As telecommunications operators and network engineers understand, specific operational requirements drive early network architectural and design decisions for 4G networks. But they also know that because technology, standards, usage practices, and regulatory regimes change on a continuous basis, so do best practices. 4G: Deployment Strategies and Operational Implications helps you stay up to date by providing the latest innovative and strategic thinking on 4G and LTE deployments. It evaluates specific design and deployment options in depth and offers roadmap evolution strategies for LTE network business development. Fortunately, as you’ll discover in this book, LTE is a robust and flexible standard for 4G communications. Operators developing 4G deployment strategies have many options, but they must consider the tradeoffs among them in order to maximize the return on investment for LTE networks. This book will show operators how to develop detailed but flexible deployment road maps incorporating business requirements while allowing the agility that expected and unexpected network evolution require. Such road maps help you avoid costly redeployment while leveraging profitable traffic. Telecommunications experts and authors Trichy Venkataraman Krishnamurthy and Rajaneesh Shetty examine various architectural options provided by the flexibility of LTE and their effect on the general current and future capability of the designed network. They examine specific features of the network, while covering specific architectural deployment strategies through example and then assessing their implications on both near- and long-term operations as well as potential evolutionary paths. Besides helping you understand and communicate network upgrade and architectural evolution road maps (with options), you will learn: How to plan for accessibility, retainability, integrity, availability, and mobilityHow to balance loads effectivelyHow to manage the constraints arising from regulation and standardizationHow to manage the many disruptive factors affecting LTE networks 4G: Deployment Strategies and Operational Implications also outlines specific network strategies, which network features and deployment strategies support those strategies, and the trade-offs in business models depending on the strategies chosen. Best of all you will learn a process for proactive management of network road map evolution, ensuring that your network—and your skills—remain robust and relevant as the telecommunications landscape changes.