While Vodafone has refused to confirm that there will be such a meeting, high-level discussions are expected to take place next week with a select group of infrastructure vendors regarding the company's plans for LTE.
While the vendors remain unidentified, other operators, including Verizon, are expected to be in attendance. Lightreading has reported that Vodafone's CEO Arun Sarin and Verizon's CEO Ivan Seidenberg told a Goldman Sachs investor conference in September that they were working on LTE development and planned to use the same technology in their next-generation wireless networks.
This 'speculation' comes as the LTE/SAE Trial Initiative (LSTI) announces the completion of a second round of LT tests which have verified that the technology is capable of providing a true broadband experience on mobile devices.
"These latest test results show that LTE development is striding confidently forward, with prototype systems comfortably meeting the performance targets set out by the 3GPP standards," said Doug Wolff, general manager of LTE, Nortel, LSTI Member. "The next steps will be early device interoperability testing, network interoperability tests, more comprehensive performance tests as the end-to-end systems continue to mature, and finally actual field trials in operator networks."
For more on this story:
- read Lightreading and Cellular News