The LTE standard

The LTE standard includes:

Peak download rates of 326.4 Mbit/s for 4x4 antennas, 172.8 Mbit/s for 2x2 antennas for every 20 MHz of spectrum.

Peak upload rates of 86.4 Mbit/s for every 20 MHz of spectrum.

5 different terminal classes ranging from a voice centric class up to a high end terminal that supports the peak data rates. All terminals will be able to process 20 MHz bandwidth.

At least 200 active users in every 5 MHz cell.

(i.e., 200 active data clients)

Sub-5ms latency for small IP packets.

Increased spectrum flexibility, with spectrum

slices as small as 1 .5 MHz .and as large as 20 MHz. W-CDMA requires 5 MHz slices, leading to some problems with roll-outs in countries where the 5 MHz spectrum is
already allocated to 2 - 2.5G legacy GSM and cdmaOne. The 5 MHz chunks also limit
the amount of bandwidth per handset.

■ Optimal cell size of 5 km, 30 km sizes with reasonable performance, and up to 100 km cell sizes supported with acceptable performance.

■ Co-existence with legacy standards (users can transparently start a call or transfer of data in an area using an LTE standard, and should coverage be unavailable, continue the operation without any action on their part
using GSM/GPRS or W-C DMA-based UMTS or even 3GPP2 networks such as cdmaOne
orCDMA2000) .

■ Support for MBSFN (Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network). This feature can
deliver services such as MBMS using the LTE infrastructure, and is a competitor to DVB-h.

A large amount of the work is aimed at simplifying the architecture of the system, as it evolves from the existing hybrid (packet and circuit switching) network,
to an all-IP flat architecture system.