T-Mobile Says Mass Market Femtos Will Wait Until 2010

Light Reading published and article on a presentation by T-Mobile at the Mobile World Conference about its plans for femto cells. T-Mobile said that it will start with a controlled femto cell introduction in the middle of 2009. T-Mobile said that it will wait for Release 8, expected in 2010, before it makes a mass market introduction of femto cells.

T-Mobile tested femtocells from three different suppliers with 100 employees in Germany, about 90 employees in Poland, and about 60 employees in the UK. The trial in the UK is still on-going and will probably involve up to 100 participants.

Some of the problems discovered included limited mobile data rates due to the limitations of lower speed DSL broadband connections; issues with femtocell location detection; reduced battery standby time in terminals; and interference between the macro cell and femtocell.

Femto cells will be a significant development and have far reaching implications for mobile and broadband services.

T-Mobile Sets Standards for LTE

Light Reading published an article that discusses statements from T-Mobile about what they are looking for in LTE. T-Mobile believes that the cost to deliver a Mbps must go down by a factor of 10 because data traffic is increasing at a higher rate than revenues. It also wants LTE networks to be self-organizing and to be software upgradeable.

T-Mobile also believes that femto cells will be important for extending coverage. It also is looking for the early availability of mass market LTE terminals.

T-Mobile plans to go to Ethernet backhaul either over high-speed wireless links or optical links to keep network costs down.

All of these are clear requirements for LTE. Without these, there will be no reason to upgrade from 3G.

T-Mobile to Adopt LTE

Light Reading has and article that describes T-Mobile's wireless network evolution plans. T-Mobile plans to continue to make software upgrades to its HSPA network to improve its performance; however, the company will not make hardware upgrades. Instead it will move to LTE at that point.

With software upgrades, T-Mobile can boost its current 7.2 Mbps HSDPA network up to 14.4 Mbps on the downlink. Beyond that, HSPA Evolution (or HSPA+) can boost 3G network speeds to 28.8 Mbps or more but requires MIMO antennas. That is where T-Mobile draws the line.

T-Mobile also stated that it is considering deploying TD LTE in currently unused TD spectrum that it owns in Europe.

T-Mobile's approach makes sense. It will put them onto the OFDM track earlier than later.