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Can anyone explain how 3G LTE works?

Categories: Ideas and rants
By: , IntoMobile
Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 3:48 PM

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I’ve read about GSM, WCDMA, EVDO, HSDPA, HSUPA, WiMAX, but this new phrase "LTE" which stands for "Long Term Evolution" is still very foreign to me.

I’m trying to find more information about it, but I’m failing.

There are people out there a lot smarter than me, can you please break it down for me?

The only fact I could dig up was this:

"To obtain the all-important performance advantage for higher data rate mobile applications, the 3G LTE specifications will be based on a switch from W-CDMA to OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation technology. This represents a significant change at the lowest level of the radio communications, and achieving synchronization will be a major challenge." – RF Design

Is Nokia working on LTE? Will it be expensive to deploy? Time frames?

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • Abhishta Paranjpe

    OFDM stands for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. The current cdma based communication systems are based on a single carrier technology. OFDM breaks this single carrier into a large number of multiple sub-carriers called as tones and your entire data is sent through these tones. This has a lot of advantages.

    The technology is quite in demand and is being used by GSM and cdma carriers. I think the next next EV-DO revisions (Rev B/C) will also be OFDM based.

    As far as I know, there is no specific LTE standard defined as of now (like wcdma was for 3G), perhaps WiMAX can be called as one (my professor disagrees tho).

    Hopefully, I can be one of the people working on these standards in the future. :D

  • Mostafa Hammam

    Well guys,i guess i can help in that.Finally 3GPP has released Release 8 for LTE Standards,its very difficult to understand and apply i must admit but for me i got no other choice than to use those as its my graduation project.It Uses OFDM for DL, and SC-FDMA for UL at 100 Mbps DL rate and 50 Mbps UL rate.