Mobile Will Trump Fixed Broadband Internet

"80% of Web users will choose mobile broadband over fixed by 2013" is the headline of a Total Telecom interview with John Cunliffe of Ericsson (ERIC). I agree with the conclusion although I think Ericsson will be unpleasantly surprised to find that LTE is NOT the technology which leads to this revolution.

Mobile access at speeds at least equal to what cable offers and at a price lower than today's cable broadband will be available both in the home and on the road within a year or two at the most. From the Total Telecom article:

Cunliffe said that over the last 12 months Ericsson has been running LTE tests in Sweden. These have taken place in urban environment, with clear line of sight between the cell tower and the device for less than 40% of the time, while moving at speeds of up to 45 kilometres per hour.

'We recorded peak speeds of 154 Mbps, an average of 78 Mbps, and minimum speeds of around 16 Mbps,' he said.

What'll drive this change? My friend Pip Coburn argues persuasively that change doesn't happen until there is a perceived benefit large enough to overcome the perceived pain of adoption of a new technology.

Online cars will be the initial benefit in buying high-speed mobile connectivity. I just got my first connected GPS. It's called Dash Express and can connect either through GPRS (low speed mobile data) or WiFi. Here's what's really cool: all the Dash Express units can communicate the current speed they are moving through their data connections and have access to the aggregate traffic reports of all the other units – talk about crowd-sourced realtime traffic reports. Wow! I know I won't get much useful information here in Vermont until penetration of these devices are higher but friends tell me it is already useful in urban areas where the company has apparently seeded units. You can also do Yahoo searches for anything you're looking for and find cheap gas, all using real-time data rather than a stored set of points which quickly gets obsolete. I'll write more about this when I have more experience with it.

High speed mobile data connections are about to become very cheap because of technologies like WiMax and LTE and, IMHO, even more importantly because of the FCC's action in freeing up the "TV" white spaces for unlicensed use. Now think of that GPS screen in the car. It's a lot bigger than the screen on your mobile phone; it's connected to the car battery so doesn't have to worry about battery life. It's going to have realtime video of traffic conditions, attractions you are passing, and is going to deliver entertainment – hopefully to the passengers. Of course there'll be another screen for the kids in back, which already is in many cars, but now it'll be Internet connected.

So we'll all need to connect our cars. Once we do that, we'll start to wonder why we need a separate connection for our house. It'll take us awhile to drop these where there already installed and working; but, when it comes time to upgrade for higher speed, we'll tend to switch to the mobile connection for home use as long as it's fast and cheap enough. For new subscribers the choice'll be easy: they'll just buy one connection.

Ericsson's customers are carriers so they think of how much easier it is for a carrier to let a customer self-install mobile than to make a house call for a fixed-connection. "Installation of a fixed connection into the customer premises is a nightmare for both the consumer and the service provider, compared to a mobile connection which self-installs and automatically connects to the network," Cunliffe says. We won't rush out and buy mobile connections to make life easier for carriers although easy installation will help bring the price down. We WILL buy mobile connections because the pain of being unconnected while in motion'll be too high and there will be little or no incremental cost for mobility and because they meet our need for high-bandwidth when we're sitting still.

Comments

[bkinn:]

No doubt we will see a revolution to wireless for autos, handsets, etc. But this technology will never completely displace a "wired" concept, especially if that concept is FTTP. Reliability and speed for massive file distribution will require fiber. Speed capabilities from fiber are nearly an endless possibility. Light is composed of a spectrum of colors and using this principle along with other advancements, fiber will be able to provide the bandwidth needed in a society that has a need to transport massive files in micro seconds. If you have kept up with the latest trends in data transport both for consumers and businesses, if you are able to grasp the desire indeed the need for larger and larger file applications, you already know that our need for speed will continue to grow... and grow quickly.

Wireless solutions have come a long way, and they will continue to expand, but we will always have a need for more speed as innovations develop in areas we can't even comprehend at this time. Your article is useful and truthful on some levels, but to suggest (as you title does) that wireless will displace all fixed BB solutions, you are discounting the speed of light. Einstein would never forgive you.

2008 Nov 24 10:36 AM

[Mobile Expert:]

The Mobile Broadband revolution will indeed occur. But sadly it is not going to be driven by small or medium sized handsets. The only reason for this is not end user lack of desire, but purely the limitations of battery technology and screen size limitations. Battery technology that requires very high density for sustaining 1 MBps usage continuously for a few hours on a handset is probably at least 10 years away. Screen sizes need to be very small for handsets to be put in your pocket, so they will inherently consume much less data, due to the limited user interactions and capabilities possible.

So from now to 2015, the Mobile Broadband revolution is going to be driven by Laptops, netbooks and also larger mobile internet appliances, vehicles and home portable modems. The reason is that these larger mobile devices can pack larger batteries and larger screen sizes to enable a richer use of the Internet data more like a PC.

Till the Mobile carriers realize the value is not just focussing on handsets anymore, they will continue to have the ostrich mentality of pushing HSPA and EVDO technologies not optimially designed for Mobile Broadband but rather for mobile narrowband data. WiMAX has a good chance if being the technology of choice given its IP based Ethernet style roots. (For those who do not know, Ethernet is by far the largest PHY/MAC technology running the internet as we know it). WiMAX was designed with the same philosophy. So WiMAX may become in the Mobile broadband data world what Ethernet is to the wired world and GSM is to the mobile voice world. LTE also has promise as a technology, but it is being driven by the wrong players who still do not understand broadband data technologies driven by the Internet and still see a telco centric world. So ultimately WiMAX is more likely to prevail given the strong ecosystem that supports it and the low prices being offered for the devices today.

2008 Nov 24 03:38 PM

[jepittman:]

Pretty good stuff. Now how would you invest to take advantage of these trends? Well done to the author and the responders.

2008 Nov 26 01:50 PM