MobileOne demonstrates LTE (4G) wireless technology at speeds of 100Mbps [HD]
Harold 3 Mar 2010

Introduction

HSPA+ has evolved over the years and reached a high speed of 21Mbps, in real life, these speeds are not sustainable. You will most likely be getting an average of 10Mbps if the network is less congested.

Have you been watching streaming video while on the move on your mobile phone. I bet your answer is a YES as it is very common these days to have video stream to your small screens while on the move. What about full scale videos, say in high definition at 1080p. You can't possibly stream it across a HSPA+ network without lags or pauses.

Another problem is that with existing HSPA+ network, the maximum theoretical upload speed is 5.76Mbps. Although it seems to be fast enough, it would take ages to upload say a 10 minute 720p HD Video clip. Current HSPA+ network's latency hovers around 50ms which is still pretty high for multimedia games that is played online.

LTE (Long Term Evolution) is supposedly 3.95G, the last step toward the 4th generation (4G) of radio technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks.  LTE is marketed as 4G. The world's first publicly available LTE-service was opened by TeliaSonera in the two Scandinavian capitals Stockholm and Oslo on the 14th of December 2009. LTE is a set of enhancements to the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) which will be introduced in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 8. Much of 3GPP Release 8 will focus on adopting 4G mobile communications technology, including an all-IP flat networking architecture.

Not only does it improve the Downlink and Uplink speed, round trip latency would also be slashed down to under 20ms which will be in the same league as fixed line cable networks.

There are various categories of devices and most of them belong to the Category 3. A typical Category 3 device promises Downlink of 100Mbps and 50Mbps uplink. In the near future, Cat 4 and 5 will raise it to 150Mbps/50Mbps and 300Mbps/75Mbps respectively.

So will LTE deliver what it promises after much reported hiccups at TeliaSonera in Stockholm and Oslo ? We check out the performance with Singapore's operator MobileOne at their office with their Chief Technical Officer Patrick Scodeller.

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