Yes, the mobile industry would be well-served if everyone got behind a single 4G technology. No, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin used his keynote speech to urge carriers to close ranks behind LTE, placing WiMAX within the TDD section of the technology. But panelists at the Infrastructure Roundtable that followed Sarin’s address agreed that wasn’t likely in the near future.
“I think that disaggregation of networks that’s been going on in the fixed and mobile world is clearly a trend,” Alcatel Lucent CEO Patricia Russo said. “There is a coming together in some respects, but I think that we’re going to see a coexistence here for some time.”
Which is not to say that LTE isn’t attracting more attention lately. Sprint Nextel Corp. remains committed to WiMAX, of course, and Intel is a major supporter. But powerhouse carriers such as Vodafone Group, China Mobile and Verizon Wireless are trialing LTE, and AT&T has committed to deploying the technology.
Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said he expected 85% of carriers around the world to adopt LTE eventually. While Ericsson is investing in several 4G technologies, “LTE appears to be the technology most operators will be embracing,” Henric Svanberg said.
Regardless of which flavor wins out, though, 4G will be a substantial step forward when it comes to providing Internet access to on-the-go users, the panelists agreed. Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski said the next-generation technologies will deliver “from three to five times more efficiency than anything that’s out there today,” and analysts say WiMAX and LTE will spawn a host of new, connected devices that integrate the Web with more traditional consumer electronics.
And while LTE will come to market later than WiMAX – which will begin to come to market in the United States this year – network operators are putting the lessons of the past to use, which will make for speedier deployments, Russo said.
“I think we all in the industry are smarter about what it takes” to build out networks, according to Russo. “I think it’s likely that implementation of LTE will happen at a faster pace than what we saw with 3G.”
