Thursday, February 7, 2013

random notes on LTE and mobile trends



The announcement that the government, indigo and microsoft are teaming up to utilize tv white space for LTE caught me by surprise.  

This is a very welcome move. There is quite a bit of what I consider misinformation that LTE is expensive or can only be done by Telcos or used for end users only - you can use it as a mobile backhaul is a use case not discussed enough. I think that most of it is informed or uninformed by ignorance and over time I'll be proved right. Based on the current install base and spectrum hoarding by most operators, no one has an incentive to lead the LTE adoption unless someone piles on some pressure on either current or future earnings.

On the other hand, new entrants trying to get into a largely untapped market can and should deploy LTE. Current LTE implementations have interesting issues, VOICE is a big one, Voice over LTE (VOLTE) is as far as I know not yet standardized. Then there is indoor penetration of the 2.6GHz and that pesky business case. *why greenfield operators try to do things like the incumbent beats me.

So while Im happy with the development, Im curious how they deal with things like battery life (on mobile devices), number/size of frequency bands and hand off (i'm expecting some backward compatibility with gsm/umts....


On another note, Cisco released their 2012 - 2017 global mobile traffic update. I think you should go there and have a look. They look more realistic than past forecasts. For a deeper analysis go here ---> http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2013/02/06/cisco-castle-deflated/

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