Telisonera has taken its LTE network live, the first one in the industry. The network is operational in Stockholm and Oslo, with additional major Scandinavian cities to follow. It is currently usable only by laptop users via an LTE dongle from Samsung, but if you’ve got one you might see speeds in the 100Mbps neighborhood. But one thing you can’t do is find a phone that will use the network. Well, I suppose you can if you get one of those handsets that plug into your laptop, but that’s not really the point right? LTE phones won’t show up until next year sometime, which means that for now that network is going to be serving up lots of data to a select few of the biggest mobile bandwidth warriors in the region.
Of course, the company didn’t just claim the first LTE network, the actual quote was:
“We are very proud to be the first operator in the world to offer our customers 4G services. “
There are two ways to read that. First there’s the way Marketwatch did, that it meant the first in the world to do any 4G commercially. That of course sends a cold shoulder in the direction of clwr and the entire technology of WiMAX, which is also a 4G technology and which is currently serving a dozen or more markets in the US and more every week it seems like. Or there’s the second way to read that, as in first to offer 4G to ‘our’ customers, as in Scandinavian customers. Ah English language, what would we do without your ambiguity.
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I’d have to brush up on some old notes here, but I think the last paragraph raises some issues regarding the claims of ITU standard compliance in marketing. It’s a pretty common trend for network operators to jump the gun in claiming to have a next-gen network. CDMA operators were notorious for that when they rolled out CDMA2000 infrastructure, frequently calling these systems 3G. They really weren’t close to meeting 3G requirements until they upgraded to EV-DO. So I get leery when I hear WiMAX operators claiming to have 4G networks. It’s not until we see a later version of WiMAX 802.16 that the throughput reaches this newly-established standard. I think LTE is probably closer to the mark at the outset. Either way, I suspect everyone is using the 4G label as liberally as possible for their own marketing efforts.
Hmmm, what exactly is the mark we are trying to get closer to? I guess that’s the problem with such acronyms and buzzwords as 4G. Because the definition is fuzzy, marketing can do what it likes.
However, as I see it, both LTE and Wimax in all current forms represent a large enough jump over 3G technologies to qualify for ‘next generation’ status.
The ITU is pretty explicit about some of the basic qualifications for 4G under the IMT-Advanced framework.
But this has often been an issue with ITU generational standards. Operators pretty much use the standards as a marketing gimmick, and they do a much better job of getting their concept of 3G or 4G across to the public than the ITU does.
Operators eventually evolve into the standardized framework, but they like to claim next-gen status preemptively.
thanks for the update on TeliaSonara LTE deployment…can someone give us a better feel for..
1. The extent of the deployment across thier network currently
2. provide more detail on the practical not theoretical speed…i realize that vendors are qouting 100mbps…what would be very useful is to understand what a likley speed would be given topagraphy and other forms of RF interference
thanks
I just came across this this AM, A generic article to be sure, but good for some of us geek wanna-be’s
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=4g-networks-open-for-business-sort-2009-12-14&sc=CAT_TECH_20091216