Nokia Siemens Networks' LTE demo call last week on commercial hardware and 3GPP R8 compliant hardware shows that the vendor is well placed to take toll of the second, and major, round of operator investments in LTE, its head of strategic sales has said.
Kai Sahala, speaking to Mobile Europe, said that the vendor was the first to have made an LTE data call over commercial base station equipment NSN's FlexiMode product and over 3GPP Release 8 (March 2009 baseline) LTE standard software.
The significance of this, he said, was that the vendor would be able to provide operators with equipment that will not need major software or hardware upgrades as future versions (R9, R10) are rolled out.
"All announcements or deployments to date will be based on the previous version of the standard, which will require a major upgrade sooner or later- depending on when you go to the next level.
"We wanted to highlight the standards based aspect of this demo because we are the first vendor to comply with this baseline. When an LTE implementation is based on previous versions of the standard, then when an operator wants to move to the next commercial level he is looking at making hundreds of changes in the software and the hardware," Sahala said.
"With earlier versions you will have to throw away all that equipment, or make a lot of changes, but this is a really strong step for us because it is on commercial level hardware."
NSN recently lost out on the sale of Nortel's CDMA and LTE assets to Ericsson, meaning that its US CDMA and LTE presence is still limited. But Sahala said that with most major European operators looking at 2010 as the start point ("You can say 2010 is really the year of LTE") then NSN is in a good position to meet that market's timelines, whilst offering future standards compatibility.
Although this was a test call in a lab in Germany, Sahala said the vendor would be able to have commercial grade software, on the March 2009 baseline, available in time to meet 2010 rollouts.
"We think a lot of operators are looking at commercialization in 2010, and this puts us well in line with what they are expecting us to do, making the deadline for 2010," Sahala claimed.