Wimax Forum Scraps TD-LTE Claims on Equipment

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Wimax Forum head of India chapter has alleged that claims Ericsson and ST-Ericsson on commercial supply of TD-LTE or Time Division Duplex-Long Term Evaluation in first quarter of 2011 are false.

“Ericsson is not at all honest in their claims. ST Ericsson chipset datasheet distributed at recent event of Assocham does not even mention about TD LTE and 2.3 GHz band,” said Dr CS Rao, chairman, Wimax Forum (India Chapter).

In an interaction with CIOL, Rao explained that Indian BWA winners need to deploy infrastructure from last quarter of this year or first quarter of next year. Giving estimate of requirements, Rao mentioned that any Telco would have plans to launch in a minimum of top 200 cities of this country which has a potential to offer about 20 million subscribers for wireless broadband by 2015 with enough young population in teens and twenties having Internet awareness, PC literacy and PC affordability.

In such a scenario, Telco needs to have a commitment from TD LTE vendors to support commercial roll out of about 50 ,000 Base Tower Stations (BTS) at a stable status and about 15 million reliable devices.

The required devices will be a mix of USB dongles, dual mode phones, embedded notebooks and others.

According to Rao, TD-LTE based BTSs are expected to be priced around 4G WiMAX BTS prices of US $ 12000 and devices at an average sales prices of $35 for USB dongle, $200 for dual mode, 8 band handsets, note and netbooks with no incremental costs due to TD LTE based BWA connectivity built into the notebooks and netbooks.

"All this is impossible as TD-LTE chips are not even there in commercial roll out stage in 2.3Ghz. Device prototypes would come out first. Then they would go for pilot mode of production and regular production stage only after chips are there in stable status. All this activity time cycle would normally take about two years for consumer market devices. Samsung, LG, Nokia and Sony Ericsson know this much better than Ericsson," said Rao.

When asked about TD-LTE threat to Wimax adoption in the country if the equipment are made available in to telecom service providers (TSP), Rao replied that the TD-LTE vendors will not be able to meet the scale required by the TSPs and that too at rational price.

"There is a limit to such aggressive claims. It is unfortunate, a large player like Ericsson is making a false claim. They say that Ericsson can support Indian BWA and thus the Indian society with equipment and devices to the scale of 50,000 BTS and 15 million devices at competitive prices and the volume of manufacturing as that of 4G Mobile WiMAX. Indian Telcos who are mature operators exactly know the status of TD LTE technology and such aggressive claims would not influence mature telcos," said Rao.

Rao pointed out that competitive price of devices, timely availability of devices and availability of BTS infrastructure equipment at suitable prices to telcos, scale of commercial production, range of devices needed at affordable prices to consumers are the key issues.

Rao also rubbished the claim of compatibility between TD-LTE and FD (Frequency Division)-LTE when CIOL pointed out claims of TD- LTE lobby that TD-LTE can be supported by FD-LTE network as both technologies have 95 per cent of compatible features and FD-LTE equipments are widely available.

Ericsson in an earlier interaction with CIOL had claimed that globally it will start commercial supply of TD-LTE in first quarter of 2011 and ST-Ericsson, also in interaction with CIOL, has mentioned that its TD-LTE chipsets are commercially available in the market.

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