Business News Americas | March 21, 2011 | Patrick Nixon
The 1,800 MHz band is looking increasingly attractive as an option for LTE deployments, and Latin America could be one of the regions to take advantage of it, Alan Hadden, president of the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), told BNamericas.
According to the executive, there has been a lot of interest in the industry in refarming or reusing the 1,800 MHz spectrum for LTE because propagation is better than in the 2,600 MHz band, which has been much touted as one of the main bands for the first rollouts.
“Very simply, it’s just physics. If you deploy LTE in 1,800 MHz, you can have twice the coverage area compared with deploying it in 2,600 MHz. So there is an economic benefit,” Hadden said.
In addition, many operators around the world already have 1,800 MHz spectrum, so they are not waiting for its allocation. And in some cases, operators have a substantial amount of 1,800 MHz, Hadden said.
“So this refarming of 1,800 MHz is of significant interest to many operators, and we, as GSA and [the GSM Association] GSMA, are leading an initiative to really show the industry what this opportunity is in the hope we can encourage products to support the 1,800 MHz band,” Hadden said.
In Latin America, spectrum allocation has largely followed the US model, allocating 850 MHz or 1,900-2,100 MHz. Brazil was the main exception in allocating 1,800MHz for mobile.
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