In the waning weeks of 2013, Huawei has rolled out a number of technological firsts that run the gamut from LTE Broadcast to LTE speed boosting to voice over TD-LTE.
Late last week, Huawei customer Smart Communications in the Philippines announced the first successful LTE Broadcast (also called LTE multicast) demo in Southeast Asia and the world's first using 2.1 GHz spectrum.
Using evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) technology, Smart streamed pre-loaded videos on three channels from its base station in Quezon City to another base station in Makati. The videos were viewable on three LTE-capable handsets provided by Huawei, as well as a TV set equipped with a device that converts data received by an LTE SIM.
Smart claimed the successful trial shows that its LTE network, which launched in August 2012, is on par with those of U.S. operator Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) and Australian operator Telstra, both of which are testing LTE Broadcast.
Huawei has made LTE Broadcast a primary focus for its research and development efforts. In August 2012, the vendor announced the opening of an innovation center focused on LTE Broadcast in Shenzhen, China.
Huawei also last week demonstrated what it calls its Turbo Button mobile app for boosting delivered LTE speeds. The app lets a user accelerate data speed on demand from 1 Mbps up to 70 Mbps over a set period of time with one touch. "The service is especially useful for improving the experience of high-speed web surfing, online gaming, large file uploads and downloads, and HD video streaming among other bandwidth intensive services," said Huawei.
The demo was conducted by Indonesian mobile operator XL Axiata at an event in Indonesia and used Huawei's Networker platform for LTE. Networker, which is part of Huawei's SoftMobile offering, lets operators customize network features and capabilities to improve user experience.
In other news, Huawei announced that it recently assisted China Mobile in a successful demonstration of international HD voice and video calls using China Mobile's voice over LTE (VoLTE) trial service in Chengdu and Hangzhou and an unspecified South Korean operator's VoLTE service.
This marked the first international VoLTE call between a TD-LTE network and an FDD LTE network. "This successful VoLTE demonstration proves that China Mobile's TDD VoLTE network has the capability to cross international boundaries and interwork with networks that use different communication systems," Huawei said.
China Mobile has said it aims to achieve VoLTE commercialization by the end of 2014.
For more:
- see this Smart Communications release
- see this Huawei release and this release
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