TD-LTE: An Opportunity for SA?

[jes]

TD-LTE: An Opportunity for SA?

TD-LTE is poised to become the first TDD mobile radio access network system deployed on a major scale in unpaired spectrum across the world

 

[jasweb]

Quite technical, but Interestiing. Thanx. Good that everyone (hardware wise) is goind the same route. Huawei and ZTE are also some of the largest network providers so using the same standard(s) will quickly enable economies of scale. Yes Wimax is a bit of a fail on consumer side since Intel never really flooded chipset with the technology and secondly base stations and consumer premise equipment (CPE) were either not easilly available or hellish expensive.

But we should be careful not to be too exited about the hype... And hope and pray that the spectrum issues are resolved ASAP

 

[SteveO]

While TDD is an option I cant see it happening that it Africa emerges as a leading light in using this duplex scheme. The investment would need to be massive, enough for one or two vendors to dedicate a substancial amount of their manufacturing targets to this single operator roll out.

I could however see Airtel India pushing for this as part of an agreement with a vendor and expanding this into Africa. That said, we need to remember that Airtel has only just started roll out of 3G in India, and in this regard I cant see them making another massive investment before Q1 2013, which by then may be too late

 

[Mr.CookieMonster]

I like the Technology revolution happening in South Africa, we have LTE comming in a few years time and LLU trying to unbundle the local loop. I am happy with the ways things are going.

 

[gargamel]

I like the Technology revolution happening in South Africa, we have LTE comming in a few years time and LLU trying to unbundle the local loop. I am happy with the ways things are going.

you must be one of those people who see the glass as 1/4 full instead of 3/4 empty. . .

 

[GTAMCN]

you must be one of those people who see the glass as 1/4 full instead of 3/4 empty. . .

Thats not allways a bad thing !

 

[UnUnOctium]

While TDD is an option I cant see it happening that it Africa emerges as a leading light in using this duplex scheme. The investment would need to be massive, enough for one or two vendors to dedicate a substancial amount of their manufacturing targets to this single operator roll out.

I could however see Airtel India pushing for this as part of an agreement with a vendor and expanding this into Africa. That said, we need to remember that Airtel has only just started roll out of 3G in India, and in this regard I cant see them making another massive investment before Q1 2013, which by then may be too late

Investment isn't really big. There are no existing networks so the investment will be the same for either and even if they were, it's easy to convert/add it as a capability on the base station software-defined radios. Only issue is the handsets and this is why everyone's trying to push their variant.

 

[Nameite]

Is there such a need for LTE speeds though?

I think 21Mbps is quite fast already if fully utilized...since our packages arent really uncapped in SA?

 

[Bern]

Is there such a need for LTE speeds though?

I think 21Mbps is quite fast already if fully utilized...since our packages arent really uncapped in SA?

When is anything ever fast enough???

More seriously, you are forgetting that wireless is a shared access medium, therefore maximum speed is the SHARED maximum speed. Therefore the more bandwidth they manage to pack in to a specific spectrum the better the average speeds will be.

 

[SteveO]

Investment isn't really big. There are no existing networks so the investment will be the same for either and even if they were, it's easy to convert/add it as a capability on the base station software-defined radios. Only issue is the handsets and this is why everyone's trying to push their variant.

There are no real carrier-grade SDRs out there. Loads of vendors say they have it, but they really dont exist. This is what I have heard from customers.
By investment I mean in order to bring those TDD greenfield/expansion cost down you would need a big order to introduce the same economy of scale as FDD for say 100 operators in 50 countries.

When you look at africa we are talking maybe 300 sites on average, in India and US you talk rollouts of 10000+ so its really chalk and cheese.