T-Mobile Beefs Up LTE Plans

Heavy Reading senior analyst Patrick Donegan says that a lot of 3G operators share T-Mobile's LTE aspirations, but reaching these 4G goals will not be so straightforward. "Whether they will be able to follow through on that will depend very much on the rate of commercialization of LTE and what other 3GPP operators are doing with the HSPA Evolution releases," he says. "If another operator in one of T-Mobile’s markets launches 28.8 Mbit/s, and meanwhile LTE is still a long way away from mass market maturity, it’s going to be difficult for T-Mobile stick to its guns and hold the line at 14.4 Mbit/s.”

The three big operators pushing LTE development are China Mobile Communications Corp. , NTT DoCoMo Inc. (NYSE: DCM), and Verizon Wireless . And T-Mobile believes it is every bit as aggressive as those three operators and should be included in that list, too. "We're the fourth," says Horn. (See DT's 4G Folly, AT&T & Verizon to Use 700 MHz for 4G , DoCoMo Takes LTE to 250 Mbit/s, and China Mobile Joins LTE Threesome.)

Earlier this year, T-Mobile demonstrated LTE with Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) equipment and tested an LTE mobile data session with Nortel Networks Ltd. gear. (See Good News for Nortel! and T-Mobile Demos LTE.)

T-Mobile is also interested in TD-LTE, the time-division duplex (TDD) version of LTE that China Mobile is backing as an LTE migration path from the Chinese 3G standard TD-SCDMA. TDD uses one channel and timed transmissions to send and receive signals, compared to frequency-division duplex (FDD), which uses different frequencies to transmit and receive and has been traditionally favored by cellular operators. (See China Mobile Flexes LTE Muscle.)

According to Horn, TD-LTE may not be just for the Chinese market. He says that TD-LTE could potentially be deployed in Europe in the 5MHz of TDD spectrum that most 3G operators have but currently don't use.

"If there is a TDD mode in LTE, then we can use our LTE in our TDD spectrum," says Horn. "Also, future spectrum might not be FDD anymore. We'll have more flexibility if we can choose. The Chinese market will push for it. And we'll see dualmode [i.e., TDD and FDD] chipsets very early in the market." (See Europe Waits for 4G Spectrum.)

Whether its TDD or FDD, T-Mobile has big plans for the 4G mobile broadband technology.

"LTE is suited in the long run, [around] 2020, to be the technology that you can consolidate all technologies onto -- GSM and UMTS," he said. "That's a vision for 12 years from now."

— Michelle Donegan, European Editor, Unstrung