Motorola will showcase its long-term evolution (LTE) base station at CTIA Wireless, and while the product itself isn’t new—it’s the same kit it debuted at Mobile World Congress and is trialing in Europe—the location of the showcase is: the roof of Las Vegas Convention Center. Moto will be conducting a live trial of LTE in Las Vegas at the show, including drive-around demos of HD video streaming.
Motorola senior marketing director Tom Gruba said Motorola will have a two-sector cell site mounted on the top of the convention center, each sector transmitting LTE over 700 MHz in opposite directions. The idea behind the demo network is to not only demonstrate the capabilities of Moto’s Wireless Broadband Radio evolved Node B base station, but to give customers perspective on the real-world performance and limitations of a working a LTE network. Gruba said it will be streaming live unbuffered HD video over the air from the booth to a vehicle circling the convention center.
“We’re using HD to stress the system,” Gruba said. “We have 8 megs of HD going down and 8 megs going out, but when we go to hand-off the capacity drops from 8 Mb/s to 1 Mb/s momentarily. Normally an operator would use forward air correction or buffering to account for a drop-off in capacity, but we wanted to show the network in its raw state.”
Despite the drop-off when moving between sectors, the video image resolves quickly after the hand-off, Gruba said, making even an non-optimized LTE hand-off suitable for any but the most robust applications. The purpose of the demo is to give operators and developers a tool in building real-time high-bandwidth applications for these new networks, Gruba said. For instance, a high-bandwidth video conferencing application could work fine when stationary, but it may lose resolution when it crosses between cells unless corrective techniques are applied.
While the evolved packet core is expected to be a big focus at CTIA, Motorola is sticking to its primary expertise, radio access, at the event, Gruba said. Motorola has contracted with Starent networks to supply gateways for its LTE core in its portfolio. Meanwhile, Motorola is focused specifically on developing software for the key mobility aspects of the core network, such as the mobility management element (MME), the central control node that authenticates and tracks users across the network.
