AT&T Continuing to Move Forward on Plans for 4G Cellular Network

[retroneo]

LTE is an upgrade to UMTS (3G) which means that they can keep the same towers and transmitters while swapping out a few boards and installing new software. CDMA is a completely different technology.

Migrating a CDMA network to UMTS/HSPA+ doesn't require new antennas or feeders but requires new boards and a new core network. It also runs in the same spectrum as CDMA, making it a logical upgrade that many CDMA operators around the world have made.

Migrating any network to LTE requires new everything. You need gigabit fibre to each base station, new spectrum that needs to be purchased, new antennas and possibly new sites for this new spectrum. The core network is all new too, although it can integrate alongside an existing CDMA2000 or a UMTS/HSPA network.

LTE is also the follow-on standard to CDMA2000, and a considerable amount of the standard is devoted to enabling soft handoffs from CDMA2000 during an active connection to the LTE network and vice versa.

LTE is an all IP network, and thus very different to UMTS. However, LTE also offers seamless integration with the GSM/UMTS core network.

Qualcomm (created CDMA2000) recommends CDMA operators upgrade to HSPA+ now or LTE later.

 

[retroneo]

shut off the 2G network once everyone has a 3G phone

Certainly not happening any time soon.

Think about all the embedded devices that use GPRS/EDGE - like credit card terminals, vending machines etc...

Ideally, they'll scrape it back to a single 5MHz channel and maybe run LTE-Advanced in the spare unused channels.

In the long term every piece of spectrum will run LTE-Advanced as it lets you pool non-contiguous blocks of spectrum of any size for infinite bandwidth and adaptive self-backhauling. Very smart stuff.

 

[speedriff]

<

Whatever AT&T decides you can rest assured it will be less than stellar. Why can't the providers in this country get it right? If a company would emerge that had a great infrastructure/service, great phones and great pricing they would put the others out of business. I am so tired of seeing AT&T's ads telling us how great they are. Obviously these ads are geared to attract new customers because anyone who has had great service and then went to AT&T knows they suck, call wise. I mean, who cares if you have the fastest network when every call you make gets dropped. I laugh out loud when I see their, "Surf the web will in a call" hype. The reality is that the call portion would probably be dropped. Maybe some cities have great service from AT&T but Atlanta and it's suburbs sure don't. They are < poor.

 

[speedriff]

Correction to <

That should have read: I laugh out loud when I see their, "Surf the web while in a call" hype.

 

[musiciscool]

Sounds great but they need to complete their 3G upgrades across the country. Heck even in some areas there is not even edge service.

we may soon find that those places are the safest ones to be. All these microwaves are not good. Add to that wifi & bluetooth.... we solve all sorts of health problems our ancestors dealt with only to add new ones that are worse and for lame reasons. We will find out in 70 years that the cell phone/wireless craze is as unhealthy as the smoking cigarette craze of the 50s. Remember when it was cool to smoke? When everyone at NASA had a cigarette in their mouth, when airplanes had ashtrays? Second hand cell phone radiation is going to be a problem. Watch.....

 

[JohnnyLemonhead]

When the original 3G iPhone first came out I made a passing reference to the possibility of 4G in the future and I was met with literally scores of replies from nerds telling me that 4G was scientifically/technically impossible (for reasons I can't possibly remember) but here we are and here is 4G. Oh well.

 

[butterfly0fdoom]

That should have read: I laugh out loud when I see their, "Surf the web while in a call" hype.

Why? I have a dumbphone and even I've found that capability useful.

 

[Duardo]

hmm

Maybe it's just me, but I feel AT&T should roll out 3G everywhere before going to 4G. My area doesn't have 3G yet, and it surely won't have 4G for a very long time.

 

[aristotle]

See that is your problem; You are actually reading wiki, the most unreliable source on the internet.

You seem to be confusing Verizon's flavor of CDMA as the ONLY CDMA and everything else as GSM. CDMA and TDMA are the core technologies all networks are built off. GSM is simply a group that endorses certain standards.

Do you have a source? Do you have links? You do realize that Wikipedia articles are moderated and that claims require citation of reputable sources?

Go to the bottom of any wikipedia article and take a look at the footnotes. If something does not have proper citation, it may be tagged with a comment from one of the editors and later removed from the article.

By all means, enlighten us. CDMA 2000 with EVDO upgrades is what is used in North American CDMA carriers. In South Korea, they use a variation of CDMA which uses SIM cards and is incompatible with North American networks.


Let me break it down for you.
W-CDMA is the air interface used by UMTS (aka 3G, 3GGSM, HSPA, HSUPA or FOMA). It shares some characteristics with CDMA2000 on the air (radio) level but the network core is the same as previous GSM standards like Edge and GPRS. This makes it easier to have a tower that supports both 3G and Edge because the core network will be the same. What will be different will be the frequencies and the radio components.

LTE is an evolution of UMTS. It will use the same W-CDMA air interface but will offer much higher data speeds. In some countries, voice services for UMTS are offered over the data network using something similar to UDP which strips away the overhead of traditional VOIP over TCP/IP. It is possible that LTE will use the same protocol for Voice over data like UMTS uses in some countries. This may allow carriers deploying LTE to also support UMTS side by side on the same tower infrastructure or to perform simple upgrades to LTE from UMTS.

Are we now on the same page? TDMA is not relevant to this discussion as we are not talking about old technologies anymore.

 

[yg17]

Whatever AT&T decides you can rest assured it will be less than stellar. Why can't the providers in this country get it right? If a company would emerge that had a great infrastructure/service, great phones and great pricing they would put the others out of business. I am so tired of seeing AT&T's ads telling us how great they are. Obviously these ads are geared to attract new customers because anyone who has had great service and then went to AT&T knows they suck, call wise. I mean, who cares if you have the fastest network when every call you make gets dropped. I laugh out loud when I see their, "Surf the web will in a call" hype. The reality is that the call portion would probably be dropped. Maybe some cities have great service from AT&T but Atlanta and it's suburbs sure don't. They are < poor.

Atlanta is not the entire US. I have absolutely no problems with AT&T's network where I live.

I have used 450 minutes since Monday of this week due to some things going on at work and never had a single dropped call or blocked call. And being able to use data while on a call was very useful.

Oh, and thank goodness for rollover minutes as my billing cycle started Saturday, and on a 700 minute family plan, 4 of us would only have 250 minutes left for an entire month. But thanks to the fact I have thousands of rollover minutes accumulated, it's not a problem. We'd be up a creek if we had Verizon.

 

[kdarling]

LTE is an evolution of UMTS. It will use the same W-CDMA air interface but will offer much higher data speeds.

LTE uses OFDMA and SC-FDMA. Not W-CDMA.

What's probably confusing you is that a lot of articles used "UMTS" and "WCDMA" interchangeably, which was understandable when UMTS only meant 3G.

However, UMTS LTE is different from UMTS 3G.

Verizons rollout date is way later than AT&T, verizon will be rolled out MAYBE by 2014. It's a major overhaul for verizon, and for AT&T it a natural progression. AT&T is already basicly set up for LTE and will be able to accomplish it 10 times faster than verizon.

LTE is not a natural progression for anyone, but will be overlaid on their current networks by both CDMA and GSM carriers.

Both Verizon and ATT have to set up new base stations, which can be done either by adding LTE equipment, or by swapping out old base station gear for new gear that can run both the original system (GSM or CDMA) and a later LTE upgrade.

If the node already has 3G, then it's more cost effective to add just LTE. If it doesn't have 3G (or you're changing 3G types like Canada), then it makes more sense to add the combination gear.

ATT is apparently planning the combination setup. The problem is, all their 3G station upgrades so far were done before they picked their LTE vendors. As ATT themselves said this week:

“As part of the supplier agreements, 3G equipment delivered to AT&T by the suppliers starting this year will be easily convertible to LTE, enabling AT&T to upgrade existing equipment and software rather than install entirely new equipment in many cases as it deploys the next generation technology.”

In other words, they're in the same position as Verizon with respect to their current 3G base stations: they still have to add LTE from scratch. The big difference is that Verizon already finished their 3G upgrade years ago, and has now started a year earlier with LTE.

 

[butterfly0fdoom]

In other words, they're in the same position as Verizon with respect to their current 3G base stations: they still have to add LTE from scratch. The big difference is that Verizon already finished their 3G upgrade years ago, and has now started a year earlier with LTE.

Well, on the other hand, AT&T can get equipment that supports both UTMS and LTE for the remainder of the 3G roll-out and start adding LTE equipement to areas that already have UTMS so as to streamline the 4G rollout, an option Verizon never had from the get-go.

Or at least that's what I infer from what I read.

 

[Yonizzle]

Once internet myths get started, they're hard to stop. The original 5-year story started with a joke by a Verizon executive about people getting "stuck on ATT" for a long time.

In 2008, ATT announced that the original one-year Apple contract had ended and they had signed another. At that time, it was widely assumed that the new contract was for two years, because it would take almost that long for ATT to recoup iPhone subsidies from its customers.

So two years made sense. In addition, ATT's CEO began talking a month or two ago about how ATT would be fine without Apple exclusivity. This reinforced the two year idea. So we still don't know if it ends in summer 2010, or if ATT and Apple re-upped because of the iPad. Guess we'll find out this year.

Ah, thanks for adding a little context. I didn’t remember the part about AT&T’s 2008 announcements, nor that the original 5-year rumors were particularly unreliable. I’m still guessing Apple’s gonna keep with AT&T for another year until they can release an iPhone that uses the same radio for AT&T and Verizon. (I think the other 2 U.S. carriers are planning on migrating to LTE in the long term, too, but I don’t know if they’ll have made much progress by June 2011.)

 

[axual]

Dear ATT

How about you deliver 3G first ... still waiting ... yes, still waiting. Your pathetic map of 3G is ... well, pathetic.

Just want to say one last thing ... ATT ... it's 2010 (not 1910).