From the CTIA Show Floor

The buzz from the show floor at CTIA this year appears to be a vision of a 4G world.

Certainly the usual flurry of cool new devices (or at least ones that vendors hope you will think are cool) got first unveilings at CTIA this year. Sprint for its part rolled out its answer to the iPhone in a device built by Samsung. I will leave the analysis of how good an alternative it is to the pundits and naysayers on the web who usually comment on such.

As for Sprint, I suppose it is no surprise that its Xohm hard launch has been delayed. Its new CEO Dan Hesse reiterated his commitment to Xohm and again claimed a two year lead on LTE. Plenty of people were hoping for a Sprint announcement of a Clearwire, Intel, Google, etc. announcement of a collaboration and new funding. But such a deal is surely complex and I am not surprised it wasn't ready to debut. He did spend some time talking about the value of real open networks.

And to me in a sense this might be the most momentous paradigm shift of late among US carriers. Their model has so long been predicated on completely controlling the customer with device subsidies and locked-in contracts that it surely must be hard for executives to consider letting that go. But the potential in terms of devices that carriers can serve and bill for is huge in a more untethered world. I think carriers are seeing this now.

There was plenty else of course. As I reported earlier there was renewed interest in the Tower Technology Summit part of the show that I was most involved in. Everyone is interested in the new auction and also the anticipation of business from the past AWS auction, which is beginning to experience spectrum clearing to free up opportunities for carriers to build out.

In a more general sense there was a real emphasis by all sorts of stakeholders that 4G is the future. Or perhaps I should say IP-based services. This appears to be driven both by devices and by services. Some services, which the cellular industry has been slow to adopt, seem to have caught the eye of carriers partly because online firms like Google are outstripping them.

I noticed both an HSPA pavilion and a WiMAX pavilion specifically set up next to each other to tout the gains by both technologies. The consensus by most was that the world would have more than one 4G standard. There are surely to be challenges, not the least of which is the amount of bandwidth all of the new applications and especially video applications will require. But the demand is the key.

Despite the economy and numerous other frustrations befalling telecom, this most recent auction plus carrier buy in to things like Android point to this being a time of flux, change and real progress in the mobile broadband industry.
 

Tim Sanders,

The Final Mile