4G LTE: Or The Dawn of Quadruple Play Services
Providing voice, Internet, and content/video to subscribers on the move without the need for a cable to access the network has been a major ambition of most telecom operators. Quadruple play is the marketing buzzword for a service that combines the triple play of broadband Internet, television, and telephone with the mobility afforded by wireless.
Recent advances in wireless technologies such as OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) and MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna systems, along with other radio techniques, offer the ability to transfer information over a wireless link rapidly, at great distances, and in non- line-of-sight conditions. The emergence of these technologies means that one would never need to be connected by a wire to anything, even while at home.
These technologies are supported by major wireless standard groups like the IEEE and 3GPP/3GPP2 as well as wireless equipment vendors like Nortel, Ericsson, Lucent, and Nokia. They have adopted these technologies to develop global standards for future wireless communications that can deliver quadruple play services. These services can be delivered to mobile users using wireless networks that will evolve from the HSDPA/HSUPA networks now being deployed and are named “Long Term Evolution” or, as more commonly known, LTE.
LTE radio networks, planned for deployment in 2008-2010, seek to offer a real quad-play experience to mobile users. They will introduce mobile subscribers to bundled services that combine broadband Internet, television, and telephone. The real boom though will take place with the introduction of 4G wireless networks where mobile users will have seamless access to all of the different wireless network technologies, with seamless handover and roaming from one to the other without service discontinuity!
The deployment timeframe of 4G wireless networks is going to be sometime between 2010 and 2015. New services using 4G networks are going to radically change the wireless scene and how users will use their mobile devices to access these services.
Editor’s Note: Eogogics offers an extensive curriculum of LTE courses