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| India recently saw Gigabit FTTx connectivity in Hyderabad |
Telecom industry is referring Gigabit LTE as next of current 4G/LTE offering; Gigabit LTE is also being advertised as 5G. Many experts use the term LTE Advanced Pro, but Qualcomm promotes the term 'Gigabit LTE'. Technically Gigabit LTE means LTE to offer 1Gbps download speed.
Chinese equipment vendor ZTE explains Gigabit LTE as pre-5G or key to 5G, paving the way for a comprehensive evolution from 4G to 5G. Technically we may even call it as 4.9G.
Road to LTE to Gigabit LTE:
Consider your network as a highway of trucks and you can understand the basic theory of upgrade process of LTE. Say, that highway is jammed by huge number of cars and that is exactly as LTE network is over loaded by huge traffic from huge number of users. And your data speed gets crippled.
How to handle this situation, adding more lanes to highway. That's similar to carrier aggregation.
If highway is overloaded even after adding more lanes, so adding flyovers that stack on top of each other is an option. That's done by 4x4 MIMO (multiple input, multiple output). It opens up new levels to the carrier highway by using four radios and four antennae in cell towers and your phone, respectively, creating more channels to send and receive data on the same spectrum.
But even after CA and 4x4 MIMO, LTE network is still clogged, and usual speed is 30Mbps, which is too slow compared to 1Gbps.
Now consider the data as the packages sent by the trucks, so putting more packages in trucks means it does not increase the traffic. Here comes 256QAM. Quite a complex technology it is and I better skip the complex part.
And the last one - Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) comes to save spectrum. A part of LTE-U (U stands for unlicensed), LAA is designed to aggregate licensed and non licensed spectrum. With LAA operators can achieve 1Gbps with 20MHz licensed spectrum (which could require 60MHz without LAA).
These four methods - aggregation to open more lanes, 4x4MIMO to stack them and 256QAM to squeeze more data into channels and lastly LAA (to deployed less amount of licensed spectrum) create a new platform for evolving LTE towards 5G.
Supported devices:
Qualcomm has X16 LTE modem which supports Gigabit LTE. At present Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor has this modem. A lot of present day flagships like Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+, Sony XZ Premium, HTC U11, Motorola Z2 Force Edition, Xiaomi Mix 2, Xiaomi Mi 6, Essential’s One, OnePlus 5, OPPO Find 9 are capable of 1Gbps LTE speed.
Qualcomm has another modem - X20 LTE modem which is technically advanced in few ways - support for 5x carrier aggregation (5x20MHz), increased number of usable spatial streams from 10 to 12, 10nm LPE processing.
Apart from these arsenals Qualcomm has a recent addition. In the middle of October 2017 Qualcomm just has announced the latest 5G modem - X50 5G modem [Qualcomm - Home of X50] as 'this is the world’s first 5G data connection over a 5G mobile chipset made for mobile devices'. The Snapdragon X50 5G modem includes SDR051 mmWave transceiver—the next-gen RF companion to the modem, supporting 28 GHz mmWave and advanced features such as adaptive beamforming and antenna switch diversity. It can connect using up to 800 MHz of bandwidth via 8x100 MHz carrier aggregation.
Samsung Exynos 9 series 8895 modem - is another commercially available device that can support Gigabit LTE. It is being used on Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note 8.
Intel also has a similar portfolio Intel® XMM™ 7560 Modem, which has no taker as of now. May it will be included in next generation of Intel Inside laptops or laptops.
However Qualcomm believes that 1Gbps can be reached only on lab environment and in real time the downlink speed could be reached 100-300Mbps.
But handset vendors also rate-limited the chipset. Pixel 2 is found to be capped to 800 Mbit/s, Apple iPhone 8/X is at 600Mbit/s.
As per the latest October 2017 data from GSA, there are operators investing on 5G and some of them are achieving 1 Gigabit per second downlink speed.
Gigabit LTE - October 2017 Update from GSA:
- 68 operators are investing, at a technology level, in Gigabit LTE
- 20 have launched commercial services
- 7 have announced Gigabit (or very near at 979 Mbit/s) speeds in their commercial networks.
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| Three core LTE network - Gigabit LTE Operators |
Overall on LTE Update (October 2017): via GSA website : www.gsacom.com
- 814 operators investing in LTE
- 644 commercially launched LTE or LTE-Advanced networks in 200 countries, including 100 LTE-TDD (TD-LTE) networks launched in 57 countries
- 125 commercial VoLTE networks in 60 countries, and 205 operators investing in VoLTE in 95 countries
- 212 launched networks that are LTE-Advanced, in 105 countries
- 7 launched networks that support Cat-16 user equipment (UE)
- 680-700 anticipated commercially launched LTE networks by end-2017 (GSA forecast)
- 18 NB-IoT and 5 LTE-M/Cat-M1 networks commercially launched, with 60 NB-IoT and 21 LTE-M/Cat-M1 networks planned or being trialled
- 103 operators investing in 5G (demos, tests and trials of one or more constituent technologies)
- 32 operators, at least, that have now made public commitments to deployment of pre-standards ‘5G’ or standards-based 5G networks in 23 countries.
5G in India:
India is not to active to match the global pace of technology adoption. We got 3G by end of 2008, while world's first 3G network of NTT Docomo went commercial in 2001 in Japan. World got its first 4G/WiMAX network in 2006 in South Korea (from KT), and first 4G/LTE network in 2009 in Norway and Sweden (from TeliaSonera). India got it's first LTE network from Airtel in 2012 and LTE went mainstay in India by 2016 when Jio launched free services.
As of now both Airtel and Jio is testing LTE-CA in several cities, and Airtel is deploying 4x4 MU MIMO in Kolkata and Bengaluru and it will be expanded to Pune, Hyderabad and Chandigarh at later time. Huawei and ZTE are supplying MIMO equipments and Ericsson is providing technical solutions to Airtel. In next 2 years Airtel may ditch 3G and will continue to offer 2G/4G services only.
Airtel is also joined hands with South Korean telecom partner SKTelecom to leverage its expertise to build the most advanced telecom network in India.
Under this partnership, Airtel and SKT will also collaborate on an on-going basis towards jointly building and enabling an ecosystem for the introduction of evolved technology standards of 5G, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Internet of Things (IoT) in the Indian context.
Samsung is the only technology partner for Jio, which has all-IP LTE network without any legacy 2G/3G network. Jio's all-IP LTE network can be easily upgraded to 5G and beyond, as the Jio officials informed. Just like Jio's 4G trials, we have almost zero updates from Jio regarding their advancement to Jio.
Smaller 4G players but incumbents like Vodafone and Idea are also deploying LTE in a better way before their merger. Both companies want to deploy massive MIMO on their networks very soon, which I don't believe actually. Vodafone and Idea will be merged entity soon, and I believe after the merger we can see actual definite movement regarding 4G and beyond from this entity.
As per ABI Research, massive MIMO will be the top level technology on 4G networks and it will grow much faster rate along with LTE Advanced and LTE Advanced Pro. By 2021 MIMO enabled LTE platform will be at top as per the number of installed cellular base. As a result huge demand on advanced antenna systems including complex passive antennas and large scale massive MIMO active antennas will create a major makeover to the telecom industry.
As per ABI Research, massive MIMO will be the top level technology on 4G networks and it will grow much faster rate along with LTE Advanced and LTE Advanced Pro. By 2021 MIMO enabled LTE platform will be at top as per the number of installed cellular base. As a result huge demand on advanced antenna systems including complex passive antennas and large scale massive MIMO active antennas will create a major makeover to the telecom industry.
COAI, the active association of Indian telecom operators has taken a collaborative initiative - 5G Forum India. The forum is focus to create a roadmap for 5G in the country and wants to work with government angencies as well to keep aside the roadblocks.
Even state owned carrier BSNL does not want to sit idle, they have signed a MoU with ZTE to collaborate on 5G and pre-5G technology. However BSNL is yet to launch 4G/LTE and they are not my choice to bring 5G in India.
In early February 2018, Government of India has announced its 5G ambition - to create a test bed in IIT-Chennai. The project is multi-institutional initiative which includes IIT Chennai, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Delhi, IIT Hyderabad, IISc Bangalore, CEWiT (Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology at IIT Madras) and SAMEER in Chennai.
As this project is yet to fly off, we don't know much about funding amount or more details. But it excited every institute linked with the project.
IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthi said, “It will incorporate several new technologies developed and will be compliant with the emerging global 5G standard to which India is making significant contributions. In particular, it will include Internet of Things (IoT), Millimeter Wave Communications, Massive MIMO, Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualisation, LiFi, and Network Security,” He also estimated the project cost would be around Rs 240 crore and it can be started by next 6 months.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) too is soon expected to issue a set of recommendations to the government that would enable companies wanting to conduct research experiments for the latest generation of mobile telephony to do so domestically.
Already many experts expressed their concern regarding the ambitious 5G project by Govt. of India - many believe these test beds will be very much limited compared t0 real life 5G usage.
Ericsson and IIT Delhi [update]
In March 2017 Ericsson AB had signed a MoU with IIT-Delhi to jointly work on a programme for 5G technology development in India. Read the press release from IIT-D here.
Under the agreement Ericsson will set up a Centre of Excellence and Incubation Centre to create roads towards 5G. The lab would be running from mid 2017 but there is not much update as of now. But during December 2017 during Ericsson Connect 2017 event in Mumbai, Ericsson showcased up to 5.75Gbps downlink speed with latency of 3 milliseconds. The even also published Ericsson 5G Business Potential Report, which noted that 5G will enable a $27 billion revenue opportunity for Indian telecom operators by 2026. The largest opportunity will be seen in sectors like manufacturing, energy and utilities followed by public safety and health sectors.
Credit: GSA, Qualcomm
note: this article originally written for Telecomtalk.info
note: this article originally written for Telecomtalk.info
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