Ericsson will make the 'world's first' demonstration of an end-to-end phone call enabled by Long-Term Evolution – System Architecture Evolution (LTE/SAE), employing handheld mobile devices, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The demonstration call will be made using handheld mobile devices developed by Ericsson Mobile Platforms. Ericsson's LTE network equipment supports multi-user data rates of up to 160Mbps per cell.
LTE/SAE represents the next step in the evolution of the user experience, improving latency, capacity and throughput. Commercial launch is expected in 2009.
LTE supports a superior, mass-market user experience. It enhances such demanding applications as mobile video, blogging, advanced games, rich multimedia telephony and professional services. It also interoperates with existing cellular systems.
Robert Puskaric, head of Ericsson's mobile platforms business, says: "This world-first demonstration marks a key milestone in the development of LTE. It proves the stability and integration of our platform with a form factor accurate handheld device, reaching uplink and downlink data speeds of 25Mbit/s already today. Samples of our first LTE platform will be available in 2008."
Ulf Ewaldsson, Vice President and Head of Product Area Radio at Ericsson, says: "Today's demonstration of a complete end-to-end solution, including a small form factor accurate device operated over a flat network architecture, reaffirms Ericsson's technology leadership. It also reflects our commitment to developing LTE as an evolutionary path that will boost operators' service offering, while providing end users with a superior experience."
LTE is the next evolution in mobile network standards as defined by the 3GPP (Third-Generation Partnership Project) and supports operations in both the paired spectrum and unpaired spectrum. It enables efficient spectrum utilization for both legacy and future wireless frequency bands. Channel bandwidths of 1.4-20MHz are supported. The wide international support for LTE ensures economies of scale, enabling cost-effective solutions for network operators.
This world-first demonstration follows another recent Ericsson first, the demonstration of LTE in both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) mode on the same base station platform.