Ofcom’s recent announcement of the 4G spectrum auction in the UK will no doubt create a mad rush by the big operators to spend money they don’t have to secure their piece of the future mobile wireless pie.
The cost of ownership will likely outweigh the costs to provide the required infrastructure because so much has already been spent on building up the 3G network, and a large portion of this is reusable on each spectrum. It will, however, still require significant investment to make the 4G networks usable for a good proportion of mobile users and I wouldn’t expect to be seeing large scale availability of 4G before late 2013, and even then large scale is a very ambitious aim. LTE is also swanning around and acting like the temporary solution it ultimately is and one way or another we mobile users are in for a period where much greater data speeds are likely to reach our handsets whenever we want.
In a couple of weeks I will have a fixed Broadband connection running at more than 30MB which is great for streaming movies, downloading files and for my family to do what they want whenever they like, all at the same time, at home.
I think about my smartphone and what I could do with greatly enhanced speeds and I struggle to come up with advantages that would make the inevitable extra charges worthwhile. Of course video streaming will be much more usable, mobile TV could become a reality, a 4G handset could in theory replace broadband and there would be benefits. The problem is that there will be a gap between the introduction of 4G and the general public’s take up of the services that take advantage of the extra speeds. Maybe I am wrong and a slew of services that make us wonder how we ever lived without 4G will come forth, but I predict that 2015 will be the year that 4G becomes the bedrock of what we do on mobile phones.
Personally I would rather see the money spent patching up the holes in the existing 3G coverage. There are far too many places where I drop down to 2G. What’s the point of 4G if you can’t get a signal?