The GSMA, representing the interests of the worldwide mobile communications industry, announced that China Telecom, KDDI and Verizon Wireless have
gained membership to the GSMA following their commitment to deploy commercial services based on LTE, the next-generation wireless technology for Mobile Broadband.
China Telecom, KDDI and Verizon Wireless are major CDMA operators and will begin the commercial deployments of LTE soon. LTE with operators’ existing Mobile Broadband services, will provide high-speed services to more than 150 million customers over the next three years. Qualcomm has also joined the GSMA as an associate member.
Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at the GSMA, Alex Sinclair, said that, with its compelling, high-speed and cost-effective network architecture, LTE is bringing the GSM and CDMA communities together.
“We are delighted that China Telecom, KDDI, and Verizon Wireless have joined the GSMA along with Qualcomm, and will be among the first operators to launch commercial LTE services,” Sinclair said.
LTE is showing higher growth compared to fixed-line broadband networks by delivering fast, highly responsive mobile voice and data services with peak rate speeds of up to 100Mbs downlink and 50Mbs uplink. LTE was developed to get increase in the bandwidth achievable over mobile networks, while also boosting network capacity and reducing latency. LTE is interoperable with widely-used technologies like GPRS, WCDMA and HSPA.
“The rapid rise in demand for Mobile Broadband devices, applications and services is driving both GSM and CDMA operators to evolve their network infrastructures and embrace new, cutting-edge technologies, and LTE is widely regarded as ‘the’ Mobile Broadband technology that will be adopted by the vast majority of mobile operators globally,” Sinclair added.
“As the largest state-owned operator in China, China Telecom is very excited to join the GSMA, which will enable us to extend our reach and network across the global mobile ecosystem,” said Cao Lei, director of Technology, China Telecom.
“We have succeeded in bringing our customers satisfaction with the performance and quality of services via our CDMA network, but the growing demand for broader bandwidth and richer multimedia applications drove us to move towards LTE. We look forward to deploying LTE by the end of 2012 and the benefits a global ecosystem for Mobile Broadband will provide,” said Tadashi Onodera, president and chairman, KDDI.
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