Globe mulls over LTE for Mobile Broadband

Globe Telecom and NEC have been testing LTE (Long Term Evolution) in the Philippines as early as May this year and based on successful field results, it could be the telecom’s next upgrade path to provide better and faster mobile broadband services.

3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), is the latest standard in the mobile network technology tree that produced the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSxPA network technologies.

Their trials achieved a peak rate of around 60Mbps downlink data throughput rate at the 10MHz bandwidth.

Globe began the trial of LTE technology early this year in partnership with NEC Corporation. Following the lab tests in May at the Globe 3G LTE test bed at the Valero Technopark in Makati, Globe and NEC conducted field trials in Quezon City as part of Phase 1 of this project. The Phase 1 field trial verified a variety of LTE functions such as quality of service; latency and hand-over within urban areas were tested as these are required for commercial use of the technology.

Was invited to see the testing but was unable to go. However, they sent me this screenshot of a test file transfer via Filezilla.

The graph with the red spikes above reads a sustained speed of 52Mbps.

The DU Meter above shows an average speed of 46Mbps downstream and just under 1Mbps for upstream. The upstream speed doesn’t look anything impressive though.

I previously wrote a short commentary that the bandwidth situation in the Philippines is all about capacity and not speed.

Globe reports that as of end September 2010, their broadband subscriber base grew by 95% to reach 1,006,460, nearly double the 517,355 broadband subscribers reported in the same period last year. As the number of broadband users in the Philippines hit critical mass, we might see more focus on speed soon when capacity has been optimized by the telcos.