CTIA: Motorola getting jump on CDMA-to-LTE migration

Motorola today said it has successfully completed a handoff between a CDMA and Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in its labs, thus demonstrating the viability of the two different technologies working in unison on the same flat IP core. Motorola also announced its LTE platform was now ready for trials, using the same architecture as its already commercially deployed WiMAX kit, and would have its first trial base station in the field in the current quarter.

While the attention was focused today on Motorola's plans to split apart its handsets and network division, the vendor offered a sneak peak at several new initiatives and products, all of which it plans to show off for the first time at the industry's largest North American trade show, CTIA Wireless 2008. Motorola hinted at the latest in its line of mobile TV players, this with an entirely touch-based user interface, a new WiMAX home gateway and its first CDMA femtocell to complement the UMTS femtocell announced at the Mobile World Congress in February. But Motorola's saved the big guns for its networking division, which is clearly trying to establish the same early lead in LTE that it has established in fellow 4G architecture WiMAX.

The handoff between CDMA 1X EV-DO Rev. A channel to LTE channel was a pure data transition across IP networks. Moto hasn't yet tackled the more difficult proposition of transferring a CDMA 1X circuit voice call to an LTE IP channel using VoIP. But the experiment did demonstrate VoIP-to-VoIP handover as well as streaming video, Motorola said. The LTE kit is built using the same basic orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) architecture of its WiMAX base station. LTE marketing manager Stephane Daeuble said that 75% of the WiMAX platform has been re-purposed for LTE, saving Motorola considerably on development costs and allowing it to get a working platform to market much sooner.

Motorola was one of the five vendors selected by Vodafone and Verizon Communications to trial its LTE gear in a joint-operator trial. A critical component of those trials will be demonstration interoperability between devices on the CDMA and LTE networks, something that so far hasn't been defined in any standard. CDMA follows the 3GPP2 evolutionary path, while LTE is the latest release in GSM's 3GPP UMTS standard. Verizon's commitment to LTE has been hailed by the GSM community as a long-awaited convergence of the two main cellular standards, but the details of how the more loosely standardized CDMA will be shoehorned into GSM's much more strictly defined standard are still being worked out. As a CDMA vendor, Motorola may have a leg up over a Nokia Siemens or Ericsson in the competition for Verizon dollars, but then Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent not only have huge CDMA businesses, they have also built all of Verizon's current 3G networks.

Daeuble said that the Motorola will not only be trialing with its LTE kit with Verizon/Vodafone this quarter but will have several other trials running worldwide, though he declined to name the customers. As far as commercial deployments go, Motorola is on the same timeline as its competitors, targeting the end of 2009. The platform will be on exhibit at CTIA Wireless next week, where Motorola will replicate its CDMA-to-LTE hand off demo.

Motorola's other infrastructure product was squarely aimed at the likes of Verizon and fellow CDMA operators. Moto will debut its CDMA femtocell, designed by OEM partner Airvana. While Motorola appears to have developed its UMTS femtocell internally, it sought out CDMA technologist Airvana for the CDMA version, using IP multimedia subsystem-session initiation protocol architecture. "The CDMA femtocell is a bit more complex than the UMTS femtocell," said Paul Callahan, Airvana vice president of business development. "It has to support dual radios: 1X and EV-DO."

Originally a pioneer in EV-DO technologies, Airvana has been branching out into signaling and gateway infrastructure, and has lately been focusing on the emerging femtocell field. It has partnered with Nokia Siemens to jointly sell a UMTS and femtocell combo, and it won an OEM contract with Thomson to build its UMTS femtocell. Airvana's relatonship with the CDMA vendors, though, is much stronger. Nortel uses Airvana's EV-DO technology in its 3G CDMA infrastructure. Motorola, however, does not, making the OEM deal the first time Airvana has done business with the vendor.

Motorola today also previewed its latest mobile TV device, the DH02, which is remarkably similar to the other two large-screened handheld video players launched at CES and Mobile World Congress. All three have Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) chips to receive multicast and broadcast video and digital video recorder capabilities. The key differences are the DH02, has an entirely touch-screen interface and high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) connectivity, allowing it to receive on-demand unicast video as well as other two-way data services. Finally Moto announced its new WiMAX gateway, a fully Wave 2-compliant device designed for the Sprint and Clearwire networks and intended only for data connectivity. Motorola would not say which chipset was embedded in the CPE, though. So far Moto has been using Intel and Beceem Communications chipsets in its gateways.

In other WiMAX news, ZTE said it would use Beceem Wave 2 chipsets in its WiMAX PC dongles and desktop gateway modems. ZTE is expected to be a major supplier of some of the initial modems on the Sprint Xohm network, making the dealpotentially huge for Beceem.