There have been several announcements over the past few weeks regarding the next level of development for cellular infrastructure, be it 3G LTE, 4G, NGN or another great sounding acronym. What a lot of people are still asking is "Why the rush?"
IMS Research says that to some degree they may have a point: the deployment of 3G solutions is still to be started in many countries and where it has the level of uptake from subscribers has frequently been described as underwhelming. After all the hype in the early years of this decade 3G could be viewed as something of a let-down. After all, ARPU has hardly gone through the roof for those operators that shelled out many millions, if not billions, of pounds, euros and dollars on licenses.
However this has not stopped Siemens from demonstrating its next generation mobile network (NGMN) solution or from Sprint Nextel, Motorola and Intel partnering to deploy a (4G) WiMAX network in the USA whilst Samsung continues to push its WiBRO solution in South Korea.
At the same time operators are making moves themselves with the formation of NGMN Ltd. Several high profile operators from the Americas, Asia and Europe have formed a new company with the aim of informing vendors of their specific requirements for their next generation infrastructure solution. Their aim being to direct development to extract the maximum from the available spectrum, effectively removing the need for stepped upgrades
Posted to the site on 6th October 2006
Posted to: www.cellular-news.com/story/19746.php