Our work here is (nearly) done: minimum of three interop-tested vendors for equipment and devices; S1 IoT almost completed
The LTE SAE Trial Initiative (LSTI), a collaboration between vendors and operators, is close to concluding “nearly all LTE trial Milestones”, according to a statement. LSTI said it has reached Milestones for Interoperability Development Tests (IODT), Interoperability Tests (IOT) and for Friendly Customer Trials (FCT). With these Milestones complete, LSTI said it could move to its last working phase and “finish all LTE trials in a timely manner”.
Following on from the Proof of Concept tests, which was the first testing phase of the LSTI alliance, and which was completed a year ago, LSTI has now completed all Interoperability Development Tests (IODT) for both FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) and TDD (Time-Division Duplex). Furthermore, penultimate Milestone for Interoperability Tests (IOT) has also been passed. That means that the LSTI members have proved that at least three vendors for each case are about to deliver to the market interoperability tested access network and terminal equipment.
The Core Network Interface S1 (Connection Access Network to Core) IOT is almost completed and more results are expected to be delivered soon.
“Overall these results are well aligned with the previous results shared in the LSTI PoC phase. This testing and the co-operation of the vendors and operators involved have brought forward the growth of the LTE ecosystem and enabled a accelerated commercialisation of LTE-EPC by fostering technology alignment across all parties”, said Christian Kuhlins, LSTI Activity Manager IOT, Ericsson AB. “We can now see that the telecommunications industry is about to launch LTE/SAE equipment. More and more commercial network and terminal equipment will be available on the market very soon.”
Eleven LSTI operators have set-up their LTE/EPC trials and have already delivered reports built on a common testing methodology. The Trial Group has achieved one major step in passing the “Radio Access Testing” milestone which includes: Latency, State Transition, Throughput, Cell Capacity, Mobility, Basic Quality of Service and User Experience testing domains.
“End-to-End Field Trials are an important step towards realising the performance of LTE as it will be experienced by end users in real networks. Notably, LSTI operators use the LSTI commonly agreed set of test domains which are based upon NGMN requirements. The current LSTI results meet or exceed NGMN requirements on most of the testing domains”, explains Rémi Thomas, Director of the LTE/EPC Programme of France Telecom Orange and member of the LSTI Steering Board. ”The End-to-End Field Trials are an essential step in testing the technology. Now the operators can prepare the rollout of the commercial LTE/EPC networks.”
LSTI said that last results are expected during the next few weeks and will be presented at the Mobile World Congress 2011.