Canadian Wireless Vendors Expect LTE to Dominate Sector

LTE will take a commanding role in wireless because of its high transmission speeds, low latency, greater capacity, more extensive coverage and lower operational costs, said executives from a range of equipment and software suppliers. “LTE will be the choice for all spectrum, all technologies and all networks in the next 10 years,” said Wen Tong, global Chief Technical Officer of Huawei Wireless: “All will migrate down the road to a single technology.”

LTE also will dominate the mobile market because it offers the promise of a much more satisfying user experience than other wireless technologies, allowing carriers to cut high customer churn rates, panelists said. “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 in Canada for Nokia Siemens Networks, said “it’s not just about improving speeds and feeds. It’s about improving the end user experience.” In a consumer survey that NSM recently did, he said, 34 percent of Canadian wireless subscribers indicated they're considering changing their wireless provider over the next 12 months, largely because of poor service. In a separate survey of carriers globally, he said, 82 percent of them cited improving the customer experience as a top goal.

Some speakers cited industry statistics and projections to buttress their argument about LTE’s forthcoming supremacy. For instance, Tamaskar said at least 30 LTE network launches are planned around the world this year and 43 more next year. Based on these planned launches, she said, there should be 92 LTE networks operating globally by the end of 2012.

In North America alone, wireless carriers have launched or plan to launch 36 LTE networks by the close of next year, Tamaskar said. That includes launches in the U.S. by Metro PCS, Verizon Wireless and now AT&T, as well as upcoming LTE rollouts in Canada by Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Telus. “So there is a significant amount of momentum,” she said. As a result, it’s estimated that LTE penetration of mobile subscribers will jump from just 0.3 percent today to 11 percent by 2015.

But the panelists warned that such widespread deployment of LTE technology alone will not be enough to meet the world’s rapidly growing demand for more bandwidth, particularly for data and video. They said wireless carriers must also acquire large chunks of fresh spectrum, build new radio access networks (RANs), improve backhaul links, deploy small cell technologies en masse, and develop new business models, among other things, to fulfill the rising demand. “In only five years, operators globally need to increase their data network capacity 10 times,” said Dragan Nerandzic, CTO of Ericsson Canada. But mobile broadband data revenue is projected to grow only 20 percent to 30 percent between now and 2016, he said, so “the business model will break” unless drastic steps are taken to boost capacity and cut costs.

Looking even further into the future, Lyytikainen predicted that mobile data traffic will multiply a whopping 1,000 times by 2020, threatening to overwhelm the world’s wireless networks. To meet that explosive growth, he said the amount of mobile spectrum needs to grow 10 times, network performance to increase 10 times, and the number of base stations to increase 10 times. He also urged establishment of 500 million Wi-Fi access points throughout the world by 2020.

In order to provide enough capacity for future mobile broadband use, several panelists said the industry will need to develop one or more advanced versions of LTE technology. For instance, Tong said the world’s wireless carriers already serve 3 billion smart devices and offer 200 million applications, with the potential for 5 billion downloads. Looking past the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) technology that’s under development, he supported development of LTE-beyond (LTE-B) technology, with maximum rates of 10 to 50 Gbps, by 2015.

On how wireless carriers could monetize their substantial investments in LTE technology, panelists said providers should focus on delivering and guaranteeing better service to subscribers and possibly content providers. For example, Steven van Zanen, senior vice president of Mobile Broadband for Acision, suggested that “quality of experience” could prove to be the biggest differentiator for carriers. “We believe this is where carriers should compete,” he said, citing the company’s surveys of mobile users. “If you start competing on the service, people will pay. … The outgunning on bandwidth only is simply not the right choice.”