By Telecom Lead Team: Telefonica has unveiled and showcased the world’s ‘smartest’ 4G network, in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2012.
The network runs on 2.6 GHz frequency band and provides download speeds of 100 Mbps, between 40-60Mbps on upload. It offers improved indoor coverage and can increase capacity by up to 400% in high density data-traffic areas.
The deployment of LTE that Telefonica has brought to the MWC, together with Alcatel-Lucent, gives us a glimpse of a tomorrow where everyone and everything is seamlessly connected, and in superfast time. But the challenge ahead is to ensure that all the technologies currently being deployed –2G, 3G, LTE, WiFi and Fiber — can co-exist to deliver next generation communications,” said Enrique Blanco, chief technology officer at Telefonica.
In this deployment conventional radio base stations co-exist with 4G metro cells (small base stations incorporating antennas and radio) working on the same frequency and with no interference.
The most significant feature of Telefonica’s LTE network is its increased capacity with each cell comfortably supporting 30 people browsing simultaneously with average speed of 30Mbps.
“This close collaboration with Telefonica through our co-creation program is a clear articulation of the future of mobile broadband rather than merely evolving their current architecture, which was designed for voice and messaging,” said Wim Sweldens, president, wireless division, Alcatel-Lucent.
Telefonica said that its strategy is to develop intelligent networks that allow these different technologies to co-exist efficiently and cover customers’ growing connectivity needs in markets that are at different stages of development.
Telefonica’s network is based on Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio technology and was successfully demonstrated with the support of Samsung. The network is aimed toward a real “HetNet” network and improves mobile coverage by bringing small-cell base stations closer to the customer.
“We are excited to join Telefonica’s breakthrough LTE demonstration with our representative LTE models, GALAXY S II LTE and GALAXY Tab 8.9 LTE,” said DJ Lee, executive VP and head of sales and marketing team for Samsung Mobile.
Recently, Telefonica selected Ceragon as one of its global microwave backhaul vendors. Telefonica is initially expected to order systems from Ceragon for Chile, Panama and Venezuela, where the Group services approximately 25 million subscribers.
