LTE and WiMAX - What's the Difference?

Yesterday, at the Convergence Technology Center sponsored Working Connections 2010 Conference In Frisco, Texas I had some time at lunch to talk about emerging mobile technologies. With only ten minutes I had to carefully pick what I wanted to discuss and decided on bandwidth and access (Surprised?!) with a focus on the two current emerging 4G technologies - LTE and WiMAX.

Lots of questions and with the time limit (people had to get back to their workshops) I did not get a chance to answer too many. People were asking about the detail differences between LTE and WiMAX. For example, is one technology better than the other? Why would one company decide on LTE while another decides on WiMAX to deliver next generation services? You said they are very similar - what makes them different?

Here’s some quick answers:

LTE will be/is the 4G technology of choice of the larger mobile carriers like Verizon Wireless (Rolling out LTE this year) and AT&T Wireless (scheduled to start LTE rollout in 2011). These carriers already have FDD spectrum and the money to buy more spectrum. The carriers will also tell you that LTE more easily supports backward compatibility with earlier cellular technologies.

WiMAX will be/is the choice of carriers with TDD spectrum and also makes sense for for greenfield situations where backward compatibility is not needed.

LTE uses FDD spectrum and WiMAX uses TDD spectrum - what’s the difference between FDD and TDD? Here’s a quick explanation from three-g.net:

Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) are the two most prevalent duplexing schemes used in broadband wireless networks. TDD is the more efficient scheme, however, since it does not waste bandwidth. FDD, which historically has been used in voice-only applications, supports two-way radio communication by using two distinct radio channels. Alternatively, TDD uses a single frequency to transmit signals in both the downstream and upstream directions.

Basically, FDD (LTE) uses two channels and TDD (WiMAX) uses one channel for two-way communications.

Which technology will dominate? It looks like LTE but..... there are issues with expensive and crowded spectrum. There’s a lot more TDD spectrum available than FDD spectrum and TDD spectrum is cheaper. Wouldn’t make sense to develop a version of LTE that could use TDD spectrum? It sure would and that is what TD-LTE does - it uses TDD spectrum.

Does it work? Yes! Yesterday, Ericsson ad China Mobile demonstrated an end-to-end TD-LTE solution that achieved a single user peak downlink rate of 110Mbps. China Mobile has also announced it will launch 8 TD-LTE test networks worldwide in 2010.

NY Times Video: Interview With A Robot

Check this 5 minute and 11 second video out - New York times national correspondent Amy Harmon along with Brent McDonald have a conversation with the Bina48 about what it's like to be a robot.

Wow - a little macabre but..... Wow!

Our Third Network Security Update Podcast with Sam Bowne

I’ve been away on vacation and business the past couple of weeks and got behind on posting this podcast. It is Mike Q and my third network security podcast with Sam Bowne, Professor of Computer Networking and Information Technology from City College of San Francisco. We continue our discussion with Sam sharing his thoughts on security and providing us with a snapshot of some of the latest and greatest developments in the field of network security.

In this Podcast we discuss - among other things:

• A living bot army control center. IE and Firefox: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/05/revisiting-the-eleonore-exploit-kit/
• The recent Google I/O conference which Sam attended. At the conference Sam got a couple of phones one of which (a Droid)he is awarding as a prize in an IPv6 contest: http://samsclass.info/ipv6/droid-contest.html
• The Hurricane Electric IPv6 Certification program: http://bit.ly/d4cRAK

Sam also discusses and provides a few more IPv6 related links:

• IPv6 Panel: http://tinyurl.com/2746v7f
• IPv6 Summit in Denver: http://tinyurl.com/23mu7u2
• IPv6 Certification: http://ipv6.he.net/certification/
• IPv6 Tunnels: http://www.tunnelbroker.net/
• Excellent slides explaining IPv6 for beginners: http://www.openwall.com/presentations/IPv6/
• Sam's IPv6-only Web page here: http://samsclass6.info -- you won't see it with plain old IPv4 at all.

Another excellent podcast with Sam and Mike!

Here's how to listen:

To access show notes and audio of our 32 minute and 17 second audio podcast with Sam titled Network Security Update with Sam Bowne click here.

Listen to it directly in your web browser by clicking here.

If you have iTunes installed you can subscribe to our podcasts by clicking here.

Google Voice Now Open To U.S. Public

Back in 2005 I was fortunate to get a Grand Central invite via Mike Qaissaunee. Grand Central was a web-based phone service company that was purchased by Google in 2007 for $95 million and relaunched as Google Voice in March 2009.

Over the past few years Google has continued to enhance the service and today announced it was free to people in the United States. Here's a quote from the Google Voice Blog:

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.

Google claims there are currently over one million active Voice users. After today it should become a lot more popular. If you have not had a chance to try it out check out this one minute and 32 second video from Google.

It is worth trying out.

100 Mbps Wireless To Your Home Coming Soon? Even Out In The Sticks?

It's likely just a matter of time before those copper telecommunications wires still connecting most of us are history..... in Australia..... and a little later..... in the United States.

Australia currently has a broadband goal of 100mbps to 90% of homes by 2018 and the country’s largest telecommunications firm, Telstra, and Nokia Siemens Networks, have demonstrated 100 Mbps of bandwidth downstream on a 4G LTE network over a 75 Kilometer distance - that is approximately 46.6 miles!

Here's an interesting broadbandbreakfast.com quote from Kalevi Kostiainen, head of Nokia Siemens Networks, Australia and New Zealand:

The benefits of LTE in urban environments are currently being deployed globally, having already been extensively tested and the business benefits well understood. Through this unique joint trial we can now see how LTE can be extended to provide cost effective solutions for rural and remote environments.

This year in the U.S., Verizon Wireless is rolling out LTE and next year AT&T will start their LTE rollout. In addition, Sprint/Clearwire continues to roll out 4G WiMax service. It is just a matter of time.....

New Study: The State of Online Video

The Pew Internet and Americal Life Project has a new report out titled The State of Online Video. The report is based on data from telephone interviews conducted between June 18-21, 2009 among a dual-frame (cell and landline) sample of 1,005 adults, 18 and older. Reported results are interesting but not surprising. Here's some of the findings:

• 69% of internet users watch or download video online; 14% have posted videos.
• Comedy or humorous videos, rising in viewership from 31% of adult internet users in 2007 to 50% of adult internet users in the current survey
• Educational videos, rising in viewership from 22% to 38% of adult internet users
• Movies or TV show videos, rising in viewership from 16% to 32% of adult internet users
• Political videos, rising in viewership from 15% to 30% of adult internet users

The study goes on to say video creation has also become a notable feature of online life. Here's a few more findings:

• One in seven adult internet users (14%) have uploaded a video to the internet, almost double the 8% who were uploading video in 2007.
• Home video is far and away the most popular content posted online, shared by 62% of video uploaders.
• Uploaders are just as likely to share video on social networking sites like Facebook (52% do this) as they are on more specialized video-sharing sites like YouTube (49% do this).

The study goes on, saying while video-sharing is growing in popularity, adult internet users have mixed feelings about how broadly they want to share their own creations.

• 31% of uploaders say they “always” place restrictions on who can access their videos.
• 50% say they “never” restrict access.
• The remaining 19% fall somewhere in the middle.

And, 35% (not surprisingly) feel they should be more careful about what they post.

You can view the full report linked here and download a PDF copy linked here. You can also view the survey questions online linked here.

Joomla! Interview with TNR Global

Joomla! is a popular open source content management system (CMS), that enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Last week I had the chance to discuss Joomla! with Natasha Goncharova and Tamar Schanfeld from TNR Global. Watch and listen to the 17 minute and 33 second interview by clicking the image below.

Here's how you can access additional podcasts and videos:

Access all of Mike Q and my podcasts by clicking here.

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