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Jaime Lluch from Telefonica spoke at the LTE World Summit about its Plans for LTE

The forecast for mobile traffic evolution 2008-2012 shows an increase of 5.2x in terms of mobile data traffic and an average per subscriber yearly traffic increase of 4.7x. Customer base increase represents just 1.1x. So in order to ensure profitability on the medium and then long term, while ARPU may be difficult to get, significantly increased, lower network cost per Mb offering needs to be accomplished:

Telefonica believes that LTE brings the potentials of a mobile broadband offering at lower network cost. However, not only technology needs be considered according to Jaime. The spectrum and regulatory framework also needs to be ensured within the industry in order to allow for true mobile broadband offering at reasonable costs.

So what are the key motivating factors from an operator perspective? The answer: higher peak data rates. Neither killer applications, nor enhancing customer experience was a main driver towards LTE. "The need for higher capacity networks at lower cost while increasing mobile broadband customer experience and thus allowing for additional services shall be considered as a whole the main motivation for LTE end evolution deployments" said Jaime.

Because of the difficult and costly to increase in number of macro sites, collocation and reuse of existing infrastructure is going to be cricual to a deployment of LTE. Also, LTE will not be deployed as a stand-alone network but as a capacity layer over currently existing HSPA networks, these deployments to be based on 2.6GHz band. As current traffic per cell distribution is extremely non-uniform, congestion levels that need to be eased are only on small percentage of cells in the first phases of deployment.

Significant micro and femto deployments may be expected on first LTE deployment phases, such as dedicated indoor systems, microcell hot-spot service and femtocell solution in combination with FTTx deployments

Progressive mobile broadband adoption, evolution and handset availability at increased penetration rates (availability and cost) will enhance LTE deployments on wider area.  Re-farming to lower frequency bands such as the 900MHz band is also needed, but is the digital dividend happening fast enough?

"In very high demanding scenarios LTE would be the solution. LTE brings the promise of bringing extra capacity, better spectral efficiency at an enhanced cost factor" said Jaime, but for all of this to happen, the "complete telecommunications segment needs to work on creating the right ecosystem for this mobile broadband wide scale scenario".

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