Thailand's DTAC Preparing for LTE Launch in April:

Thailand's DTAC now expects to launch its LTE network in April, having secured the necessary regulatory approvals.

An unnamed source at the regulator told The Nation newspaper that the mobile network aims to launch the service with 200 LTE base stations in Bangkok and around 100 more towers in other cities.

DTAC will be using the 2.1Ghz spectrum it was allocated in last year's license auction. AIS used the spectrum for its 3G service, while Real Future launched both 3G and 4G services.

 DTAC revealed its intention to launch an LTE service last September, when Sigve Brekke, executive vice-president and head of Asia operations at Telenor, which is the company's largest shareholder described the take-up of 3G service in Thailand as "surprisingly running hot", evidenced by the strong growth of mobile data traffic.

Mr Brekke said Telenor is ready to invest more in Thailand to stretch its 3G network across the country, and launch LTE services.

NSN's Evolved Smart Scheduler Delivers 30 Percent Faster Cell Edge Downloads:

NSN says that it is offering a software upgrade to its LTE base stations that reduces interference between adjacent base stations.

With the software upgrade, operators can deploy a coordinated scheduling feature in their FDD-LTE and TD-LTE networks, which NSN says then provides up to 30 percent faster downlink speeds at the cell edge, an advantage during periods of peak congestion.

Importantly, coordinated scheduling is implemented as software within the base stations, avoiding the need for any additional hardware.

In LTE networks, the algorithms used for scheduling are not standardized. With NSN's Smart Scheduler, individual base station radio resources can be optimized, resulting in a claimed more than doubling of cell edge data rates and more than 20 percent improvement in cell capacity today when compared to other baseline industry LTE schedulers.