Well here we go. "Can you hear me now?" is going to take on a new meaning. They might even think about changing the line to "Can you see me now because I'm going so fast....just like The Flash." OK, maybe not THE catchiest tag line in the world (I never pretend to be an advertising genious), but you get the drift. Verizon Wireless' CTO, Dick Lynch, announced this week that his company was going to have LTE running by the end of 2009. I think I had a Keanu moment, where I just stopped and said "Whoa..."
This is huge people. LTE, the 4G, uber high speed nirvana we've all been waiting for (wait, didn't we say that about 3G?) is coming a couple of years earlier than we expected. Speeking of "Whoa...", maybe it wasn't a Keanu moment so much as one like the little baby boy in those eTrade commercials. OK enough joking around.
Almost everyone out there, including your favorite enterprise mobility analyst (that's ME people!), expected LTE deployments to readilly be available no earlier than 2011, call it 2012. This is going to be a good 2+ years earlier than that. Now I wonder what drove some of this acceleration...
My first guess is that Verizon Wireless is reacting to Sprint's recent deal with Clearwire, where for all intents and purposes Sprint becomes a 4G MVNO. Now sure, Clearwire is doing that WiMax thing right now, but during the call where they announced the deal a couple of weeks ago, Clearwire executives openly stated they could switch over to LTE relatively quickly if necessary. That's going to have headaches on its own, but there is one argument that Clearwire/Sprint have at least a theoretical leg up on the competition. (I don't agree with that because of the technology migration issues that will come up, but that's not really the point here). My gutt says that the fat lady in the Wagnerian epic better known as Mobile WiMax is warming up for her finale...
My second guess is that Verizon Wireless (and half brother Vodafone) are now going to even more aggressively go after AT&T. T-Mobile, still launching its cooky 3G (1700/2100 MHz) is probably not a consideration. However, AT&T's 3G international roaming goodness gives it an edge (not EDGE - stay with me people!) in terms of being able to attract the international road warrior. Not the biggest population in terms of total addressable market, but boy do they rack up those ARPU loving roaming charges! (you should see my last bill from a weekend trip to Canada...shoot me). Switching to LTE opens the doors to great (inbound and outbound) roaming revenues that Verizon Wireless was never able to lay its paws on.
So what will happen in 2010 when there will be "decent" LTE coverage in the US of A? It will most likely start with data cards. The road warrior will love having theoretical 100 Mbps, which has recently turned into real-world 50 Mbps....heck, that's almost twice as fast as my Comcast cable modem! Maybe I'll even think of dumping my Comcastic home service...like that's not part of their plan ;-)
What this does do however is open the flood gates for ubiquitous enterprise mobility. We all thought it was going to happen with 3G, but that has yet to deliver...even though we now have a good 3.6 Mbps with AT&T. But LTE is more than an order of magnitude faster. This is really going to make data speeds a moot point (at least for a while). The pipe will finally be big enough to push bits not just to your PC dongle, but to your crazy fast new devices. Sure, we'll have to deal with battery life issues and the fact that the processors on current devices could choke on that throughput...but can you imagine a device that has the screen of an iPhone, an Atom -ish processor, a solid gig of RAM and the crazy LTE goodness? What would we NOT be able to do with our mobiles at that point???
So get your life preserver on. The flood gates are getting ready to open. Not today, not tomorrow, but in the corporate near-term. End-user organizations are going to have another reason to strongly consider mobilizing their applications and thereby provide their employees ubiquitous access to whatever resources they need anywhere they might be (assuming Mr. Can You Hear Me Now is there too).
