As 4G cell sites are rolled out in support of Long Term Evolution (LTE) services, and the increase in mobile data services continues unabated, it is expected that average bandwidth requirements will increase to tens of Mb/s per site. To keep pace with this growth, service providers need an end-to-end architecture — from cell site to core — that supports a variety of network evolution alternatives and service provider deployments.

This paper  discusses the changes that LTE will bring and examines their impact on mobile transport networks. It also introduces the Alcatel-Lucent Mobile Evolution Transport Architecture (META). META is an end-to-end LTE-ready network architecture offering the service intelligence, flexibility, simplicity and cost-effectiveness necessary to serve the massive growth in demand for mobile broadband services while continuing to optimize 2G and 3G service delivery.

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