This page is a round-up of our blog posts on wireless technologies and standards. Here you will find explanations of new wireless technologies, including LTE, LTE-Advanced, small cells, HetNets and much more. You will also find discussion of the features of past, present and future 3GPP standards releases. For information on the roll-out of wireless technologies and standards, please visit our page on Mobile Network Deployment.
In the quest for substantial increases to the capacity and throughput of mobile networks, unlicensed radio spectrum is expected to have an important role in 5G systems from 2020. However, work is already underway in 3GPP to allow 4G LTE-Advanced networks to take advantage of unlicensed spectrum much sooner. The Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) feature will… Read more
Since my first post on fifth generation (5G) mobile networks, in August 2013, there has been a dramatic upsurge in activity and publicity on the topic. Leading organisations in the mobile industry have become increasingly vocal, in white papers, conferences and press releases, about the benefits of 5G, the technologies they expect to feature and the… Read more
With all the focus on LTE, LTE-Advanced and now 5G, it is easy to forget that High Speed Packet Access (HSPA/HSPA+), based on 3G WCDMA, is still the dominant mobile broadband technology worldwide. In February 2014, the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) reported that all WCDMA operators had launched HSPA, with 547 networks providing access to… Read more
One of the major features of LTE-Advanced is Carrier Aggregation, which allows mobile network operators to combine a number of separate LTE carriers. This enables them to increase the peak user data rates and overall capacity of their networks and to exploit fragmented spectrum allocations. I introduced the fundamentals of Carrier Aggregation in a previous… Read more
One of the highlights of 3GPP Release 12 is the introduction of LTE Device-to-Device (D2D) discovery and communication. Release 12 is only the start, but ultimately D2D will create a host of new service opportunities, while also achieving significant performance and efficiency benefits in LTE networks. It does this by enabling mobile devices to discover… Read more
A few months ago I wrote a summary of facts and figures on HSPA+, LTE and LTE-Advanced, based on the 3GPP Release 11 standard. With Release 12 due to be finalised in the middle of 2014, I thought I would write about some of the developments in the pipeline in the 3GPP work programme. The expected… Read more
Following a low-profile launch by Three in December 2013, all four of the UK mobile network operators now offer 4G LTE services to at least some of their subscribers. While early impressions of LTE data services are favourable, I have heard mixed reviews about the quality of voice calls for LTE subscribers in the UK,… Read more
One of the tools in the LTE toolbox of radio features is Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antennas. MIMO enables radio systems to achieve significant performance gains by using multiple antennas at their transmitters and receivers. In my Facts and figures on HSPA+, LTE and LTE-Advanced I comment that LTE-Advanced uses base stations and mobile… Read more
Here in the UK, where LTE services are still in their infancy, it feels premature to be looking forward to the fifth generation of mobile networks. However, in recent months there has been a significant increase in activity related to 5G. There has also been a flurry of misleading hype referring to LTE-Advanced (which strictly… Read more
Since I wrote my previous post on the capabilities of HSPA+, LTE and LTE-Advanced, SK Telecom has announced the world’s first end-to-end commercial implementation of LTE-Advanced. Other network operators, including Verizon, AT&T and NTT DoCoMo, have announced plans, trials and network implementations of LTE-Advanced, but SK Telecom is the first to offer a commercial service with mobile… Read more
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