I recently went to the LTE World Summit in Amsterdam. The show was quite a bit smaller than I would have expected for an industry under pressure to transform itself. There were a number of very good speakers and panels that more than made up for the apparent lack of industry participation. Overall the show was sufficient but it left me with the impression that the LTE/Mobile industry in Europe needs leadership, badly.
Currently mobile networks in Europe are at an impasse on which technologies to implement to cope with the current and (non)expected broadband data usage on their networks. Their US and Asian counterparts have already started to implement infrastructure that can cover not only todays 100Mbit/second demands at the base station but can cover a 10x increase in case of another data explosion.
The LTE show should have been a place where the Vendors could show leadership in the infrastructure game by demonstrating the solutions that can solve the impending (existing!) bandwidth issues. Instead all of the major vendors showed the same presentations and same concepts as last year. One Vendor I didn’t see anything from was NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks), though as they were hidden in a separate set of “invitation-only” showrooms. Maybe they have a real solution but want to keep it secret…
A number of Carriers also presented their LTE plans and this too was disappointing. One major global carrier stated “We are LTE ready!” and proceeded to explain their claim. They setup a small network, configured the proper technologies for various classes of voice/video/data services and simultaneously served 5 (that’s right “five”) customers. According to this global carrier that services millions of customers globally at any given second, they can claim “LTE readiness” by successfully completing a trial of “5″ customers.
The only carriers I saw that could provide concrete evidence of being on the LTE path were US based. I believe this is because of (or a lagging indicator of) the “iPhone effect” where Apple forced mobile carriers, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
Perhaps I’m being a little too hard on the Vendors and Carriers. I would also place quite a bit of the challenges we face at the feet of the standards bodies that drive the LTE concept. Standards are being developed and the LTE people are continually modifying how they make use of the standards in order to accommodate their charter. You could almost say they’re “evolving” which, of course, is the “E” in LTE.
While there I took part in a panel that tried to provoke a discussion about the current state of mobile backhaul. The title of the panel was “Mobile backhaul, is it fixed?”, literally meaning “do we have a standard solution for mobile backhaul?”. The direct answer is of course, no. Mobile backhaul is a mess, especially in Europe where synchronization is a major issue with technological and political hurdles. That topic, however, is meat for another blog post.
