Many opportunities for LTE despite emphasis on 5G
BARCELONA, Spain – Industry trade association 4G Americas singled out broadband spectrum access as the major driver of advancements in current LTE networks and as a key part of evolving potential 5G standards.
4G Americas President Chris Pearson, and Jose Otero, director of Latin America and the Caribbean for 4G Americas, were on hand at this week’s Mobile World Congress 2015 to discuss market trends in their respective regions.
“North America is a leader in LTE as far as the number of connections, as far as the best coverage and, even if you look at the number of operators, right now there are 67 commercial networks,” Pearson told RCR Wireless News.
Pearson added that LTE-Advanced is a major emerging technology that will boost network efficiency by supporting carrier aggregation.
“LTE-Advanced will become more prevalent in the next year,” he said. “We continue to look at lots of opportunities with LTE.”
Otero described recent spectrum auctions in Latin America as providing the consumer with “more than two operators in every single country in Latin America. We started 2014 with 26 LTE networks with limited coverage. At the end of the year, we had 45 networks.”
Otero expects 10 to 15 more LTE networks to come online in Latin America by the end of 2015.
Pearson explained the education work 4G Americas does with governments around the regions as meant to convey the fundamental importance of spectrum access to telcos.
“All the possibilities of what mobile broadband can do … it’s a requirement to have more spectrum,” he said. “We can optimize our networks, we can continue to improve our networks … but really the lifeblood of the industry, like water is to a fish, you need more spectrum.”
Pearson and Otero called for industry players to start the process of building consensus on as yet undefined 5G standards ahead of planned deployments projected for 2018 and 2020.
“The time is now,” Pearson said of analyzing 5G possibilities, but LTE and LTE-A still have much to offer.
“I think 4G Americas is on record and feels very strongly that LTE and LTE-Advanced have a huge runway of robust innovation ahead of them.”
