LTE, HSPA, EvDO Network Types

Table of Contents

LTE, HSPA, EvDO.............................................................................................................................. 2

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Standards ............................................................................................................ 3

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Governing Body ................................................................................................ 6

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Network Types ................................................................................................. 8

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Signaling .............................................................................................................. 9

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Hardware........................................................................................................... 19

Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 21

Notices .......................................................................................................................................... 25

Page 1 of 25
LTE, HSPA, EvDO

LTE, HSPA, EvDO

29

**029 LTE, HSPA, and EvDO. What are

those, other than really cool letters?
I got people already looking at the
next slide. Right? What industry are
these coming from? This is cellular,
right? This is 3G and 4G cellular
service.

Page 2 of 25
LTE, HSPA, EvDO Standards

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Standards

Wireless data standards used by mobile phone providers
Long Term Evolution (LTE)
High Speed Packet Access (HSPA)
Evolution Data Optimized (EvDO)

Allow customers to access data services from their handsets

LTE HSPA EvDO

Speed (down) 300 Mb/s 88 Mb/s 4.9 Mb/s
(Theoretical) (up) 75 Mb/s 22 Mb/s 1.8 Mb/s
(per carrier)

Technology GSM UMTS CDMA

Evolution
Network IP IP IP
Type 3G transitional 3G transitional 3G transitional
(LTE Advanced is 4G)

30

**030 And why are we talking about

that in here? Because it's another
data standard, correct? There was a
time when we didn't really think of
our phones as data devices. And
depending what your age is, you may
not yet think of a phone as a data
device, but how many people have
received somebody sending you a
video or sending you a photo from
their cell phone? We now get our
email on our cell phones, right? They
are data devices, and the whole
cellular network is another
infrastructure that you can move data
on.

Page 3 of 25
The good news is the cellular
infrastructure does not operate on
2.4 GHz. Anybody know why?

Student: You have to pay money to

buy the spectrum.

Joe Mayes: Yep. Eventually, yeah.

And it's one of the few times the FCC
has ever auctioned spectrum.
Usually most spectrum is given away
by the FCC, as long as you operate in
the public interest. TV stations don't
pay for their channels, but they must
operate in the public interest or they
can pull the license. That's why they
have periodic license reviews, and
that's why you'll see stations do, "If
you have"-- "Our license is up for
review, and if you want to comment,
send your comments to somebody-
somebody at the FCC."

So, Long-Term Evolution, High-Speed

Packet Access, or Evolution-Data
Optimized, EvDO. You can see the
data speeds there-- 300 megabits, 88
megabits, 4.9 megabits, per carrier.
And then the technology evolution of
GSM, Global Systems for Mobile;
EMTS, or CDMA. CDMA is a very
interesting technology. With CDMA
you can have multiple stations
operating on the same frequency at
the same time, and they actually
embed what's called a Walsh code on
each signal so the two receivers can
tell which one they should listen to
and which one they can't listen to.

When the company that developed

this technology was beginning to put
it together, all kinds of engineers

Page 4 of 25
said, "This will never work," including
engineers from very prestigious
companies. Said, "This will never
work." Guess which company went
forth and developed it anyway.

Student: Qualcomm.

Joe Mayes: Qualcomm. And the

fact that we know about Qualcomm
means, by golly, it did work, and they
made it work. Yep. CDMA-- Code
Division Multiple Access. CDMA.
Have multiple people broadcasting at
the same time on the same
frequency using something called a
Walsh code. It's interesting to read
about if you like technology. So I
would recommend that you go out
and read separately because we're
not going to delve into it in this class,
but it's an amazing little technology
to see how CDMA actually works.

Page 5 of 25
LTE, HSPA, EvDO Governing Body

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Governing Body

3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership Project
Group of providers and manufacturers who work to define 3G
cellular services, strategies, and policies worldwide
Focused on GSM networks

3GPP2 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2

Focused on CDMA / CDMA2000 networks

31

**031 So, one of the reasons it

comes up in here is because we
really do now have an active
competition in the business world
and in the world at large between
which technology am I going to listen
to-- right?-- which technology am I
going to use. How many people
have phones that have 3G and 4G on
them? And also have 802.11,
correct? You can connect to an
access point or you can connect to a
cellular network. What makes you
choose one over the other, by the
way?

Student: If you're going to pay for

data or not.

Page 6 of 25
Joe Mayes: Whether you're paying
for the data or not-- that's a big one.

Student: You're going outside the

country .

Joe Mayes: If you're going outside

the country, because then either you
can't connect or the data rates are
tremendous. What'd I see? I was
just seeing that ad. I think one of
the-- I'll leave the carrier name off,
but one of the carriers was selling
400 megabits of data, foreign data,
for 25 dollars. Twenty-five dollars for
every 400 megabits when you went
into Europe. And around here, we
get upset when we have to pay 25
dollars for 4 gigabits, right? Or
gigabytes. So, at the same time, in
the back of the room, you talk about
sometimes you're in a hotel and the
wireless environment in the hotel is
so clogged up that people will put out
their iPad or whatever and make a
local connection and say, "I'm done
with this 802.11 network. I'm going
to go over to my cellular network."

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LTE, HSPA, EvDO Network Types

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Network Types

Similar to cellular voice calls
The handset communicates with a base station on the antenna
tower, which relays the data signals to the provider.

Internet

Base
Station
Service Provider

Network setup is similar to cellular voice calls.

Subscriber identification numbers are compared to the providers
authorized customers number and allowed to communicate with the
base station dependent on that decision.

32

**032 So. Network types. These

systems, I think we all know how
they operate. There are bay stations,
cell towers, right? And a cell tower is
connected back to a service provider,
who connects back to the internet,
and basically they're just an alternate
ISP, internet service provider. You
can treat them just like ISPs. I do
work on Cisco routers, and Cisco
routers can take cellular cards in the
routers to make a backup network for
when the wired network fails, and it
can just roll right over and create an
alternate connection through the
cellular network as an ISP.

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LTE, HSPA, EvDO Signaling

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Signaling

LTE
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
HSPA
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and MIMO
EvDO
Code Division Multiple Access / Time Division Multiplexing

3x3 Setup
9 Parallel Channels
LTE
Channel

Power

Frequency
OFDM

Multiple Carriers
MIMO

33

**033 Oh, these are cool terms,

right? Orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing. You like that one?
Orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing. Or quadrature
amplitude modulation, with multiple-
input, multiple-output. Or code
division multiple access with time
division multiplexing. What is all that
stuff? Here's what it is. Let me see
if I've got it on the next slide. Nope.
I'll talk about this just briefly,
because the stuff they use in these
signaling are also used in 802.11.
They're also used in modems.
They're also used in all kinds of
technologies, because there's really

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only so many ways to do this stuff,
and we keep using the same
technologies over and over again.

So, let's play a game. Any time

you're using a radio transmission,
anytime you're using RF, are you
sending a digital signal, or an analog
signal?

Student: Analog.

Student: Analog.

Joe Mayes: Why does everybody

say analog?

Student: Because you've got to

modulate it.

Joe Mayes: Right, because it's a

radio wave, right? And a digital
signal would look like that. This you
can do in Ethernet. Power on, power
off, power on. When you send a
radio signal, it sends with a carrier
wave, and then you modulate the
carrier wave. So, if I've got a carrier
wave going along like this, one of the
things it's supposed to do is it's
supposed to be very even. And by
even, that's what they mean when
they say "unmodulated."
"Unmodulated signal" doesn't mean a
straight line; it means it doesn't
change. And in this case, it's the
waveform that doesn't change.
Every waveform is the same as the
next one.

How can we change a waveform, by

the way?

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Student: Increase amplitude,
frequency.

Joe Mayes: This is amplitude. So if

I'm going to change the amplitude--
that's a change in amplitude. Right?
Another way?

Student: Increase frequency.

Student: Frequency change.

Joe Mayes: Change in frequency.

Right? Do we use these
transmissions every day?

Student: Yes.

Joe Mayes: Sure we do. Now that

I've said, AM radio. What do you
think is being modulated there?

Student: Amplitude.

Joe Mayes: Right-- amplitude

modulation. And FM radio?

Student: Frequency.

Joe Mayes: Frequency modulation.

Anything else we can do with it?

We can actually do something called

phase modulation, or PM. And in
phase modulation, you don't send
unified signals anymore. I'll give you
an idea of this one. Again, this does
not pass college-level RF 101 class,
okay? But for a practical basis, if I've
got this waveform here-- if I'm going
to use frequency modulation or
amplitude modulation, how many
ones and zeroes can I put in this one

Page 11 of 25
wave? And that's a tough question,
but the concept is one, because if
this is one sine wave, and I'm doing
amplitude modulation, where I'm
making it bigger or smaller, then
that's going to be characteristic of
one letter, or one bit.

If I'm going to change it by

frequency, same trick, right? I've got
one wave. If one frequency is a zero
and the other frequency-- a longer
frequency is a one, then I can only
represent one character here. But
let's play a game. Everybody ready
for games? So, we'll start by
dropping a signal line across this. So
here's a question: If I only show you
half the signal, can you still rebuild
the entire wave for me?

Student: Yes. If you flipped it.

Joe Mayes: Yeah. Yeah, what you

could do is essentially just flip this
over and over here, right? And then
you could-- if it does this, then you
know it's going to do that, correct?
How about if I only give you a
quarter of the signal; can you still do
that? Because this is the smallest
unit that'll tell you both the amplitude
and the frequency. You know it's the
amplitude because it hit as high as
it's going to go, so that's the
amplitude. You know what
frequency because one quarter of the
wave went this tall, so the next
quarter and the next quarter and the
next quarter all have to have the
same frequency and amplitude to
rebuild the wave.

Page 12 of 25
So now that I've done that, let's have
some fun with this. If that's one
wave, let's divide it into its four
quarters. Right? So far you all are
with me? Because I'm about to make
fun. So far we're still thinking like
analog people in an analog world.
Let's become digital people instead,
and let's renumber that one, two,
three, four in a digital world. We'll
make this section 00, that 01, this
10, and that's 11. Everybody buy
that?

So now, if I were able to do phase

modulation and send different
phases-- if I could send this, and
then send another one of those, and
then send one of these, and then
send one of these, have I sent--

Student: You sent an octet.

Student: Zero-zero, zero-zero.

Joe Mayes: But I've sent it in the

space of one sine wave, correct? I
still got four quarters, and I still got
the amplitude and I still got the
frequency. All I did was I messed
with the phasing, didn't I? But now
how many bits have I sent?

Student: Eight.

Joe Mayes: If we go back to this--

Student: Four bits.

Joe Mayes: Yep. I've sent a 00 and

a 00. What's this one? That's a 11.

Student: One-zero.

Page 13 of 25
Student: And a 01.

Joe Mayes: And this is a 01. So

now I've sent eight bits in the space
of what used to be one bit. Now, to
be really fun, what if I also had
another set of signals that were half
that height? If I mess around with
the amplitude as well as the phasing,
then I can send three or four bits--
right? And depending how much I
mess around with the phasing and
how much I mess around with the
amplitude, you can get all the way up
to 256 bits in the space of one
waveform.

Anybody ever hear of QAM?

Quadrature Amplitude Modulation.
So you're going to mess with-- by
quadrant, or by phase, you're going
to mess with the amplitude. And by
varying the amplitude, you're going
to have a higher-- not really a
compression ratio, but a higher
expression ratio, or higher encoding
ratio, encoding rate, that allows you
to send more bits with the same
waveform. That's the difference
between 802.11, 802.11b, to
802.11g, to 802.11n. It's just more
and more complicated encoding
schemes, more and more
complicated modulation schemes.

And those systems get used over and

over. They get used in modems.
They get used in digital television and
TV cable. All digital TV cable that I'm
aware of in the U.S. is sent by QAM.
It's all a QAM feed. Because what
you're trying to do is send more bits
in the same space.

Page 14 of 25
Questions? This is not a class that's
going to go into any great detail
about that stuff, but I will give you
one last diagram. If I send this-- find
a clean sheet of paper here. I talked
about having this, and then having
one that's also half the height, right?
What if I had a whole range of these,
right? So now I've got eight of them
in there. If I have eight of these,
times the four quadrants, what have
I got?

Student: Thirty-two?

Joe Mayes: Thirty-two possible

values, correct? How many bits does
it take to represent 32? It should be
five, correct? Sixteen is four; 32 is
five. So I can represent five bits with
every quarter wave that I send.
What's the problem with this? What
happens when attenuation takes a
hold? Because what is attenuation?

Student: Degradation of your

segment.

Joe Mayes: Yeah, signal loss over

distance, right? Or for any other
reason, signal loss. So now, what's
that?

Student: You don't have any

separation in it.

Joe Mayes: Right. I can't send a

very complicated signal as far as a
simple one, and still have it readable.
That's the basic idea behind when
you get farther away from an access
point, your data rate drops on your
laptop. You're sitting right next to

Page 15 of 25
the access point; you may see a
connected 54 megabits. But if you
only have one or two bars, you may
see you're connecting at 18 megabits
instead. That's the reason. The
system actually negotiates back and
forth and says, "What can I
consistently read?" And when you're
too far away for me to read a signal
that's very complicated, then it's
going to go to a less and less
complicated modulation scheme until
it reaches a modulation that it can
read. Because it doesn't do any good
to send at 54 megabits a second or
send at 5 bits per encoding when you
have to throw away three out of four
of them because you can't read
them.

So, does that help a little bit? Yep.

It's a wonderful world as we learned
to send ones and zeroes over an
analog waveform. And the different
schemes they use are pretty
fascinating. Different ways to do it
are pretty fascinating.

And that's how we got

cellular signals to go from-- I mean,
does anybody know what the original
data rate was for the original cell
phone texting system? It was 9600
baud, or 9.6K, right? And now we're
moving megabits. It's all about how
much bandwidth do you give it, and
how complicated is the encoding
scheme, and how smart are the
receivers and transmitters. The
better our chipsets get-- anybody
ever hear talking about using one
chipset over another for wireless?
It's because different chipsets have

Page 16 of 25
different degrees of sophistication.
The more sophisticated your chipset,
the better it sends and receives.
What's the problem with that? They
want to charge more for it.

That's why different devices and

different laptops or a laptop and a
mobile device or-- make any
comparison-- not all devices are
going to see the same number of
bars; not all devices are going to
transmit at the same rate, even when
they're all talking to the same access
point, because it's up to the chip
system on both sides, and how
discriminating they can be at reading
the signal, reading the signal-to-noise
ratio, anything else it takes to be able
to decode the signal off the air.
Questions?

Student: Would they be using fast

Fourier transfers to look at the
signals?

Joe Mayes: In some coding

schemes, yes. There's actually four
or five different coding schemes out
there, and that's part of the game, is
the difference between 802.11b and
802.11g is that they adopted a more
complicated encoding scheme. And
that's also why it's backward-
compatible, so that when that more
complicated scheme doesn't work,
they can fall backward. Or, when
you're talking to an older radio that
doesn't support the more complicated
scheme, then you can still
communicate. And it allows for that
incremental upgrade we were talking
about that's allowed 802.11 to stay

Page 17 of 25
around so long, is because every
upgrade we make is backward-
compatible with the previous system.
So you can buy the new laptop and
it'll still operate with the old access
point. Or you can buy the new
access point and it'll still talk to the
old laptop.

Student: It's all software.

Joe Mayes: Yep. Because it's all

software. And that's why it's been so
hard to move to 802.11a in the 5
GHz range, is because that one's not
software. It takes a whole different
radio operating at a different
frequency. It's not just-- you don't
just download a patch and suddenly
you can talk about 5 GHz. It needs a
5 GHz radio.

Page 18 of 25
LTE, HSPA, EvDO Hardware

LTE, HSPA, EvDO Hardware

Most modern mobile phones have data capabilities built-in.
Cards and dongles are available from various providers.

Since data services are closely tied to voice services,

antennas and base stations are usually on cell towers.

LTE Antenna

HotHardwareForums.com

34

**034 So, most modern phones

have data capabilities built in. And of
course most modern-- there's that
cellular network, right? That cellular
tower. That look familiar, seeing it in
the picture? Big triangle at the top
because it's sectorized.

Of course, the funny thing is we use

cellular networks to avoid the
congestion of a wireless environment,
correct? But how do we connect our
laptop to the cellular network that
the iPad is running? We turn on
tethering and talk to it over the same
congested wireless network, or
congested RF world, that we just
tried to avoid. So every once in a

Page 19 of 25
while if you find out that you jump on
the-- your 802.11 is really slow, so
you say, "I'm going to jump on the
cellular network instead," and you do
it with tethering, and it's still slow, it's
because the whole 2.4 GHz spectrum
is saturated and you can't get
through the saturation.

Or we make it even tougher for the

other people who are trying to
operate in the 2.4 gig world, because
your tethering is now adding to the
environment. Interesting world.
Lots of fun. And what you really get
out of this is it's much more difficult
to do this than it is to do a wired
world, because in the wired world,
it's all visible. You can look and see
how many ports are plugged in; you
can see how many switches you've
got. And you get this tactile
sensation that says, "I know how
many wires are here." In the
wireless world, we all turn it on and
we expect it to work, and we don't
see how many other signals are
already there, unless you use some
special software, special device to
actually look in the environment and
see it. So it's much harder for us to
just walk into a room or walk into a
data closet and say, "Oh, I see why
your wireless is all messed up. I see
why nobody can connect today. I
see why everything's running so
slow." In a wired world, you could
do that. You could say, "Oh, look.
Yeah, okay, there it is." Wireless
world, we can't touch it. We can't
feel it. We can't count the cables.

Student: Can't tell the source.

Page 20 of 25
Joe Mayes: Yep. So, what we're
going to learn later today, or in later
lessons-- right? We're going to learn
in later lessons-- is that you really
can see that; you just got to have the
right vision. Because it can be seen.

Summary

Summary
Standards, technology, capabilities
Wi-Fi
Bluetooth
WiMAX
LTE

35

**035 So, any questions? The

reason we have this block is we really
need just to step back, take a look at
this thing, and say, "What are we
doing to ourselves? What kind of a
world are we walking in on?"
Because the one shared media in
common between all of this stuff--
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, WiMAX, and even
with tethering, even the LTE world,

Page 21 of 25
because we tend to tether into it--
what do they all share in common?
The medium in the same for all of
them. What's the medium.

Student: Radio frequencies.

Student: Radio waves.

Joe Mayes: Radio waves. You can't

set up two worlds of radio waves,
right? Everybody operating on the
same frequency is sharing with
everybody else operating on that
frequency. The only equivalent we
get to that is if we step up to
something like 5 GHz; then we're
operating in a different radio world,
because the 5 GHz doesn't see the
2.4. If we operate on the cellular
network, which is operating at 1.8,
11.9 GHz, those don't interfere with
the 2.4. So your separation is
something you don't see or touch,
and we tend to lose sight of how
many things are operating in our
environment with us. And until you
kind of embed that in your own mind
to say, "Every time I do a wireless
installation, every time I do wireless
troubleshooting, one of the things I
have to remember is what's my
world." Right? If I'm in the 2.4 GHz
world, then I have to look at all the
possible 2.4 GHz sources to
understand what could be interfering.

It's kind of like in-- we don't do this

much anymore-- but in the wired
world, if you went back to the way
people were installing wire 20 years
ago-- how'd people install wire?
They took down a ceiling tile, they

Page 22 of 25
took a ball, they tied it to the end of
the cable, or at the end of a string,
the string was tied to a cable. They'd
take the ball and they'd chuck it to
the other end of the ceiling. They'd
grab the ball at the other end, pull
the string, and pull the cable straight
across, right over three fluorescent
lights, and they couldn't figure out
why the wired network didn't work,
because it was laying on top of three
transformers, right? Well, we don't
yet think of our wireless world in the
same way. We're doing the wireless
equivalent of operating right over the
top of three transformers.

Are we trying to operate in an 802.11

environment right next to half a
dozen microwave ovens in the break
room? And then we wonder why
people have trouble connecting in the
break room. Well, it's not because
the signal's bad; it's because you've
got 3000 watts of microwave oven
going off 10 feet away from you.
Anybody experience that at home?
You may not even know it. All you
know is sometimes the wireless
doesn't work. And if you ever check
it, you'll find out that somebody in
the next room was heating up a cup
of coffee, or doing something else
with the microwave. And as you get
more used to this environment, you
become aware. You look around and
you say, "Hmm, that could be a
problem. Hmm, that could be a
problem." And you start to think like
a wireless person.

Page 23 of 25
Thinking like a wireless person makes
it much easier to install and
troubleshoot because you anticipate
the issues and you avoid them by
engineering solutions into the initial
infrastructure. When I operate
around a lot of RF interference, I put
a lot more access points in, so they
can always get a very strong signal
between the end-user and the AP
and not have to worry about having a
very weak signal and a microwave
overriding it. Because not all denials
of service are attacks. But all denials
of service are denials of service.
When it doesn't work, at some point
it doesn't matter why it doesn't work;
it's just not working. And when it
doesn't work, somebody's got a
failure. We have to engineer around
that.

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Notices

Notices
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