LTE also known as Long Term Evolution 4G is the mobile broadband network.
And I need to correct a mistake on my parts - LTE is not faster than fibre...I messed up Mbit and Gbit on that one - my bad!
In other words
Fiber: 10.000-20.000 Mbit/s
Copper: 1000 Mbit/s
LTE: 300 Mbit/s
However...I've NEVER seen a network based on copper that supports more than 30 Mbit/s so the degrade of signal strength must be really bad - which is why many repeaters are needed.
Fiber just do it with light and as we know light does not degrade over our measly small distances so the signal will not degrade at all.
A note on the speeds:
300 Mbit/s is enough to pull down a full DVD movie in about 10 seconds - we will NEVER have a use for a network supporting 10-20Gbit/s unless we start beaming people to the moon and back with datastreams.
The reason that LTE is cheaper to implement is that it is basically just an attached antenne to the existing mobile masts around the countryside and some upgrades to the software ( okay fairly heavy upgrades ) but compare that with having to dig up the cables for a few thousand miles ( this being Austrailia its prbly closer to a few mio miles ) and you should be able to see how come it's so much cheaper.
There is one little thing that i do remember from out implementation here in Denmark, the antennas for LTE are shaped differently ( small orbs instead of rectangular antennas as the the ordinary 3G network uses ) this also means that the supported area is affected as the antenna will cover a different sized area ( something it took us about a month to realize - embarrasing really ).
The bad thing about wireless is that the amount of users per hub is paramount to the speed - i.e. in Copenhagen we have about 800.000 inhabitants and speeds will be nerfed by the sheer amount of people using it. However in the countryside my dad for instance will happily rock on with 80 Mbit/s. ( I live in the surburbs so I get about 40 Mbit )
In geekspeak.
Quote:
The LTE standard only supports packet switching with its all-IP network. Voice calls in GSM, UMTS and CDMA2000 are circuit switched, so with the adoption of LTE, carriers will have to re-engineer their voice call network.[27] Three different approaches sprang up:
VoLTE (Voice Over LTE): This approach is based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network, with specific profiles for control and media planes of voice service on LTE defined by GSMA in PRD IR.92. This approach results in the voice service (control and media planes) being delivered as data flows within the LTE data bearer. This means that there is no dependency on (or ultimately, requirement for) the legacy Circuit Switch voice network to be maintained.
CSFB (Circuit Switched Fallback): In this approach, LTE just provides data services, and when a voice call is to be initiated or received, it will fall back to the circuit switched domain. When using this solution, operators just need to upgrade the MSC instead of deploying the IMS, and therefore, can provide services quickly. However, the disadvantage is longer call setup delay.
SVLTE (Simultaneous Voice and LTE): In this approach, the handset works simultaneously in the LTE and circuit switched modes, with the LTE mode providing data services and the circuit switched mode providing the voice service. This is a solution solely based on the handset, which does not have special requirements on the network and does not require the deployment of IMS either. The disadvantage of this solution is that the phone can become expensive with high power consumption
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