Will Huawei Make Any Headway in the US LTE Market?

It is clear that Huawei and Ericsson have been stumping the most contracts for LTE. Huawei recently teamed up with Vodafone Germany to test LTE in the digital dividend band and boasts contracts with TeliaSonera and Telenor. Rival to vofafone Germany, E-Plus also has a pilot, working with Ericsson, in the same digital dividend band.

Huawei's next target seems to be a tier 1 operator in te USA, which unlike Ericsson (with Verizon Wireless), Huawei doesn't have. It has already signed a deal with the cable company Cox Communications for a 3G network, but its the LTE contacts Huawei is after. Huawei recently opened an LTE lab in Plano, Texas and they are hoping to be in the running to become a supplier to AT&T for its LTE network although that deal is unlikely to materialize for at least another year.

Huawei's price competitieveness is putting pressure on vendors such as NSN and Alcatel-Lucent. Its seems as if its only a matter of time that before Huawei makes an impact on the US market.

Is Vodafone Looking at a Mass LTE Deployment in Germany?

With the announcement that Vodafone Germany will work in cooperation with Huawei to test LTE in the digital dividend bands (790-862MHz), wha is interesting is that Vodafone may be planning to deploy LTE in rural areas.

Is has been suggested by many operators, that LTE will initially only be deployed in high density urban areas or hotspots to help ease conjestion. The test that will be carried out by Vodafone and Huawei will be to assess the ability of LTE to provide wireless broadband coverage to rural and urban areas. The test will also look to prove LTE's compatibility with adjacent technologies such as digital TV and digital radio.

This announcement suggests that Vodafone is potentially looking to deploy LTE on a much larger scale if the test results are positive.

LTE Real World Performance, Hitting the Target?

LTE performance in "real world" conditions has been a very big topic of discussion at Informa's LTE World Summit conferences for a while now and we have slowly been getting a better idea of what to expect from operator and vendor trials that have been taking place as well as from the LSTI.

Nokia Siemens Networks today demonstrated a 35 Mbps LTE service at its offices in Centurion. The system handled bandwidth hungry applications like high definition movie streaming, video conferencing and online gaming with ease, while voice quality over the test network was excellent. NSN had previously demonstrated peak data rates of 160 Mbps.

It was about a year ago when I was speaking with a senior level executive from Vodafone, who said he expected average data rates of about 30Mbps from LTE, far higher than what we get with highly congested HSPA networks at the moment one might add. It certainly seems that LTE is hitting the mark when it comes to expectations of average data rates. Vodafone only came out and endorsed LTE very recently, one of the last major tier 1 operators to do so. They clearly wanted to be absolutely certain that LTE was up to scratch!

LTE Asia Operator Attendees Set to be From Across the Region

Delegates confirmed as attendees for the conference include the following companies:

Hutchison HK, Shanghai Mobile Communications Company, CSL, PCCW, GSM Kazakhstan, Chunghwa Telecom, Kcell, Vodafone, CTM, ViBO, SmartTone-Vodafone, Taiwan Mobile, WiTribe Asia, Orange Labs, PTCL, Tata Communications, Telkomsel, Maxis, Telkom CDMA, Aircel, Datacom, Packet One Networks, PT Bakrie Telecom

Not to mention the high level speakers that will be talking about their vision for LTE in the Asia-Pacific region including NTT DoCoMo, Starhub, Dialog Telecom, Softbank Mobile, eMobile, KDDI and regulators from Hong Kong, Indonesia and Japan.

There are still a limited number of free passes available for operators to claim. For more information or to download the conference brochure you can visit www.lteconference.com/asia