“The one thing we’ve been concerned about from a steel products manufacturing aspect, is [determining] the proper use of the mounts,” explains CommScope’s Heath. “With LTE [installations], we’re talking about adding heavier remote radios, heavier antennas — as well as junction boxes and fiber boxes — and all this weight is going onto existing structures with existing antennas and technologies. And you can’t put this much load onto a structure that wasn’t designed for it.”

The class is aimed at tower technicians, tower owners, and carriers.

LTE is rapidly changing the way mobile services are used. It is spurring development of rich new broadband services, and triggering the deployment of new handset features such as higher screen resolution and better battery technologies through increased capacity. Traditional services like SMS and MMS are morphing into rich communication services to include features such as real-time video calling.

While these advances are great for the end-user, service providers require their network to support a variety of applications not traditionally seen on mobile phones — like advanced web surfing, streaming video, peer-to-peer networking, and machine-to-machine communications that consume large amounts of bandwidth for longer durations. Smartphones and increased backhaul traffic have already created nightmare scenarios for carriers, including the need to regulate the traffic flows and the need to monetize new services.

With this surge, mobile services providers are not only faced with finding ways to optimize the performance of their networks, but simultaneously creating billing structures that drives revenue for these enhanced services. Should the person who is streaming HD movies from Netflix be billed at a different rate than someone simply sending out text messages? Most service providers believe so, since downloading a YouTube video uses 100x more bandwidth than voice, and not to mention that the average iPhone uses 400MB of data per month.

Solutions must not only recognize the applications and services each individual is using, but also decipher their different billing plans based on a variety of criteria. This can be a huge challenge when you consider the millions of concurrent mobile users any one network has at any given time.

The Role of the Evolved Packet Core
As such, providers’ best option is to validate and optimize the performance and accuracy of the charging system components of the evolved packet core (EPC). The EPC is the all-IP mobile core network for LTE, allowing the convergence of packet-based real-time and non-real-time services. It not only provides a simpler, flatter, and cheaper network infrastructure, but also adheres to new, stringent LTE requirements for high bandwidth, reduced latency, and 2G/3G interoperability.

Measurements are essential to assessing the quality and performance of the EPC.

By creating a high number of subscribers and their behavior, and stepping through a sequence of events that trigger charging data records (CDR), operators can successfully validate the EPC billing system.

Apple is not allowing mobile operators to offer the iPhone 5 as an LTE device unless they pass the Californian vendor’s own, independent tests for LTE network performance, Swisscom has confirmed.

It proved, he said, “who is running the industry”, adding: “Apple have put themselves in the driving seat; it’s really changing the game.”

3G and 4G technologies will account for half of all global mobile connections in five years, according to Wireless Intelligence forecasts.

2G connections are forecast to decline by over half a million over the next five years (down from 4.8 billion) as users migrate to next-generation 3G/4G networks and devices.

In the 3G space, HSPA will continue to account for the vast majority of connections; the technology is forecast to make-up over 30 percent of the global total by 2017, almost double the 16 percent share today.

Most WCDMA operators have now upgraded their networks to HSPA and many have deployed dual-carrier HSPA+ in order to offer download speeds on a par with 4G.

The share of 3G CDMA technologies (EV-DO) will remain flat over the period at about 4 percent, but will grow in absolute terms.

4G technologies such as LTE, TD-LTE and WiMAX currently account for just 1 percent of the global total but are forecast to account for 10 percent by 2017. The most common implementation of LTE (FDD) is expected to account for about 85 percent of all 4G connections by this point, with TD-LTE at 14 percent.

Letting Dish roll out LTE into its satellite frequencies will obliterate the value of neighbouring radio spectrum that the US government hopes to sell for billions, said the FCC.

FCC rep Justin Cole told Bloomberg that allowing Dish to deploy 4G would “take a public asset potentially worth billions of dollars and turn it into a private windfall”, putting the wannabe mobile operator on the back foot. Dish is awaiting a green-light from the FCC to run its high-speed data network, and approval could come in the next few weeks.

Dish is hoping to get permission to deploy a 4G network in bands previously reserved for satellite phones, and – crucially – permission to deploy devices using those bands without any satellite capability at all. But the uplink band it wants to use, 2000 to 2020MHz, is right beside a 5MHz block that Sprint wants to buy and the FCC wants to sell.

Google has been chatting to Dish about cooperatively launching a mobile phone network in the USA, using the same loophole LightSquared failed to exploit to build a national network.

It’s not just Google that Dish is taking to, the TV company has been looking for a partner for some time and is open to discussions with anyone

Dish certainly wants to roll out a mobile network, having seen LightSquared fail at the final fence in its attempt. Both companies own frequencies designated for satellite use, but in the USA such owners are also permitted to deploy ground stations in the same band, to fill in shadows and improve building penetration: a loophole LightSquared hoped to use and Dish plans to.

At an “innovation center,” Verizon adds wireless to cars, ATMs, and jukeboxes.

The LTE Innovation Center, as it’s called, envisions all manner of devices using Verizon’s newer and faster 4G LTE network, which provides speeds up to 10 times faster than the older 3G network that is the focus of much of today’s congestion issues. (Verizon slows data transfers to 3G customers when networks are congested. AT&T slows data transfers after users hit a three-gigabyte monthly threshold.)

For now, Verizon’s LTE network has fewer than six million subscribers and isn’t being fully utilized—much less throttled—says Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst based in Seattle. But as 3G subscribers migrate to LTE and more people buy smart phones, LTE congestion will become a greater risk, he adds.

Verizon is hardly the only player drumming up business. All of the major carriers are interested in boosting revenue by dreaming up and promoting new uses for faster wireless broadband—especially for business customers. “They really want to find out how to get revenue not just from consumers using networks, but from businesses,”

Lindqvist says it’s not entirely clear how bad congestion really is, but says it’s not necessarily paradoxical to throttle data on the one hand while promoting more usage on the other. “This kind of fits the scheme: you limit consumers now so you can support more customers and applications later,” he says.

Verizon opened the testing and demonstration site last year. More than 300 employees work there with partners to develop new business models.

One business that’s already signed on is TouchTunes, a maker of interactive jukeboxes—one of which hangs on the wall at the Verizon Center. The company streams songs and video to 52,000 jukeboxes in bars and restaurants around the United States. A company spokeswoman, Liz Anklow, says an undisclosed percentage of these already use wired and wireless broadband, including both 3G and LTE, which makes it easier to sell and maintain the system in more places.

“The vision is that there is going to be an LTE pipe providing a combination of infotainment, security services, surveillance, and home control that you can access from anywhere.”

A video camera just above the plate can be programmed to dispatch a blast of streaming video when the car is bumped. You’d get a message on your smart phone and an image of who hit you, he says. Similarly, cameras inside the car could let you see how many teenagers piled in after junior borrowed the keys, he adds.

An electric meter rigged with an LTE radio chip, he says, would initially do low-bandwidth tasks such as sending reports on kilowatt-hours used. But it could also be the basis of wider services offered by your power utility, such as home security monitoring. While wired security cameras could be cut off by physically severing a cable, wireless cameras are more tamper-proof.

“Now these guys have a gateway; if they want to add water metering, and gas metering, and multiple nannycams, they can do all of that,” says Atreya. “They could even end up offering broadband service to the home, because they have X amount of data left.”