Altair launches Digital Dividend reference design – Telecom Paper

Fabless chip company Altair Semiconductor has announced the commercial availability of its Digital Dividend (Band 20) reference design. The design has completed IOT testing with tier-one infrastructure vendors. Altair’s Digital Dividend reference design features the company’s FourGee LTE chipset and interoperability-tested software stack. It can be used in a range of products, including USB dongles, CPEs and routers, all of which are expected to be market-ready by the end of this year. Digital Dividend spectrum will be used in rural-broadband installations. Digital Dividend is UHF spectrum that, until now, has been used for analogue television broadcasting. As a greater number of consumers switch from analogue to DTVs, this spectrum has become available for use in carrying mobile broadband signals. German carriers Vodafone and Telefonica O2 are testing LTE in Digital Dividend spectrums and plan to launch commercially before the end of the year, while Deutsche Telekom has started signing up customers for its LTE rural broadband service, replacing existing DSL infrastructure with LTE services that run over Digital Dividend spectrum.