LTE USA '08

The spectrum, licensing, royalties and equipment are all factors in an industry already under cost pressure, how can vendors justify to the operators that now is the time to invest in another new technology?

The 3G experience has highlighted many challenges, some of which still remain today - what have been the key learnings and how will these affect future strategy? Are there key differences between the European, US and Asia-Pac models?

Where are we on the wireless road map? In an industry where the next technology is always around the corner how long does 3G LTE have to deliver?

Demand for data services is still relatively unproven for the mass market, voice and sms are still dominant today despite a fragmentation of the value chain and new applications coming to market, what implications does this have and how can future applications utilise the additional bandwidth of 3G LTE?

As the telecom industry grapples with 3G investments, LTE has emerged as a candidate evolutionary technology for mobile service providers to scale their broadband data service offerings. As the technology continues to run through the standardisation process, significant performance improvements over 3G are being touted along with a myriad of acronyms such as OFDM, OFDMA, MIMO, and SDMA. This session will demystify the LTE nomenclature and provide pragmatic guidelines for evaluating the performance of LTE relative to 3G and other technologies like WiMAX.

Profitable LTE implementations require careful deployment strategies of network and service delivery infrastructure coupled with adequate business model innovation. This session will investigate the various tradeoffs confronting service providers as they integrate LTE services with their legacy 3G ecosystems. In addition, the session will investigate next generation service delivery infrastructure requirements to capitalise on third party applications and services, while at the same time mitigating the potential disintermediation of telecom providers.

Telecom regulators in Europe have mandated the GSM and UMTS technologies to be implemented in the 2G and 3G radio spectrum bands, respectively. This approach was particularly successful in creating technology consistency with GSM for 2G. However industry players are currently debating whether it is an appropriate approach for 3G and 4G technologies. An alternative (technology neutral) approach, which has been adopted in the US, mandates the service requirements for the particular spectrum band and allows service providers to decide upon the technology used. This session will investigate the trade-offs for regulators and industry players evaluating the alternative approaches for regulators and industry players.

Traditionally cell phones, PDAs, and modem cards have been the primary devices for mobile data services. Recently 3G capabilities have been embedded in the laptops and are expected to be embedded in other devices in the future. Advocates of alternative technologies like WiMAX are promoting complementary business models that would be derived from an embedded device market. This session will investigate the embedded device market, from the perspective technology challenges, IPR and royalties, and alternative business models, such as those based on opt-in service offerings.