Overview:
· As consumer behavior continues to shift the traditionally downlink-driven focus of the carrier industry to a more balanced uplink usage, LTE carrier networks and mobile devices will be pushed towards more innovative solutions that enable enhanced uplink performance.
Key Points:
· The downlink side is how carriers have typically focused on cellular technologies, given that most use cases, such as web browsing, email and application downloads, are predominantly dependent on the downlink.
· With the continued rise in social networking, user-generated content and real-time applications, such as video telephony, augmented reality and real-time gaming, the paradigm is shifting for carriers, and it is time for them to start thinking about the uplink side to address today’s growing user requirements.
· This is where the latest LTE advancements in uplink Carrier Aggregation (CA) come in.
· Current levels of uplink CA are now topping out at about 100Mbps, but new innovations are coming into the market that are starting to see the needle move up to 150Mbps or more soon after that.
· Increased modulation schemes using 64-QAM will also help to increase uplink throughput compared to the previous topped-out 16-QAM standard.
· Despite improvements in both technologies, the uplink will still be far behind the downlink speeds, partially due to the head start that downlink technologies have had, but also because there continues to be limitations in the maximum transmit power of today’s mobile devices or UE (user equipment) and this will always be a limiting factor.
· In order to maximize ROI (return on investment) and to reduce TCO (total cost of ownership), it is clear that the deployment of both uplink CA and 64-QAM are required.
· The performance upgrade for carriers using uplink CA and 64-QAM means they can maximize the total impact on the network and user experience, ranging from optimized increased network capacity to longer UE battery life.
Conclusion:
· As consumer behaviour continues to shift, LTE networks and devices have ‘nowhere to go but up’, and will be pushed to adopt solutions that enable enhanced uplink performance.
· Consumer demand for better uplink performance has thus far outstripped the industry’s ability to meet that demand. As such, it is imperative that the industry use all available innovations and solutions for enhanced uplink performance to help close the supply and demand gap in order to continue to drive user adoption.
· The next release of the LTE standard being implemented and commercialized allows for both uplink CA and higher orders of modulation with 64-QAM support.
