GSM and UMTS on trains

[bylo]

From a nice profile of Huawei (that should be read by everyone), Huawei: Will China conquer the world?, this snippet about what's possible even on very high speed trains:

Climbing aboard the high-speed train, Huawei engineer Shen Lie Jun takes a black GPS unit with a red flashing light out of his backpack and places it on the windowsill. He puts the laptop on a seat and crouches on the floor as the train glides silently out of the station. Rain streaks horizontally across the window as we pick up speed. Shen clicks on a file and begins to download over a Long Term Evolution, or LTE, wireless network that Huawei has built over the track. As the train clocks 170 kilometres per hour, the download speed has already hit 43 megabits per second, way faster than the LTE networks Bell and Rogers have just built in small, urban parts of Canada. “The bandwidth is limited by China Telecom,” Shen says. “The max we can go up to is 46.1.” The train is now going 300 kilometres per hour; leafy industrial parks flit by the window. Shen points to a visualization of the GPS, which shows his download signal switching seamlessly between two wireless towers. The train rocks back and forth as it reaches its maximum speed of 431 km/h, but Shen’s download speed is still wavering between 43 and 44.9 mbps...

[kuba.g]

Litle bump to this nice discussion. Now that the LTE bands are beging auctioned in The Netherlands, I'm wondering where I can find a good comparison on bands being used in different countries.

It seems the most 'interesting' LTE frequencies in Europe are 800MHz, 1800MHz and 2600MHz. The 2600MHz have already been auctioned in The Netherlands and have resulted in a few tiny LTE networks in some larger cities, but the providers are waiting for the other bands to be auctioned, for the reason of better coverage. In Belgium the 800MHz is beging auctioned at the moment. Belgacom (Proximus) has already set up a running LTE network using the 1800MHz band in 8 cities. Not including their capital Brussels, which will most likely never get any LTE network, because they apparently have the strongest radiation norms in the world (whoever thought Belgium is a unity is deeply mistaken: Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels are three different 'states' with different rules).
In the US, on the other hand, the frequencies used seem to be 700MHz and 2100MHz, making the new iPad incompatble with European LTE...


Also for UMTS this is interesting. We know the example of Sweden, where the UMTS networks run on the 900MHz band, providing a superior coverage. Are there any other European countries permitting this? I looked around on the internet but I couldn't find a good summary.

[VladS]

As far as North American LTE implementations I can speak for the Canadian side, where we have active LTE networks on Band 4 (AWS - 1700/2100) and Band 7 (2600). Band 7 seems to be shared with some European networks, so we may end up with CPEs that can be used on both sides of the pond.

As for European UMTS networks on Band VIII (900MHz), I used three such networks: Orange France, Orange Romania and Vodafone Romania. I'm sure there are more out there.