Oz MobileNet

While Category 6 LTE devices are just coming onto the market the first being the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Ericsson, Qualcomm and Telstra are now demonstrating category 9 speeds.

In the demonstration of LTE-A 20 MHz in each of three bands B28 (700MHz) B3 (1800MHz) and Band (2600MHz) were aggregated to achieve peak speeds of 450MHz. A Qualcomm equipped category 9 LTE-A modem was used and on the network side Ericsson’s suitably enhanced RBS6000 family base stations on Telstra’s 4GX network completed the connection.

In May 2014 Telstra as part of its Mobile Update  gave its view of the speed steps with LTE advanced summarised as follows. Subsequently Telstra revised its date for introduction of category 9 in its network to April 2015 in capital city CBD’s.

The GSA has an updated report showing the adoption and peak speed of carrier aggregation capable networks world wide. They say that there are 49 operators in  24 countries with LTE CA. Their report is here.

Supporting these TLE Advanced speed steps on November 20 2014 Qualcomm announced their newest (5th) generation of Gobi modem chips the 9×45 family. This family of chips will be based on 20nm architecture and support LTE-A Category 10. They will support peak speeds of 450Mbps downlink and 100Mbps uplink on suitably upgraded LTE-A networks. These speeds are achieved by utilising 60MHz 3X carrier aggregation on the downlink and 40MHz 2X CA on the uplink. Category 10 devices have the same downlink as Category 9 but double the uplink speed.

Like previous families the 9×45 will be backward compatible with all older generations and Qualcomm say they will work on all major RF bands and combinations in both FDD and TDD LTE.

To make it truely future proof the device provides support for all four GPS constellations GPS (USA), Beidou (China), Glonass (Russia) and Galileo (EU) and for upcoming LTE Broadcast and Voice over LTE VoLTE. Qualcomm will include this modem family and hence capability into their latest system on a chip SoC Snapdragon 810.

The modem family has a companion RF360 Envelope Tracker. These devices are increasingly being used to vary voltage to power amplifiers in LTE devices to enable them to work at peak efficiency. The iPhone 6 and other newish devices employ envelope tracking.

The chips are sampling now and will be seen in commercial devices in 2015 according to Qualcomm. You can see the comparison of the Qualcom Snapdragon 800 series SoC’s here.

Source Ericsson Mobility Report – Click to see larger image

The latest Ericsson Mobility Report November 2014 predicts that by 2020 the world’s smartphones will grow to 6.1Bn of a total 9.5Bn mobiles.

Currently Ericsson say there are 2.7 Bn smartphones (38% of the 7.1Bn total). Mobile broadband subscriptions are projected to grow from 2.9Bn to 8.4Bn by 2020.

Ericsson predicts that smartphone data usage will increase from an average of 900 MB per month today to 3.5 GB per month by 2020. The combination of more devices and higher usage will see smartphone data increase by a factor of 8 between 2014 and 2020.

Source Ericsson Mobility Report – Click to see larger image

In Australia Telsyth reported that there were 16 million smartphones in use in Australia at June 2014 and predicted that this would increase to 17.5 million by the end of the year. This represents 74.5% of Australia’s 23.5 M population owning a smartphone.

As such there will be lower growth in smartphone subscriptions in Australia than Ericsson predicts worldwide and a little less pressure on mobile data network growth. Maybe these will only need to grow by a factor of 5 to 2020.

Telstra presentation at Comms Day Congress in October 2014 shows the huge change over the past 10 years in mobile network utilisation. 10 years ago the networks had 18 million subscriptions 98% of which were 2G CDMA and GSM/GPRS. 3G using WCDMA had been launched by 3 in April 2003 and was only available in capital cities. The Telstra network load in 2004 was 97% voice and 3% data.

10 years on as data has grown 120% p.a. data carried has increased 3,000 times and now represents 96% of the network load. Where data speeds in 2004 peaked at 160Kbps for CDMA 1XRTT, 50 Kbps for GPRS and, 384 Kbps for WCDMA in 2014 LTE offers peak speeds of 150 Mbps with widely availble LTE category 4 devices and if you are in the right place with the category 6 Samsung Galaxy Note 4 which supports LTE Advanced Category 6 speeds up to 300 Mbps.

Of course if you want to go back another 10 years to 1994 then 93% of the mobiles were AMPS 1G voice and SMS only devices and there were just 1.7 million mobiles in use. So in the 10 years from 1994 to 2004 mobile services grew over ten fold.

Telstra went on to mention in their presentation 700/1800 MHz LTE Advanced (they term 4GX) deployment in Perth, Sydney, Adelaide and Darwin CBDs, and in some regional towns. They , like Optus plan for rapid switch on of 700MHz from 1st January when the spectrum license officially starts. Telstra says it will provide 700 MHz 4GX coverage to a three kilometre radius of all capital city CBDs and 50 regional locations at 1 January and to 90% of the Australian population by the end of January 2015. With the most popular mobiles like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 supporting the APT 700MHz LTE band 28 Telstra expects to have over one million devices in its fleet ready to take advantage of the deeper and broader coverage and faster speeds offered by 4GX by the end of 2014.

The Telstra presentation is here.

Optus like Telstra is working hard to bring their 700MHz LTE Band 28 spectrum into use. They have the dual incentives to improve their depth of coverage in established 4G areas and to allow them to offer 4G service in regional areas where presently they don’t hold 1800MHz licenses. Optus also has launched LTE in 40 regional centres using 2600MHz spectrum 2X20MHz of which it acquired in the May 2013 4G spectrum auction. This 2600MHz spectrum became available in September 2014 and its use allows Optus to selectively introduce 4G ahead of availability of 700MHz in January 2015. Optus plans to have 4G in all capital cities and 100 regional towns in January 2015 and to provide 4G to 90% of the population by April 2015.

Vodafone is rolling out dual band LTE A using its existing 1800 MHz and re-farmed 850MHz spectrum with a focus on major metropolitan markets.  It terms this network upgrade 4G+. Vodafone said in July 2014 that it planned to have 4G available to 95% of metropolitan population by the end of 2014. This would be circa 75% of total population coverage. Vodafone has the advantage by using 850 and 1800MHz LTE that the vast majority of its 2 million 4G customers have devices which will work today in these bands.