GSMA officially backs LTE for mobile broadband

Not surprisingly, the GSM Association's board voted to support Long Term Evolution (LTE) as the mobile broadband standard that will succeed HSDPA. The GSMA said it will work with other companies and organizations developing LTE technology, and start working with the NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks) initiative. Now the big push from the GSMA will be to secure more spectrum. GSMA CEO Rob Conway, during a speech at the GSMA's Mobile Asia Congress in Macau, China, called on the International Telecommunication Union to make sure operators win the spectrum they need to offer mobile broadband.

A recent Unstrung Insider report says one of the biggest hurdles LTE will have to overcome is lack of spectrum to deploy it. Not including spectrum already allocated for mobile communications, the report finds that an additional 1 GHz of spectrum needs to be found for future mobile communications technologies. The LTE radio systems can run on bandwidth ranging from 1.25 MHz to 20 MHz. Of course, the more bandwidth available, the faster the data speeds get.

To find out more:
- read this article from IDG News Service

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