Ubiquitous Mobile Broadband

There has been a lot of press and buzz in the industry regarding 4G deployments and the related technology choices being deployed by carriers.  It is a good time to study the impacts of deployment of these technologies on the business of telecommunications providers.

Of the many articles I have read in the past few months, invariably when 4G (LTE or WiMAX) is mentioned in the same breath people start talking about more bandwidth to the cell/smart phones. While this may be true, the objective and scope for the development and deployment of 4G mobile technologies is certainly much more than that. Deployment of these technologies allows the wireless service provider to achieve the following:

1. Compete for High Speed Internet business, with a much differentiated service than traditional HSI service providers by not only providing the service but also adding mobility to the plan and thus significantly differentiating their service offering.
2. Provide a much richer multimedia experience on mobile phones and other devices. 4G certainly is going to emerge as a strong competitor for DSL and cable because of higher speeds and mobility. Based on current architectures it is understood that 4G could provide up to 15-30 Mbps broadband speeds to individual subscribers with about 100Mbps shared amongst various users on a particular cell cite.
3. Always-on connections and seamless mobility for all wireless enabled devices.
4. As technological innovation continues for these 4G technologies, there could come a time where broadcast video services are provided over the wireless infrastructure as well for certain demographic areas in the network. Voice will become ubiquitous where the phone picks the best network medium available based on the location of the subscriber

These are just some of the benefits that position 4G as the next step in mobile broadband. 4G can be used both in densely populated regions to increase capacity but also in rural areas to use spectrum that you cannot use today in existing networks.

The above points are just some of the benefits of 4G in terms of higher speeds and feeds. Another way to think about this technology is in terms of coverage for all services in areas of developing as well as developed countries which are under-served or not served in terms of telecommunications services. Even in a developed country like the United States of America there are areas of the country that are not served with broadband. As a part of the economic recovery stimulus spending the federal government has allocated $7.2 billion to serve these areas with broadband. There has been talk in certain sections of the industry that rather than spending a lot of money of adding wireline infrastructure it may be advisable to look at LTE and WiMAX as technologies that can blanket these under served areas across the country. This way the entire population can have access to not only broadband capabilities but also mobility for any type of service.

This model can also be replicated in countries where lots of greenfield infrastructure is being added to provide basic telephony as well as other advanced services.

According to a World Wireless Research Forum report, it is expected that by 2017 there will be 17 trillion wireless serving the world population and a wireless broadband network based on technologies like 4G and beyond could provide the seamless connectivity to anything from anywhere.