Good news for those wireless operators with business plans not based on WiMAX: The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an ITU-based standards organization, has completed its latest round of work clarifying the specifications for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless. While more work remains, it appears that the LTE spec will be released as part of the 3GPP’s Release 8 set of standards. According to Adrian Scrase, vice present of international partnership objects at European Telecommunications Standards Institute (commonly known as ETSI), most of the work on the spec is completed, and he expects to wrap up the process by March 2009.

Release 8 may also include a spec for System Architecture Evolution (SAE), sometimes called evolved packet core (EPC) by the March ‘09 date, but more work remains to be done in fleshing out the framework’s details for specific functionality. Currently, 3GPP has created a list of “exceptions” — ostensibly, holes in the nascent spec — that will have to be addressed and finalized before SAE can be included as part of Release 8. Details describing or naming these exceptions were not announced by press time. Not to worry, says Scrase, extensions such as this are common, and took place as recently as on the 3GPP work on Release 7.

The 3GPP board is working to prepare more than just LTE and SAE for Release 8, having met in Athens last week to consider spec drafts for femtocells, or “Home Node B” in their lexicon. It also decided on the final set of specs set for inclusion in Release 8, as well as those that will be bumped out to Release 9, although a final roster will not be set until December 2009.

Release 8 should come just in time, or at least not a moment too soon, for Verizon Wireless, who has already talked of bumping up its initial rollout dates to end of 2009 with a wider deployment the following year. NTT DoCoMo has similar designs for 2010, while AT&T is a little more difficult to pin down, but appears ready to make do with its 3G network, currently running at about 1 Mbps download rates on HSDPA, until 2012.

Software upgrades are expected to boost average speeds and handle roughly four times the current peak traffic rate, though, according to AT&T operations chief John Stankey at the 36th Annual Media and Communications conference held in New York on Dec. 9.

“We have been aggressively deploying UMTS in our infrastructure and migrating it to HSDPA," said Stankey. "What is important to understand is that over the next two years and in the next three years, we have a very defined and very clean technology path to improving the performance of our wireless data services and the speeds and the capabilities of this network. This is a capability that we will be able to deploy largely by doing software upgrades in the network and augmenting backhaul, as opposed to doing a fundamental transition of an entire air interface such as the change from EV-DO to LTE,” a reference to Verizon’s current migration plan.

Network equipment vendors are moving to finish production on LTE gear based on the new proto-spec, and should be able to release product by Q3 2009 that allows for software enhancements to cover any refinements or tweaks in the final specification. Handset vendors, however, may face a greater challenge in building devices that conform to a still-evolving spec; these products typically require a more stable, well-defined framework as a blueprint that details the full functionality and technology requirements, which could push the final release date back into 2010.