Nokia Siemens and China Mobile last week demonstrated the
world's first indoorTD-LTEfemtocell communication for indoor coverage of high-speed mobile
calls.
This follows last month's demonstration of a TD-LTE system in a
mobile application by Motorola.
LTE
(Long Term Evolution) is the extension of the GSM mobile telephony
technology for fourth generation mobile networks. With commercial
roll-outs starting from next year, they will provide users with
theoretical speeds up to 100Mbps and beyond.
The tests in China used transmission technology based on time
division duplexing (TDD or TD), which means a network can send and
receive lots of calls on a single channel simultaneously by
splitting the concurrent messages by time. Common applications of
TDD include USB, BlueTooth and DECT.
Indoor mobile coverage at LTE speeds using tiny short range
radio transmitters called femtocells promises to do away with
in-office or in-home communications cabling for phones and
networked IT equipment.
"User habits indicate that the majority of mobile broadband
capacity will be consumed inside homes and offices where coverage
is typically lower than outdoor spaces," said
Huang Xiaoqing (Bill) , general manager of China Mobile
Research Institute. The institute is driving a
number of multi-disciplinary, multi-lateral research projects
on advanced mobile communication technologies.
Nokia Siemens Networks' Beijing research team showed a live
streaming video downlink application using a compact experimental
femtocell prototype in China Mobile's Research Institute
laboratory. The demonstration achieved speeds faster than the
typical xDSL speeds currently possible via residential broadband
connections.
On 6 August Motorola said its joint over-the-air trial using
TD-LTE gave download speeds up to 70Mbps in a 20MHz bandwidth
channel, together with mobility and hand-over with live
applications.