FierceWireless: ‘Apple drops 4G iPhone model’

GAAAAA!

<gently hijacks thread for personal soapbox>

<sound of colours being affixed to wind-based nautical propulsion system>

4G does not yet exist. Some candidates for 4G are in the lab. It is not yet defined by the ITU. No-one sells 4G. XG is not 4G. WiMax is not 4G. 802.11n is not 4G. 4G spectrum is not defined. Anywhere.

When 4G is deployable, the overwhelmingly obvious bet is that it will be something that MNO's can transition their billions of 3G users to gently, gradually, using much of the existing infrastructure. No-one is going to fund a completely new network. No-one is going to be able to charge the customer any more than they can now for 4G. We have reached the limit of mass-market disposable income for telecommunications. Food/shelter/clothing/fuel are all more important. Race you to the bottom.

4G will not exist for several years to come, at least. Global standards and vendors take a looooong time to get their acts together. Nothing is real until your friendly MNO ponys up several billion to actually build it in your neighbourhood.

VC types, repeat after me: WiMax is not 4G. WiMax is not 4G. WiMax is not 4G…..

<back into soapbox>

WiMax is not 4G. But LTE is.
UMTS was finalised in 2000 and started to be deployed in 2003 – so it's not that much of a lead time. The main issue will be spectrum reuse.

However, saying that you can't charge customers more for telecoms is like saying that there's no point deploying DSL because the dial-up market is in a price war.

Moving to an all IP network has some advantages for customs and a lot of advantages for MNOs.

But, you're right, WiMax is a dead duck.

Hi Terence,

Yes, 2003, but it only became mainstream in the last year or so (VF have only just moved HSPA beyond the M25), and still represents a fraction of overall connections. While I hope that LTE will deploy quicker than UMTS did due to a lot of future-proofing in BTS design, I'm not holding my breath.

I do hold that we can't really expect customers to pay any more. OFCOM's William Webb wrote a paper on consumer propensity to increase telecoms spend – and it was measured in a few percent. With just about every essential commodity – carbohydrates, petrochemicals, cotton – becoming more expensive, paying more for a snappier wireless connection will be waaaaaay down Maslow's hierarchy of needs for most consumers.

I'm not sure the DSL vs dialup argument stands. DSL delivered a much-improved experience and enabled many core apps to work better than over dialup. But the step from 3.5G to 4G? hmmmm…..

The devices will not get bigger, so the idea that something killer will come along to take advantage of a 100MBps connection vs the 2MBps avg now is pretty sketchy. 100MBps to the home will enable HD VoD, which will change viewing patterns the way iPlayer is now. But that's to a big screen. We can deliver 30FPS QVGA video now (some MNO's even brand this 'mobile HD' :-/ ) – and no-one wants to watch it, let alone pay more for it! We can stream audio for Africa, yet everyone is sideloading like crazy on dedicated devices.

All-IP will be good for MNO's, but a voice call over IP with QoS delivers the same experience as one over CS. Remembering, 3G calls *ARE* IP now, in that it's all packets anyway, just in a proprietry format, not IPv6.

Cheers,

Mike

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