Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA) is the air interface of 3GPP's Long Term Evolution (LTE) upgrade path for mobile networks. E-UTRA is the successor to HSDPA and HSUPA technologies specified in 3GPP releases 5, 6 and 7. Unlike HSPA, LTE's E-UTRA is an entirely new air interface system, unrelated to and incompatible with W-CDMA.

E-UTRA has the following features:

Flexible bandwidth usage with 1.25 MHz to 20 MHz bandwidths. By comparison, W-CDMA uses fixed size 5 MHz chunks of spectrum.
Increased spectral efficiency at 2-4 times more than in 3GPP(HSPA) release 6
Peak download rates of 326.4 Mbit/s for 4x4 antennas, 172.8 Mbit/s for 2x2 antennas for every 20 MHz of spectrum. [1]
Peak upload rates of 86.4 Mbit/s for every 20 MHz of spectrum.[1]
Sub-5ms latency for small IP packets

E-UTRA uses orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology to support more users, higher data rates and lower proces ...more