Get Ready for LTE

As the wind vane of next-generation mobile broadband technology, LTE has become a focus in all telecom equipment exhibitions since 2008. Most major telecom equipment suppliers have demonstrated static LTE products and dynamic LTE service, indicating that the LTE industry chain has moved to an “expressway.”

However, from the viewpoint of hype cycle for networking and communications, LTE is still in the technology trigger phase and has not reached a level of large-scale commercial use. In addition, the global economic crisis has lagged the commercial application of LTE, more or less.

Among the mobile carriers, Verizon Wireless is the most aggressive; it has announced plans to construct an LTE trial network at the end of 2009. Other worldwide carriers have planned to deploy LTE networks from 2012 to 2013.

What will the steady CDMA carriers do to seize the market opportunity of the expanding broadband data subscribers and get ready for LTE? As a strategic partner of these carriers, what will ZTE do to help them continue as leaders in this fierce competition? To tackle these issues, ZTE offers several suggestions:

1. Continuously optimizing the existing CDMA2000 1X network, improving 1X user experience and increasing voice service profit. At present, the voice service still accounts for more than 60 percent of mobile telecom carriers’ income. With the increasing tariff competition, the scale effect can effectively solve the problem of decreasing 1X voice ARPU, expand the profit margin of 1X voice service and offer sufficient cash flow for network upgrade. Network quality and user experience are the key factors to retain the existing users and attract middle and high-end users. The carriers will be able to keep a steady user growth and increase voice service income only by continuously improving their network quality and focusing on customer experience and demands.

2. Improving network profitability by reducing expenditure and increasing income.

Reducing expenditure: The adoption of 1X enhanced technologies and the introduction of new green base stations can help the carriers to reduce the operation and maintenance costs per Erl. The mature 1X enhanced technologies such as 4GV and QLIC can help improve 1X spectral efficiency by merely a software upgrade without any change to hardware device, thus not only reducing the operation and maintenance costs of voice service, but also leaving some 1X frequencies for developing EV-DO services. By virtue of outstanding power-saving, small-footprint and transmission-saving features, green base stations help the carriers to greatly slash their network TCO.

Increasing income: The EV-DO broadband wireless access service expands the development space of value-added services. In the service-centered era, it is a popular model for most carriers to share profit with the intelligent terminal manufacturers by cooperating with them to develop customized terminals and services. For the carriers that have no rich value-added services, it is a good chance for them to cooperate with the service providers to develop value-added services and share the profit. For the carriers that have abundant value-added services, it is recommended to directly move to the top of the mobile telecom market value chain and dominate the value-added service development and the market exploration.

3. Taking the chance of network expansion or EV-DO upgrade to deploy LTE Ready network. By taking advantage of a mature EV-DO industry chain and by upgrading the existing CDMA2000 1X network to multi-carrier EV-DO networkat a proper time, the carriers can get as much value as they can out of the lowest investment. They can not only adopt the proper tariff to increase the number of data subscribers, but also develop subscribers’ habit of using data service. Moreover, they will be able to meet the subscribers’ future demands in a certain period by introducing the multi-carrier technology and therefore lay a solid foundation of user base for LTE.

As LTE leads 4G mobile broadband, mobile telecom carriers pay more attention to the smooth evolution of radio access network equipment. If the carriers start to deploy LTE Ready SDR base stations from now on, fulfill the goal of a unified radio access network and ensure support for 2G, 3G and 4G networks simultaneously by using only one set of access equipment, they can not only meet the current urgent development demands, but also make preparations for LTE, thus saving considerable network upgrade expenses.