TORONTO – Despite numerous technical, operational and financial challenges, Long Term Evolution (LTE) will become a dominant wireless technology, if not the dominant wireless technology, globally by the end of the decade, according to panelists at the Canadian Telecom Summit.
Speaking in a Tuesday morning session, executives from a range of major equipment and software suppliers argued LTE will take a commanding role because of its high transmission speeds, low latency, greater capacity, more extensive coverage, and lower costs. “LTE will be the choice for all spectrum, all technologies and all networks in the next 10 years,” declared Dr. Wen Tong, global CTO of Huawei Wireless. “All will migrate down the road to a single technology.”
Just as importantly, panelists contended that LTE will dominate because it offers the promise of a much better user experience than other wireless technologies, enabling carriers to cut high customer churn rates. “It appears to be more about a killer user experience than about a killer app,’ said Natasha Tamaskar, vice-president of strategic Marketing for Genband, who moderated the session.
Petri Lyytikainen, CTO and head of services, Canada, for Nokia Siemens Networks, concurred. “It’s not just about improving speeds and feeds,” he said. “It’s about improving the end user experience holistically.” In a recent survey that NSM conducted, 34% of Canadian wireless subscribers indicated that they’re considering changing wireless carriers in the next12 months, largely because of poor service.
Several panelists cited industry statistics and projections to buttress their argument about LTE’s coming supremacy. For instance, Tamaskar noted that at least 30 LTE network launches are planned around the world this year and 43 more next year, including planned launches by Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Telus. Based on these planned launches, she said, there should be 92 LTE networks operating globally by the end of 2012.
“So there is a significant amount of momentum,’ she said. As a result, Genband believes that LTE penetration of mobile subscribers will jump from just 0.3% today to 11% by 2015.
But panelists also warned that the widespread deployment of LTE technology alone won’t be enough to meet the world’s rapidly growing bandwidth demands. They said wireless carriers must also acquire swaths of fresh spectrum, build new radio access networks (RANs), improve backhaul links, deploy small cell technologies, and develop new business models, among other things.
“In only five years, operators globally need to increase their data network capacity 10 times,” said Dragan Nerandzic, CTO of Ericsson Canada. At the same time, he noted, mobile broadband data revenue are projected to grow only 20% to 30% between now and 2016. So, he predicted, “the business model will break” unless something is done.
Peering further into the future, Lyytikainen predicted that mobile data traffic will multiply a staggering 1,000 times by 2020, potentially overwhelming the world’s wireless networks. To meet that explosive growth, he called for the amount of mobile spectrum to increase 10 times, network performance to increase 10 times, and the number of base stations to increase 10 times. He also called for the establishment of 500 million Wi-Fi access points by 2020.
Several panelists suggested that it will take one or more advanced versions of LTE technology to provide enough capacity for future mobile broadband use. Going beyond the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technology already under discussion, Dr. Tong called for the development of LTE-beyond (LTE-B) technology. He noted that the world’s wireless carriers already serve 3 billion smart devices and offer 200 million applications, with the potential for 5 billion downloads.
Questioned about how wireless carriers can monetize their LTE investments, panelists said providers should focus on delivering better service to subscribers. For example, Steven van Zanen, senior vice-president of mobile broadband for Acision, suggested that “quality of experience” will prove to be the biggest differentiator for carriers.
“We believe this is where carriers should compete,” he said, citing the company’s survey of mobile users. “The outgunning on bandwidth only is simply not the right choice.”
Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network at TechWeb and covering CTS 2011 for Cartt.ca.
