China Telecom, KDDI and Verizon Wireless join GSMA to launch commercialLTE services

The GSMA has announced that China Telecom, KDDI and Verizon Wireless have gained membership to the GSMA following their commitment to deploy commercial services based on Long-Term Evolution (LTE), the next-generation wireless technology for Mobile Broadband. China Telecom, KDDI, and Verizon Wireless are three of the world’s largest CDMA operators and will begin the commercial deployments of LTE as early as 2010. LTE, when combined with the expansive footprint of these operators’ existing Mobile Broadband services, will deliver high-speed services to more than 150 million* customers over the next three years. Qualcomm has also joined the GSMA as an associate member and will work with the operators to aid the smooth integration of LTE with existing Mobile Broadband technologies.

LTE is set to out-perform most of today’s fixed-line broadband networks by delivering very fast, highly responsive mobile voice and data services with peak rate speeds of up to 100Mbs downlink and 50Mbs uplink. LTE was developed to enable a significant increase in the bandwidth achievable over mobile networks, while also boosting network capacity and reducing latency. LTE is designed to be interoperable with widely-used global technologies such as GPRS, WCDMA and HSPA, building on the all-pervasive international roaming capabilities available today. This will allow mobile operators deploying LTE to provide a seamless service and multi-mode devices for their customers, who will benefit from using high-speed mobile internet to surf the web or download applications wherever they are on a wide range of devices.

More than 74 mobile operators from around the world have committed to plans, trials or deployments for LTE, with many more commitments expected to be announced over the coming year. The world’s first commercial LTE network was launched at the end of 2009 in Sweden by TeliaSonera, with NTT DoCoMo in Japan on track to join China Telecom and Verizon Wireless in deploying commercial LTE services by the end of 2010. LTE is expected to experience substantial growth over the next three years with research firm Infonetics predicting the number of global LTE connections to exceed 72 million by 2013**.

* Wireless Intelligence
** LTE Infrastructure and Subscribers Report, Infonetics Research, 2009.