25 Facts about LTE Technology

With the advent of 4G mobile phones, LTE technology has also become very popular. It is used to connect to Internet and also provides voice calling facilities. Let us have look at 25 interesting Fats about LTE Technology.

1. It stands for Long Term Evolution (LTE).
2. It was started as project in 2004.
3. It was developed by 3GPP or Third generation partnership project which is telecommunication body.
4. LTE is successor of another 3GPP system which is known as UMTS or Universal Mobile telecommunication system.
5. 3GPP had been inspired by rapid increase in mobile usage and emergence of MMOG or multimedia online gaming, mobile TV and Web 2.0 and developed LTE for 4th generation mobiles.
6. Its main goal is to provide increased speed of wireless data network. To increase speed, it uses Digital Signal Processing (DSP) technique.
7. It is designed to handle packet switching while providing seamless mobility and great quality of service.
8. LTE is completely IP based network.
9. It provides upto 50 times better performance than its predecessors.
10. It provides high data rate, voice over IP, multimedia streaming and video conferencing services.
11. LTE uses both time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD). FDD provides uplink and downlink that use different frequency, whereas in TDD, both uplink and downlink use same carrier and are separated in time.
12. LTE can get 300 Mega bits per second peak downlink and 75 Mega bits per second uplink at peak times.
13. It supports MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output ) transmissions, allowing base station to simultaneously transmit several data streams at once.
14. It does not use expensive and narrow-band ATM and frame relay links, rather, it uses IP-based interfaces.
15. A great mechanism, QoS or quality of service, has been adopted to ensure that requirement of voice calls can still be fulfilled even after capacity is reached.
16. It provides high throughput by ensuring high data rates in both downlink as well as uplink.
17. Time required to enter network well as entering and exiting power saving mode are very less thereby providing low latency.
18. In 2009, first LTE enabled service was launched in Oslo and Stockholm by company, Teliasonera. It was launched for first time as USB modem. First phone that used LTE was Samsung in September 2010.
19. It is trademark whose owner is European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
20. LTE based architecture is called Evolved Packet Core (EPC) architecture and it replaces GPRS Core Network architecture used earlier.
21. LTE interface is incompatible with 2G and 3G networks, so it is operated on different radio spectrum.
22. Successors of LTE are LTE advanced and LTE advanced pro, that were standardized in year 2011 and 2013.
23. It also has ability to manage fast moving mobiles i.e., if user is travelling in high speed motorbike, car, train or any such vehicle, he can still access LTE.
24. It has lesser operational cost than its predecessors.
25. It is estimated that India has 90.9% LTE coverage or LTE penetration. The highest penetration is present in South Korea, Japan and Norway (97.5%, 96.3%, 95.5% respectively).