Norwegian incumbent expects degree of convergence between the two access technologies; NTT urges greater focus on backbone networks.
Telenor said Thursday that it is leaning towards LTE rather than WiMAX to deliver next-generation mobile broadband services.  

“As an incumbent we see LTE as the most promising technology at this time it comes from the 3G family and is therefore in keeping with HSPA,” said Berit Svendsen, head of product and IS at Telenor Norway.

She explained during a keynote presentation at Telecom World Congress in London that Telenor is currently rolling out WiMAX infrastructure to provide fixed wireless Internet access in remote areas, but is growing its HSPA coverage in order to provide mobile broadband.

“We are keeping both options open but we have a strong bias towards the 3GPP family…we don’t want to have to invest heavily in both, we do have capex requirements,” said Svendsen.

She said WiMAX is more suited for greenfield markets as long as it continues to be developed as a network technology.

“We believe mobile WiMAX can play a role but only if the industry supports it,” she said.

Furthermore, she maintained that there is very little to choose between LTE and WiMAX on a technical level.

“It is not possible to pick a winner on a technical level both have similar uplink and downlink speeds, and both require a broad chunk of spectrum,” she commented.

With that in mind, Svendsen predicted that a certain level of convergence will take place, where both LTE and WiMAX will be incorporated into carriers’ models.

“We believe there will be some convergence between the two technologies in devices, core networks and standards,” she said.

Despite the promise of high-capacity mobile broadband delivered over LTE, Svendsen said she doesn’t foresee it substituting fixed-line broadband, at least not in Norway.

“The fixed broadband market in Norway is very advanced. We are using DSL, fibre and WiMAX to deliver good services and we don’t see that we will need [LTE],” she said.

Meanwhile Japan’s NTT Communications said it is all too easy to concentrate on the access side of broadband.

In a separate presentation, Kazuyoshi Terada, vice president of NTT Communications, said that consideration needs to be given to backbone networks.

“The capacity of our networks is still expanding but we can’t continue this rapid growth forever…it is important to utilise very efficiently the capacity of the network,” he said.

He explained how NTT’s Smart Content Delivery Service uses dedicated cache servers around the world to effectively replicate Websites and thus lighten the load on origin servers.

“Broadband access should be discussed, but on the network side there are possible new technologies that could provide consistent access,” Terada commented.

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