LTE World Summit 2011: Tweets from the floor

The seventh annual LTE World Summit 2011 took place at the RAI, Amsterdam on the 17-18th May 2011. The event proved a great success, attracting over 1,750 attendees, with speakers representing more than 160 operators from more than 110 different countries. Like LTE itself, it was a truly global event.

Naturally Twitter proved a popular way of responding to the speakers at the event, and below we have collected some selected highlights of the #ltews hash tag.

@Gabeuk reflected many people’s feelings about the conference when he wrote, “Big thanks to @LTEWorldSeries for the event in Amsterdam this week. Moderators did a great job. Some really good speakers.”

Back at the start on the first day @dmavrakis noted that, “T-Mobile, TeliaSonera and Orange teaming up to drive device evolution for LTE at 1800MHz in Europe”, to which he later added, “I wonder if progress on LTE1800 in Europe will be slowed by legal challenges in the same way UMTS900 was hampered in [the] past five years”.

Meanwhile @disruptivedean observed that, “Seems like consensus LTE1800 is critical for success. 2600 not viable for wide usage, DigDiv not enough capacity. regulator headache.”

Signalling challenges were another big theme from the stage. @disruptivedean was concerned at the operators for not taking into account the bursty nature of data demands from smartphone apps commenting, “So, who has been fired at operators, vendors or standards bodies for completely missing impact of app signalling when LTE was designed?”

Meanwhile @twehmeier commented, ”Funny how the operators talk up the signalling challenge, whilst the vendors seem to think there are *quick* fixes. Quick=pricey?”

@TMGB vented frustration over the issue tweeting, “I’ve been banging on about signalling aware apps and cross-app update correlation for months. Who do you think should spend big?”

At the first day keynote Huawei’s Weimin Ying, president of the LTE Business Group took to the stage and @dmavrakis reported his words saying, “Huawei believes Pocket WiFi will be a killer application for LTE.”

When Seizo Onoe, managing director of R&D strategy at Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, came on stage @oholin said that, “Docomo says spectrum needs to be used more efficiently and shared between technologies. I am a fan of efficiency”. @disruptivedean added, “DoCoMo pitching LTE2100 shared with HSPA2100. Recommends all phones support LTE2100. Use my band & give me scale economies please!”

@dmavrakis explained NTT Docomo’s postion stating. “Deploying LTE at 2.1GHz makes sense in Japan, where indoor systems (DAS, tuned for 2.1GHz) are heavily deployed in urban areas”.

@kingcharles1666 then referenced Seizo Onoe bold statement, “Top tip from NTT: stop evolution of old technology. They will shut off 2G soon!”

Sweden’s TeliaSonera was the first network in the world to deploy LTE commercially and when its vice president of system development Tommy Ljunggren came on stage @oholin tweeted, “TeliaSonera: trust this technology”, and @dmavrakis wrote, “TeliaSonera reiterates same message as last year on LTE: Mobile operators should stop trialing and start deploying.”

@disruptivedean was scathing of one of the ideas floated during a panel discussion, “Stupidest idea of the day at #LTEWS ’email & social network only’ data plan. Cue Facebook putting VPN, video & web proxy in next app update”.

Sprint also came under some flak for its presentation with @twehmeier stating, “Love the fact that Sprint have done a whole presentation on what they’ve done with “4G” WiMax so far without mentioning WiMax once!”.

@twehmeier also seemed somewhat concerned that the discussions around spectrum were rehashing ground covered last year. “So much spectrum chat. LTE WS 2010 just called—it wants its PPT decks back. Or, spectrum issues got much worse in last 12 months.”

Martin Harriman from LightSquared was certainly a hit with @dukeq8 who wrote, “What an excellent speech! Wholesale market for LTE is a shift in the industry!”

Telecoms.com was also there to hear Harriman explain LightSquared’s hope that people would use its satellite coverage as a last resort saying, “We’ve likened satellite coverage to gym membership. We want everyone to have it, be we don’t want people to go!”

Sisvel’s founder Roberto Dini took to the stage to explain the complexities of patent pools, generating this from @dukeq8, “I’m confused now that I choose the wrong industry! I should be a lawyer!”

@AjitJaokar reported on Christian Daigneault, CTO of CSL, Hong Kong’s comment, ““When is the last time you saw a 15 year old talk on a cellphone? It’s always some kind of messaging (not necessarily sms)”

To sign off we’ll go to the official #LTEWS account, who wrote, “#LTEWS would like to thank everyone who attended the event this week, thank you for making it such a fantastic success! See you next year!”