RP telecoms firm eyes 4G tech for mobile internet

A telecommunications firm is working to adopt a new transmission protocol that offers speeds of up to 100 megabytes per second (MBPS). Mobile service provider Globe Telecom Inc. said in a statement Tuesday it has started testing Long Term Evolution technology or LTE to establish a regionally compatible network in the Philippines. The company has collaborated with parent Singapore Telecom or SingTel to complete the tests that would take six to nine months to complete. SingTel has led similar LTE trials in other parts of Asia and in Australia, Globe said in its statement. LTE is a registered project name of a high performance interface for cellular mobile telephony, spearheaded by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute, a partner in the 3GPP, has trademarked the project name. Also dubbed as 4G (fourth generation) technology, LTE is an improvement over the 3G and 3.5G transmission protocols that offer speeds of up to 7.2 MBPS. The technology is expected to widen both mobile capacity and transmission speeds of services introduced in 3G protocols, such as video calling, video streaming, and mobile internet. With LTE, mobile internet connections in particular are expected to carry multimedia content usually only carried by cable connections. International carriers Verizon and AT&T in the United States have begun converting their services to LTE, while the world’s first publicly available LTE service was opened in Stockholm, Sweden and in Oslo, Norway in December 2009. —VS, GMANews.TV