It’s worth pointing out that land-line ISPs suffer from similar problems, although fixed-line broadband capacity is far greater, meaning that many consumers can receive close to what is advertised. By contrast Mobile Broadband is still very young with limited capacity and there is surely a far greater danger for excessive promotional abuse.

ERICSSON: The debate on top speed and actual average speed or perceived speed by users is a crucial discussion. The industry needs to set reasonable expectations for consumers. Whilst I think it is valid to quote top speeds as an indicator of what could be possible under favourable conditions, it seems inevitable that the industry needs to develop a better vocabulary to advise consumers of typical performance.

6. Much has been said about the download speed of LTE but what can we expect real-world upload performance to be like? The growth in online video viewing, multiplayer gaming and other high quality content areas suggests this could also become very important.

ERICSSON: LTE demonstrates a significant improvement in the upload speed as it can reach up to 80Mbps (peak rate of course, to compare against 150Mbps downlink peak rate). This addresses all the services that you have mentioned and especially gives a new dimension to
user generated content (e.g. YouTube, Facebook and so on).

7. LTE appears to have won the fight against mobile WiMAX, a similar technology that has already been completed. Is it purely because the EU has given more support to LTE through research and development funding or is there another angle?

ERICSSON: I can’t comment on your funding point without all the facts including support for WiMAX.

As for “winning”, WiMAX will probably be deployed by some, but LTE comes from a substantially bigger eco system. The explosion of mobile broadband based on HSPA has been driven by scale and the readiness of people to build mass market devices. Meanwhile the simplicity of the end-user propositions presented by operators have been embraced by eager customers concerned more by convenience than anything else.

8. Put in its simplest form, what does a mobile operator have to do in order to upgrade its existing HSPA Mobile Broadband network to LTE and is that work costly?

ERICSSON: It depends on where operators are in their investment cycles. Clearly old radio access equipment will need to be replaced, but current Ericsson base station products are LTE ready and can be enhanced to provide LTE services with relatively easy upgrades.

Operators will need to upgrade the core transport networks and OSS/BSS associated systems. Meanwhile System Architecture Evolution (SAE) simplifies the access network and removes the circuit switched elements as it is all IP.   Operators will typically build out LTE from the existing core IP network elements.

As for voice, we think that operators will initially deploy LTE as a data service and add voice later.