The initial duty of the 3GPP was to unify the Technical Specifications and Technical Reports for 3G Mobile System based on GSM core networks. It expanded to include the maintenance and development of Global Systems for Mobile communications, Technical Specifications and Technical Reports. The organization was created in December 1998 when companies signed the “The 3rd Generation Partnership Project Agreement”. The newest scope and initiatives grew out of this original agreement.
The organization regulates and determines standards for GSM cellular communications, which includes evolution towards LTE technology. LTE works on upgrading GSM cellular towers and sites. Companies like Motorola, Verizon, TeliaSonera and AT&T are all part of the 3GPP organization that works towards regulation and standardization of LTE devices, base stations and other solutions.

LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is a a 4th generation (4G) mobile broadband standard and is aimed to be the successor to the 3G technologies GSM/UMTS. It is currently in development and is considered the competitor to WiMax. Carriers will include Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, AT&T, and many more worldwide.

This technology will provide broadband services wirelessly (like EVDO), and will transmit signals via radio platform. You will need an LTE modem to access the network, which can be in USB format, ExpressCard, PCMCIA, or embedded in a laptop. It will also likely be featured as the internet connection on PDAs and phones.

This network, which is promising peak download rates of up 100Mbps, will provide an alternative to DSL, cable, satellite, and dial-up internet. It will free people from the burden of having to find a WiFi hotspot when they are on the road – as long as you have an LTE modem, you can connect to the internet anywhere in the service provider’s coverage area.

Key Details:

• Downlink peak data rates up to 100 Mbps with 20 MHz bandwidth
• Uplink peak data rates up to 50 Mbps with 20 MHz bandwidth
• Reduced latency to 10 msec round-trip time between user equipment and base station

LTE deployment  won’t be widely available until about 2012.

LTE supports voice and efficient support of voice was one of the key considerations in designing LTE. The voice solution for LTE is IMS VoIP and it is fully specified. The 3GPP solution for voice over LTE is a combination of multiple efforts:

• The work in Rel 7 to optimize IMS signalling and VoIP encoding so it would be as good or better than CS voice in terms of quality and efficiency,
• The work in Rel 8 to develop a radio and core network evolution optimized for the transfer of packet data.
• The work in Rel-7 to add the IMS emergency call requirements and to adapt it to regulatory requirements in LTE and GPRS in Rel-9.
• The work in Rel-8 to add the always-on IP connectivity requirements in LTE

A key consideration to recognize is that under LTE, voice is just one of many potential media streams that can be communicated. A packet based network and VoIP allows this flexibility while still providing efficient use of radio and network resources.

However, 3GPP recognizes that adoption of both LTE and IMS will not occur overnight. For this reason 3GPP provided a transition solution for voice called CS Fallback. This allows a LTE device to drop back to the legacy 3G or 2G network if IMS VoIP capabilities are not supported. This is viewed as an interim solution to ease the transition to IMS and VoIP.