Asia - Europe Business

Huawei makes play for LTE patent leadership

Huawei has increased the pressure on its rivals by claiming to be leading the race for being granted LTE patents.

 

The company, which recently demonstrated the world's first LTE mobile broadband internet connection with TeliaSonera in Oslo, said that ETSI had confirmed the award of 147 LTE patents to the Chinese equipment manufacturer.

 

According to Huawei, it was granted patents across several key LTE sub-sectors, such as physical-layer air interface, radio resource management and connection management, and represented 12% of the total existing 1,272 LTE patents assigned by ETSI as of August 2009.

 

Yin Weimin, president of Huawei’s LTE division, said this reflected the company's commitment to operators as they evolve to LTE. “We have always adopted a forward-looking approach and will continue to collaborate closely with the industry in driving the development of next-generation mobile communication solutions.”

 

Separately, the patent portfolio management firm, Sisvel, has responded to a request from the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance to help select the patent pool administrator for parties owning patents essential to the LTE standard.

 

In May, Sisvel called upon the wireless industry for patents and patent applications essential to the LTE standard, in an effort to support the creation of a joint licensing program to make LTE technology accessible to all users on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms and conditions.

 

This move by the NGMN to establish an open and fair approach to LTE patents has perhaps been motivated by the many long and protracted legal battles that have been fought for years over wireless patent ownership and infringements.

 

Lisa

School Of 3G LTE & Advanced Communications Launched

Informa Telecoms Academy, a leading provider of technology and business training to the global telecoms industry announce the launch of the School of LTE & Advanced Communications. The School of LTE & Advanced Communications delivers a wide portfolio of training courses covering the key technologies in the planning and deployment of LTE and Advanced Communications networks, details of which can be found at www.schooloflte.com.

 

Lisa

Beyond 4G Wireless (3)

The project is also developing systems for space applications, working with the European Space Agency. The reveal details have not yet been made public, probablly the systems will operate in the 100GHz band and are needed immediately.

 

There are various ongoing co-operation projects with industry to commercialise the components and systems, and some components are already at a pre-commercial stage and are being sold in limited numbers. There are also ongoing talks with some of the biggest names in telecommunications, including Siemens, Ericsson, Thales Communications and Malaysia Telecom.

 

In a few years time, everybody will be able to see the results of the IPHOBAC project in telecommunications, in the home, in radio astronomy and in space. It is a completely new technology which will be used in many applications even medical ones where mm-wave devices to detect skin cancer are under investigation.

 

Lisa

 

Beyond 4G Wireless (2)

Millimeter-wave photonics is a truly disruptive technology for high frequency applications. It offers unique capabilities such as ultra-wide tunability and low-phase noise which are not possible with competing technologies, such as electronics. What this will mean in practical terms is not only ultra-fast wireless data transfer over telecommunications networks, but also a whole range of new applications.

 

One of these, a 60GHz Photonic Wireless System, was demonstrated at the ICT 2008 exhibition in Lyon and was voted into the Top Ten Best exhibits. The system allows wireless connectivity in full high definition (HD) between devices in the home, such as a set-top box, TV, PC, and mobile devices. It is the first home area network to demonstrate the speeds necessary for full wireless HD of up to 3Gb/s.

 

The system can also be used to provide multi-camera coverage of live events in HD. The same technology has been demonstrated for access telecom networks and has delivered world record data rates of up to 12.5Gb/s over short- to medium-range wireless spans, or 1500 times the speed of upcoming 4G mobile networks.

 

One way in which the technology can be deployed in the relatively short term is wirelessly supporting very fast broadband to remote areas.

 

To be continued.

 

Lisa

 

Beyond 4G Wireless (1)

With much of the mobile world yet to migrate to 3G mobile communications, let alone 4G, European researchers are already working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s. The technology – known as ‘millimetre (mm)-wave’ or microwave photonics – has commercial applications not just in telecommunications (access and in-house networks) but also in instrumentation, radar, security, radio astronomy and other fields.

  

The mm-wave band is the extremely high frequency part of the radio spectrum, from 30 to 300 gigahertz (GHz), and it gets it name from having a wavelength of one to 10mm. Until now, the band has been largely undeveloped, so the new technology makes available for exploitation more of the scarce and much-in-demand spectrum.

 

A practical exercise will develop and commercialize a new class of products with a ‘made in Europe’ label on 4G, this project called: IPHOBAC.

 

It recently unveiled a tiny component, a transmitter able to transmit a continuous signal not only through the entire mm-wave band but beyond. Its full range is 30 to 325GHz and even higher frequency operation is now under investigation. The first component worldwide able to deliver that range of performance, it will be used in both communications and radar systems. Other components developed by the project include 110GHz modulators, 110GHz photodetectors, 300GHz dual-mode lasers, 60GHz mode-locked lasers, and 60GHz transceivers.

 

(to be continued)

 

Lisa