LONDON — Leading chip, equipment and test companies are participating in a long-term evolution (LTE) field trial being conducted in Germany. Participants include NXP, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and Alcatel Lucent. Signalion GmbH (Dresden, Germany) has provided MIMO-capable test equipment for the test.

The field trials are labeled as the Easy-C project, financed by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and led by Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone and coordinated by Professor Gerhard Fettweis at the Technical University of Dresden, as well as the Fraunhofer Institute for Communications, Heinrich-Herz Institute (HHI).

Easy-C includes 11 industrial partners and three academic institutes.

The trials are planned to start in Q1 2008 on up to 10 sites with a total of 33 sectors in the Dresden City area and in Berlin, where the project partners will have the opportunity to deploy and test prototypes of LTE equipment under real-life conditions, perform field measurements and verify theoretically obtained results.

Signalion added enhanced MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) capability to its Sorbas LTE test product in December 2007. This supports enhanced data rates and features in line with the developing standard.

"Through our partnership with network providers, equipment manufacturers and research institutes within EASY-C, we can timely expand and streamline our LTE product portfolio, and strengthen our leading role as a reference vendor of test systems for this future global cellular standard, ready to support forthcoming LTE network rollouts and interoperability trials," said Tim Hentschel, CEO of Signalion, in a statement.