Long Term Evolution is indeed turning out to be a technology with a long lifespan, and the telecom industry is only in the early stages of mining the benefits of LTE — but there are hefty challenges that must still be dealt with, according to experts at the 2014 LTE Innovation Summit.
The fifth annual event examined the promise and problems across the LTE ecosystem.
Francis Sideco, senior director at IHS Research and Analysis, painted a bright picture of the expectations for LTE growth, including an estimate that LTE subscribers will reach 2.3 billion worldwide by 2018.
“For the first time in cellular history … we have the possibility of having a mobile technology that will serve us for more than just the 10-ish years before the next generation comes to be implemented,” Sideco said. He added that as the Internet of Things push opens up possibilities for new applications such as driverless cars and even pacemakers that could be cloud-controlled, but challenges such as battery life remain — along with the fact that much of the promise of LTE requires wider frequency channels than many operators are using for deployment today.
Still, “you evolve because of the challenges,” Sideco said.
Some of those challenges were laid out as well. Doug Makishima of D2 Technologies, which focuses on embedded software for mobile devices, discussed the complexity of deploying Voice over LTE and the Rich Communications Suite (RCS) such as joyn, which has been deployed by some global operators and MetroPCS in the U.S.
While Makishima said that some of VoLTE’s intial challenges have been resolved, he noted that something as taken for granted as the phone dialer presents a significant hurdle in VoLTE because devices have multiple native dialers as well as the ability to make calls directly from OTT applications, such as mapping.
Attendees also received a reality check from Peter Seidenberg of P3 Communications, which works with major operators on network optimization. Because of the complexity of hand-offs between LTE and legacy circuit-switched technologies, VoLTE is difficult to deploy without ubiquitous LTE. Seidenberg said that successful interworking between LTE and legacy networks is crucial to customer experience. He gave the specific example of call set-up times and said that in some networks, P3 has seen call set-up times of 30 seconds or more, which is unacceptable to customers.
“If you don’t solve this problem, forget about the innovation in LTE — your customers will run away,” Seidenberg said, adding that switching the device between networks can also lead to an unacceptable amount of time that a phone is unable to be reached. Many of the issues can be reduced or solved by proper configuration, he noted, but “‘it’s really hard work.”
“LTE is just a capacity technology” as most operators are currently using it, Seidenberg said — meant to deal with the data crunch while operators maintain voice coverage on their 3G networks. LTE services do have promise, he added, but “it is a bumpy road to get there.”
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