster base station along with a Flexi Lite base station for micro or pico deployments at MWC, though the latter won’t be commercially available until 2012.