Probably like most of you, I’m gearing up for another Mobile World Congress. While the tapas and Rioja are always a highlight of any trip to Barcelona, I’m also gaining perspective on what are expected to be highlights at this year’s MWC. At the top of the list: LTE-Advanced and small cells.
At Radisys, we’re seeing record deployments of LTE small cells by customers in Korea and Japan, with planned deployments in China, India and the U.S. not far behind. Our TOTALeNodeB small cell software is helping operators overcome the technical challenges of integrating small cells into their networks, including small cell-to-macro interoperability and handover, remote configuration, and backhaul. Our LTE-Advanced features including carrier aggregation and enhanced Inter-Cell Interference / Coordination (eICCI) will further enable operators to deliver true 4G speeds, and I anticipate we’ll see early deployments in 2014.
We’re also experiencing more demand for our LTE-TDD solution.
Why now for LTE-TDD? LTE-TDD small cells bring major advantages over their FDD counterparts that meet mobile operators’ current demands – namely, providing high-capacity downlink media streaming that can support the bandwidth-hogging associated with consumers and their smartphones streaming Netflix, YouTube, etc. Also, practically speaking, there are many large operators who own significant TDD spectrum including Reliance Jio, China Mobile and Sprint to name a few – due to our TDD portfolio our customers are able to successfully engage in these sorts of opportunities.
We’ll be announcing LTE-TDD small cell wins this month, and we expect to see 2014 as a big year for TDD with major deployments expected around the world. I encourage you to check out our “Evolution of LTE-TDD” ebook to learn more about how this technology is expected to take off with LTE deployments. And if you’ll be at MWC, I hope you’ll stop by the Radisys booth 516 to talk small cells, as well as share your favorite spot for a rich Spanish red.
