The Vendor Battle for LTE Dominance Heats Up

The battle for being a credible 4G/LTE vendor is certainly heating up.  In a very interesting article a few months ago, Light Reading listed out the myriad vendors of LTE, and which pieces of the puzzle these companies were focusing on.  In total they listed about 80 vendors and indicated whether they were supplying Core or Access equipment or both.  They also listed the vendors that were only supplying subsystems or Software or Services.  All in all a very useful list.  It also showed about 9 companies that were essentially investing heavily (in that they are competing in both the core and access areas)., and it is the battle between these that is becoming very interesting.

I saw that CSL have just opened their LTE lab in Hong Kong to drive a cluster of LTE field trials across the city, offering speeds of up to 127 Mbps.  This is using ZTE technology and it was reported that at one stage ZTE had shipped in around 1000 engineers to get this launched and working.  The fact that CSL are owned by Telstra could gives some hint as to who ZTE are really trying to impress!  Telstra is definitely a prize worth going after in the LTE world.  Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Samsung & NSN have also all recently made significant announcements of technical progress in LTE trials and making LTE calls etc.., so it is hard to tell if anyone has a genuine lead in terms of technology maturity.  However, the full rollout performance of these various vendors in 2010 will undoubtedly seperate the wheat from the chaff.