Firms speed up plans to put HK in 4G fast lane
Ready or not, Hong Kong will soon hear more about the promise of fourth-generation (4G) mobile-telephone services over the next few months as its proponents increase trials in the city.
The chief attraction is the faster speed at which the new technology will be able to allow downloads of music, movies and other data - from minutes under the 3G system to seconds or less for 4G.
CSL, the largest mobile network operator in Hong Kong, and mainland telecommunications equipment supplier ZTE Corp fired the opening salvo last week with their agreement to build next year a high-speed 4G network based on Long-Term Evolution (LTE), a wireless technology that is still being developed.
LTE has emerged over the last year as the preferred technology upgrade for most mobile broadband network operators using the world's main 3G mobile technologies: Wideband Code Division Multiple Access, CDMA2000 and the China-developed Time Division Synchronous CDMA.
As the standard for future 4G wireless communications, LTE networks are designed to deliver data-transfer speeds of more than 100 megabits per second, an all-internet protocol (IP) infrastructure, seamless interoperability with existing wireless standards and more network capacity, which means serving a greater number of users per mobile site.
'Our rollout of LTE will be progressive,' said CSL chief executive Tarek Robbiati, adding that the company already has 'an all-IP network that makes it LTE-ready'. Its current 3.5G network is touted to deliver peak data rate speeds of up to 21Mbps.
CSL, a subsidiary of Australian telecommunications carrier Telstra Corp, was one of three winners in the city's broadband wireless access licence auction held in January this year. The company and other winners - China Mobile Hong Kong and a joint venture between PCCW and Hutchison Telecom International - will deploy LTE on the 2,600-megahertz frequency band.
Robbiati said the world's first commercial deployments of LTE are on track for next year. Verizon Wireless in the US will the first in the middle of next year.
But those plans also depend on how soon the suppliers provide new mobile handsets and other devices for the advanced networks.
'It's a chicken-and-egg situation in which you need the network for the devices to appear,' Robbiati said. 'We are extending the invitation to our device partners to test their products on our network.'
CSL and Shenzhen-based ZTE last week demonstrated what can be accomplished on an ultra high-speed LTE network, with an eye to accelerate conversations in Hong Kong of its prospects in the consumer and commercial sectors.
ZTE chairman Hou Weigui said: 'Hong Kong is one of the most challenging environments on earth to deploy a network, but this drives us to become as innovative and imaginative as possible.'
Christian Daigneault, the chief technology officer at CSL, said the bulky LTE network device from ZTE used in the demonstration would eventually be reduced to the size of a USB thumb drive that can be attached to a laptop computer and used for ultra high-speed internet applications.
At more than 100Mbps data-transfer speeds, the demonstration showed an MP3 song downloaded within half a second. An album of 10 MP3 songs was downloaded in five seconds, compared with several minutes typically for 3G. A two-minute DVD clip was downloaded in 10 seconds.
'There are endless possibilities with how this [speed] can change our day-to-day lives,' Daigneault said.
Data from the Office of the Telecommunications Authority shows that the fast speeds offered by the city's networks helped boost monthly mobile data use in Hong Kong. In May, mobile data use in the city was about 296 terabytes. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.
CSL, which paid HK$523 million for its proposed new 4G spectrum, expected its LTE investment to be minimal compared with its competitors and made up mostly of software adjustments, thanks to the design of its ZTE-based 3.5G network.
SmarTone-Vodafone chief technology officer Stephen Chau Kam-kun noted that CSL's proposed LTE implementation in the higher frequency band would need more new base stations to be effective.
He said SmarTone would take a low-frequency band approach for its LTE introduction.
