Kyocera, Motorola Display LTE Base Stations at CTIA

Kyocera Communications announced it is displaying a prototype of its all-in-one LTE base station in its booth at the CTIA Wireless conference, along with three iBurst terminal devices.

Kyocera has not yet conducted field trials of the Long Term Evolution base station it has on display, and for now is restricting descriptions of its benefits to the base station's small size, the ease with which it can be installed and its performance qualities, which the company says can help to reduce operating expenses through low power consumption and simplified maintenance.

WiMax was the first 4G technology to arrive in the United States, but as its three-year head start over competing technology LTE closes up, the CTIA Wireless conference offers an opportunity to build buzz around both next-generation wireless technologies.

LTE technology-which Verizon Wireless, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI have all announced plans to roll out commercially as early as 2010-can offer maximum data rates of 100 Mbps in downlink and 50M bps in uplink for every 20MHz of spectrum.

Motorola is also displaying LTE gear at CTIA: its WBR (wireless broadband radio) 500r LTE eNodeB base station.

In a statement, Motorola described the eNodeB as a "very agile, zero-footprint LTE solution that addresses the full scope of wireless carriers' deployment needs to provide an advanced LTE RAN solution that meets size and deployment cost criteria."

The eNodeB LTE base stations will support Frequency Division Duplex and Time Division Duplex and be available in frequencies ranging from 700MHz to 2.6GHz and with bandwidths from 1.4MHz to 20MHz.

Darren McQueen, vice president of wireless broadband networks for Motorola, said the company is on track to release the LTE solutions for 700MHz and 2.6GHz later in 2009.

On April 1, Kyocera additionally announced it had joined Ng Connect, a program created by Alcatel-Lucent in February 2009 for vendor partners looking to collaborate on solutions for next-generation broadband services, such as LTE. Motorola is already a partner, as are Hewlett-Packard and Samsung.

Kyocera is also displaying three iBurst terminal devices at CTIA, a USB key, a 1MB desktop modem and a 2MB desktop modem.

iBurst-a 4G technology separate from LTE and developed by Kyocera-is an HC-SDMA (high-capacity spatial-division multiple access) technology for mobile broadband wireless communication, which Kyocera describes as being on par with fixed-line communications while offering wide coverage and high spectrum efficiency over narrow bandwidths.

According to Kyocera, iBurst offers uplinks and downlinks of up to 32M bps per 5MHz, which makes it small enough to work on the GSM band. Kyocera states that it is currently in use in 10 countries, including the United States, and is available in 1.7GHz, 1.9GHz and 2.0GHz configurations.