Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

The Networks business of Motorola (News - Alert), announced the addition of a TD-LTE-Advanced capable 4Tx/8Rx radio head with multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) to its 4G - WBR 700 Series LTE eNodeB portfolio. This TD-LTE (News - Alert)solution while similar in size to a standard 2Tx/2Rx LTE eNodeB – enables advanced MIMO schemes including multi user (MU) MIMO and beam-forming to provide unprecedented capacity and coverage. The WBR 700 TD-LTE 4Tx/8Rx with MIMO solution will be displayed in Motorola's booth at International CTIA (News - Alert)Wireless 2010.

Bruce Brda, Senior VP of Motorola Networks said, 'Motorola continues to demonstrate the benefits of our significant OFDM expertise by bringing to market industry-leading LTE solutions like the WBR 700 4Tx/8Rx TD-LTE solution. We are one of the few vendors that has committed to investing in both TD-LTE and FDD-LTE because we know operators will likely use a combination of technologies to meet their 4G needs.'

Motorola had recently launched its LTE-Advanced capable WBR 700 Series, which are Motorola's fourth generation orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) solution and its second generation LTE platform. The WBR 700 Series features Motorola's proprietary Intelligent OFDM Scheduler for improved sector throughput. This eNodeB portfolio supports TD-LTE as well as FDD-LTE solutions in a wide variety of frequencies from 700MHz to 2.6GHz and offers an unprecedented mix of capacity, compact size and energy efficiency.

With this latest addition, the WBR 700 series brings a high-performance TD-LTE radio head to provide a better subscriber experience due to the maximized performance and coverage. The product will be available for 2.3GHz and other TD-LTE bands such as 2.6GHz. The energy-efficient WBR 700 TD-LTE 4Tx/8Rx radio head reduces power consumption by up to 30 percent using advanced linearization techniques, helping to lower operational expenses.

Interest in TD-LTE continues to grow because of several key factors are the low cost of TDD spectrum that is particularly attractive to emerging and developing markets, Operators' continuing need for more capacity and spectrum and the ability of TD-LTE to hand-off to FDD-LTE networks.

In effect, this ability to roam between FDD-LTE and TD-LTE means operators can use TD-LTE networks to augment their FDD-LTE network for more capacity or other applications such as video broadcasting, while operators choosing to use TD-LTE as their 'main' network can still offer their subscribers the ability to roam to other operators' FDD-LTE networks in different countries.

The LTE-Advanced-capable design of the Motorola WBR 700 series also will accommodate 3GPP Release 9 and 10 based upon the current specification, offering operators greater flexibility as well as investment protection as they roll out LTE across their network. The baseband unit provides up to four times the processing power of the average LTE eNodeB and is the most energy-efficient unit on the market. That level of processing power is required to support the sophisticated and complex functionality of this 4Tx/8Rx radio head and deliver maximum performance.

Read here about how AirWalk Communications, a developer of IP CDMA Radio Access Network (IP-RAN) products, has announced its alliance with Mindspeed Technologies (News - Alert), Inc., a company that designs, develops and sells semiconductor solutions, and Aricent, a global technology and services company, to develop an LTE picocell.