SAN FRANCISCO—Sony Ericsson's new CTO,
Jan Uddenfeldt, told a group of industry executives June 3 that the 4G mobile
broadband market is "exploding" at this time and that the powerful
protocol will be in regular use worldwide sooner than many people think.
Uddenfelt,
named to the job June 2 after spending more than 20 years with Ericsson in
other capacities, made his remarks at the 4G
Summit & Open Mobile Summit at the Parc 55 Hotel here. Uddenfeldt will
be based in Redwood City, Calif.
"In just a few years, there will be more broadband connections than there
are people [on Earth]," Uddenfeldt said, citing market projections
compiled by the industry. "Right now, there are about 500 million mobile
devices in use, with about 10 percent being 4G. By 2014, there will be 5
billion, and by 2020, we expect to have 50 billion devices being used in the
world—with 50 percent of them being mobile broadband."
As of June 4, the human population of the world is estimated by the United
States Census Bureau to be 6.8 billion.
4G mobile broadband refers to the fourth generation of cellular wireless
standards. The first generational move was from 1981 analog (1G) to digital
(2G) transmission in 1992.
This was followed in 2002 by 3G multimedia support, spread spectrum
transmission and speeds of at least 200K bps.
4G is a converged protocol that refers to all-IP-packet-switched networks,
mobile ultrabroadband (gigabit speed) access and multicarrier transmission. Mobile
WiMax and first-release 3G LTE (Long Term Evolution), which are pre-4G
technologies, have been available on the market since 2005 and 2009,
respectively.
Sprint Nextel has announced that it will be using WiMax and branded it as a 4G
network. Vodafone, Qualcomm and Verizon Communications have said they will be
using LTE as the basis for their 4G networks, due to be launched later in 2010.
An advanced LTE protocol system, owned by TeliaSonera, first went online as a
4G system in Stockholm and Oslo
on Dec. 14, 2009, with
Ericsson providing the core network. Both Sweden
and Norway have
adopted LTE as their 4G standard; LTE is being considered for an international standard
by a working group of the IEEE (Institute
of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers) standards organization.
TeliaSonera, with about 106 million mobile customers, is the largest telephone
company and mobile network operator in Sweden
and Finland. It
recently launched a fiber broadband network in Denmark
and has users in Eastern Europe, Central Asia
and Spain.
"4G mobile broadband is built on LTE/IP," Uddenfeldt said.
"Mobile data traffic is growing at about 175 to 200 percent per year and
will pass up voice traffic in a few years. Sixty-four operators in 31 countries
thus far have committed to launching 4G/LTE networks; 22
will come online this year, and we'll have 39 networks by the end of
2012."
4G/LTE is another iteration in the computer industry's continual march toward
bigger, faster and better. Bigger, meaning more bandwidth and data storage
capacity; faster, meaning the movement of more bits from place to place in
shorter time frames; and better, meaning that all these improvements serve the customer—and
the enterprise—more effectively.
4G/LTE has a theoretical net bit rate capacity of up to 100M bps in the
downlink and 50M bps in the uplink, Uddenfeldt said.
But the industry still has a lot of work to do, he said, to make 4G/LTE the
best communications protocol ever created.
"We need smarter pipes built everywhere. So much more needs to be
converged; convergence requires both throughput and signaling scale,"
Uddenfeldt said. "The radio and packet parts of the network need to be
combined and optimized.
"All IP networks and end-to-end deployments are not so much converged yet.
We use the same core routers, but edge routers are different. We also think
that there will be converged services, and they should be the same type of
full-fledged Web services hat are being used now," Uddenfeldt said.
"Smart phones and iPads are changing everything. A mobile device just
isn't a Web browser anymore."
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