NTT DoCoMo launches LTE mobile service

Hot on the heels of my previous post about Japan having 600 LTE base stations, then, on Christmas Eve (2011), NTTDoCoMo in Japan launched its LTE mobile services (ie USB sticks at this stage) under the brand name Xi.

According to the press release, then the speed looks pretty crispy for those of us in the UK.

In most outdoor areas, transmission speeds are up to 37.5 Mbps for the downlink and 12.5 Mbps for the uplink, but in heavily used indoor areas, such as the terminals at Tokyo International Airport, customers can enjoy up to 75 Mbps for the downlink, approximately 10 times faster than DOCOMO’s current 3G service with HSPA.

LTE also averages about three times more data in the downlink and two to three times more in the uplink, and transmission latency is just one-fourth that of HSPA.

According to the article on Gigom, then will fall back to the carrier’s 3G network in areas that lack 4G coverage (currently, Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka).

(Thanks to Eurotechnology for the original news alert.)

Japan has 600 LTE base stations

News of this capability comes from Gerhard Fasol at Eurotechnology - see this recent newsletter.

This sounds impressive but Mike Bryant, an analyst with market research company Future Horizons points out in this article from EE Times that LTE cells can support MUCH fewer users than 3G cells.

Whereas a 3G basestation cell could support 4,000 users, an LTE cell is smaller and can only support 600 users, so seven times as many basestations are needed to support the same number of users, Bryant said. That means additional sites have to be found and, in addition, placing LTE equipment on the roofs of tall buildings doesn't always provide street-level coverage as it normally did for 3G basestations.

Bryant further concludes that:

The result is likely to be an inability to service the demand created by sales of smartphones. Already monthly flat rate data usage plans are being dropped by many operators in favor of per-Gbyte charging schemes to increase profits and throttle demand.

I have been a firm believer in the view that all-you-can-eat data schemes are disastrous for operators and that per-Gbyte must surely make better sense, even if it is a marketing proposition.

Also, this interesting article (from July 2010) also declares that WiMax is dead as operators are deploying the spectrum to other technologies

LTE reaches 100Mbps in the lab

Nokia has announced 100 Mbps data transfer speeds using LTE. Story from MobileMonday.

LTE (or its official name 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution) - definition at wikipeidia).

From the same article:

Verizon Wireless and Vodafone Group plc shocked some in the industry when the companies announced they were considering LTE as the 4G evolution path for their respective networks. However, neither company has yet fully committed to the technology.

Many still expect Vodafone partner company and CDMA operator Verizon Wireless to eventually select Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) technology, which stands on the CDMA evolution path, and is often touted as an alternative to LTE technology, which is the WCDMA evolution path.