Analysts at Ovum are taking a bold stand and declaring Long Term Evolution, or LTE in industry parlance, as an overhyped technology. “Only 11 percent of mobile broadband subscribers are going to be on LTE networks by 2015. Besides, LTE may not generate revenue growth,” said Matt Walker, an Ovum Analyst, at a recent press event in Malaysia. He later added: “Vendors are pushing machine-to-machine but this is going to be small for service providers. Besides, we do not expect big changes in users’ willingness to pay for LTE. Different prices for different speeds or quality of service have come to nothing. Service providers will need to take some costly measures, like new spectrum acquisition, new RAN [radio access network] and a new mobile core network.”
The man has a point. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with HSPA+, and we’ve seen T-Mobile’s newly launched 42 Mbps network hit 25 Mbps download speeds in the real world. That’s comparable to Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Unlike Verizon however, T-Mobile doesn’t have to install any new equipment to get voice and SMS working over HSPA+ since it’s a natural extension to the technology that’s already in place. While we’re not exactly Chief Technology Officers at multibillion dollar wireless operators, we do think that operators should milk 3G for as long as then can and wait for LTE Advanced, which not only promises higher speeds, but supports carrier aggregation, which is a fancy way of saying the ability to combine channels in different frequencies (up to 5 on the downlink and 5 on the uplink) to make one big fat download pipe.
At the end of the day we have to quote the CEO of Clearwire who said something along the lines of customers don’t care what technology you go with, as long as you offer interesting products and compelling services. Expect LTE equipped phones to be incredibly rare for at least the next few years, and for HSPA+ to become a headline feature in Europe and Asia over the course of this year.