September 14, 2010
By Jean-Pierre Joosting
Altair Semiconductor has announced the commercial availability of its Digital Dividend (Band 20) reference design, one of the world’s first such designs which also claims to be the only one that has already completed rigorous IOT testing with tier-one infrastructure vendors.
The Digital Dividend reference design features the company’s proven FourGee LTE chipset and interoperability-tested software stack. It can be used in a wide range of products, including USB dongles, CPEs and routers, all of which are expected to be market-ready by the end of 2010.
“As greater numbers of countries around the world begin to license Digital Dividend spectrum for mobile broadband use, the demand for mature and market-proven products suited for this spectrum is going to rapidly increase,” said Eran Eshed, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development at Altair Semiconductor.
Due to excellent propagation characteristics, Digital Dividend spectrum will become especially important for use in rural-broadband installations. Additionally, according to the GSMA, it is approximately 70 percent cheaper to provide mobile broadband coverage over a given geographic area using Digital Dividend spectrum than with the 2100 MHz spectrum widely used for 3G services today.
Digital Dividend is UHF spectrum that, until now, has been used for analog television broadcasting. As a greater number of consumers switch from analog to digital televisions, this spectrum has become available for use in carrying mobile broadband signals.
The UK, France, Germany, Sweden and Finland have already licensed using Digital Dividend spectrum for mobile broadband use. Additionally, leading German carriers Vodafone and Telefonica O2 are already testing LTE in Digital Dividend spectrums and plan to launch commercially before the end of the year, while Deutsche Telekom recently announced that it has started signing up customers for its LTE rural broadband service, replacing existing DSL infrastructure with LTE solutions that run over Digital Dividend spectrum.
For further information: altair-semi.com.