The ninth edition of the LTE World Summit has just wrapped up in Barcelona. The event has grown year after year and it has now become an unmissable item with over 2500 pre-registered attendees coming from 111 countries. Of course ST-Ericsson was there too. It was a very busy couple of days given the buzz around the event and the large number of visitors. According to the organizers over 200 operators and nearly thousand of their representatives joined the event. ST-Ericsson was a Bronze sponsor of the LTE World Summit.
ST-Ericsson demonstrated its Thor™ M7400 LTE/HSPA+/TD-SCDMA modem with its world-wide radio solution and a streaming use case. The world-wide radio demonstration highlights the possibility to design LTE enabled devices with global reach using the multi-mode and flexible radio solution of Thor M7400. This sleek modem is also integrated in both the NovaThor L9540 and NovaThor L8540 powerful smartphone platforms from ST-Ericsson.
On Wednesday 23 Björn Ekelund participated in a panel discussion on “technology architectures for 4G voice”, where he shared the stage with Daniel Lönnblad from Sony, Robert Coffey from TeliaSonera and Martin Taylor from Metaswitch. The discussion covered many interesting topics such as the opportunity to use cloud technology for centralized network nodes, the challenges of device architectures and the fragmentation of VoLTE implementations. Björn highlighted that ST-Ericsson is engaging in VoLTE trials and that VoLTE in combination with downloadable IMS applications represents a unique window of opportunity for the operators.
The following day, Björn delivered his speech during the “Devices and Smartphones” conference track with an audience representing all parts of the telecom value chain. The topic was how to stimulate growth in the LTE ecosystem through competitive and flexible LTE radio modem products such as the Thor M7400.
The presentation focused on how ST-Ericsson efficiently addresses many of these industry headaches with the novel Thor architecture and also hinted at the next generation of products from ST-Ericsson.
All the challenges of LTE (and to some extent of the telecom industry in general) were covered in the various sessions. The main “pain points” being discussed were: the constant decline of voice traffic revenue, the data traffic explosion, the entry of the over-the-top players in the value chain, the challenges of Voice-over-LTE and the role of Wi-Fi and heterogeneous networks.
It’s clear that the industry has now taken the next step towards LTE deployment and the journey continues at a fast pace towards mass market adoption that will become visible towards the end of this year and during next year. LTE World Summit is one of many activities needed to create momentum in the industry and the extensive knowledge sharing during this event benefits the whole LTE ecosystem.