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| • Course 101 updated - again! |
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• Tutorial: 4G cellular, OFDM and LTE - the "GSM vs. CDMA" standards war ends!
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| • Seminar tuition is going up in 2009: register now to lock in current prices |
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• Sneak preview: TCO CTA certification exam
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| Course 101 updated - again! |
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Course 101: Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineering Professionals is our "core training" - an intensive three-day course designed for non-engineering professionals, to get you up to speed on virtually all aspects of telecom, datacom and networking, from fundamentals and jargon to the latest technologies. |
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The content, its order, timing and pacing have been tuned and refined over the course of sixteen years – and we constantly update it. The latest update added new material on 4G cellular (this month's tutorial) and the mature competitive environment: POPs and MANs, collocation and bypass (last month's tutorial), as well as moving older material that had become less relevant (voiceband modems!) to an appendix.
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| Thousands of people from organizations including Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, the CIA, IRS, FAA, and FBI, all branches of US Armed Forces, Verizon, AT&T, TELUS and Qwest, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, TD Bank, Oneida Tableware, the Portland Trailblazers and hundreds of others who needed to be more effective in understanding and dealing with telecom and networking technology have benefited from this course. |
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Our goal is to bust the buzzwords, demystify the jargon and instill structured understanding... in plain English.
Register today for a scheduled session, or have us come to you to benefit from this career-enhancing course! |
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| Sneak preview: CTA certification exam |
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We're proud to let you know that we're partnering with the Telecommunications Certification Organization to offer TCO certification to Teracom Course 101 students. |
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| Beginning in early 2009, the Certified Telecommunications Technology Analyst (CTA) exam and certification will be included with Course 101 at no additional cost. It will also be possible for anyone not attending Course 101 to take the certification exam through Teracom at a cost of $159. |
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| We're very excited about this new partnership, and believe that the TCO certification along with its certificate suitable for framing and right to use the CTA designation brings an important added value to distinguish you from the competition in the eyes of your clients, employer or potential employer. learn more about TCO certification |
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| Full details on this exciting development will be published in early 2009. In the meantime, you can get a free sneak preview of the CTA certification exam here. Note: that link only works if you are signed in to myTeracom.
If you don't have a myTeracom account, it's fast, easy and free to sign up. You may also access the certification exam preview from your myTeracom home page displayed after signing in. |
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| Seminar tuition is going up in 2009: register now to lock in current prices |
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| We've been holding the line on tuition fees since 1999 - but with the cost of everything from air travel to paper going up, we have no choice but to increase the tuition fees for instructor-led training courses. |
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TIP: avoid the price increase and lock in the current tuition fees by registering for your course before year-end.
course 101 schedule · course 110 · course 130 · course 150 |
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| Be assured that we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that Teracom training courses will continue to be "best of breed", bringing you the best content, instructors and course materials at the best value available. |
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| Tutorial: 4G Cellular, OFDM and LTE - the "GSM vs. CDMA" Standards War Ends! |
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| This tutorial is part of the most recent update to Course 101, Chapter 6, October 2008. |
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| After more than 20 years, it appears that an almost universally-accepted standard for mobile radio may finally be implemented, bringing to an end the standards war between carriers that deployed TDMA/GSM for second generation and carriers that deployed CDMA for second generation. Those two factions continued the standards war for the third generation (UMTS and 1X respectively); but now carriers from both of the factions are supporting the GSM/UMTS faction's Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 8, known as Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network Long Term Evolution (LTE). |
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| LTE appears to have triumphed over alternatives 802.16 WiMax and Qualcomm's Ultra Mobile Broadband. LTE promises co-existence with other standards, allowing in theory handoffs between cells supporting LTE and cells supporting UMTS, GSM/GPRS, 2G CDMA, CDMA-MC or 1XEV-DO. |
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| LTE’s spectrum-sharing method, called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), is different than that of previous generations, providing flexible and efficient use of different carrier bandwidths along with tolerance to noise and multipath interference. Bit rates are on the order of 100 Mb/s when a 20 MHz carrier is employed. As with all claims for wireless bit rates, these are peak burst rates under ideal conditions with one user per cell. |
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| Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna designs can increase the bitrate using spatial multiplexing, which is basically gluing several antennas together. Interestingly, OFDM is also used for 802.11 Wi-Fi and DSL. |
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| OFDM is not like 3G CDMA. On the downlink, many 15-kHz subcarriers are defined within the radio band. The bit stream is used to modulate the subcarriers individually; in the most complex implementation, each of hundreds of subcarriers is used to transmit 6 bits at a time with QAM-64. These are all added together to produce a transmittable waveform… and this is calculated in one step with highly-complex digital signal processing called an Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform. The figure below illustrates an example using the very simplest type of modulation of the subcarriers, binary Amplitude Shift Keying, i.e. tones that are either on or off to represent 1 and 0. |
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LTE: Orthogonal Frequency-Divison Multiplexing (OFDM) - transmitter
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| At the receiver, a Fourier transform performs the reverse process to yield the original bit stream. This happens at the same rate as the subcarrier spacing, 15,000 times per second, which has the result of making the harmonics of all of the other subcarriers cancel out during the detection of a given subcarrier at the receiver, hence the term orthogonal. |
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| Prior to modulation, Forward Error Correction is implemented, adding redundancy to the bit stream so that correct decisions can be made based on maximum likelihood in the presence of impairments like noise and fading. The bit stream is also shuffled or interleaved, re-arranging the order of the bits in time so that burst errors are no longer sequential errors. |
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| On the uplink, LTE uses a pre-coded version of OFDM called Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) to avoid the need for expensive and inefficient power amplifiers, which would increase handset cost and shorten battery life. |
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| One of the reasons for the 3G standards war was the requirement to pay American company Qualcomm royalties on patents for several techniques necessary for a mobile CDMA system. LTE is not CDMA, so those royalties are avoided… but it turns out that Qualcomm filed or has purchased many patents that underpin LTE. Additionally, since LTE phones will have to be backwards-compatible with 3G CDMA networks, Qualcomm sees “no impact” on patent royalty revenue for the first ten years of LTE development according to COO Sanjay Jha. |
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| The 3GPP Technical Report 25.913 contains the detailed requirements specification for LTE. The system architecture, in Technical Specifications 36.300 and 36.401, is simplified to two principal network elements: evolved Network Base stations (eNBs) and Evolved Packet Cores (EPCs). eNBs communicate with EPCs, with each other and with user equipment. |
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LTE is slated to become part of IMT-2000, the 3G “standard”, so in a strict standards committee environment, LTE would be called a 3G technology. An updated version, 3GPP release 10, which might be called LTE-Advanced, is expected to be submitted to the IMT-Advanced standards committee, which would cause those standards committee members to declare it officially a 4G standard. Everyone else will refer to LTE as 4G from the start.
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From Course 101: Telecom, Datacom and Networking for Non-Engineering Professionals, rev 2008-10 page 6.19
and from the upcoming new DVD 7 "Understanding Wireless 2" scheduled for release in 2Q09. |
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| Here are a few links that you may find useful: |
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