4G LTE and Beyond
Technologies like Voice-over-LTE and Circuit Switched Fall Back attracted growing interest from operators worldwide, which helped LTE make rapid gains over competing BWA technology WiMAX.
Well, we bet you had already guessed this one but then no bonus for doing so—so much of LTE has been in the air for so long, figuratively speaking! To put things in context, it has been more than five years since the airwaves in the 2300 MHz bands were auctioned in 2010 for what was then termed as the broadband wireless access (BWA) license and was meant for… well, mobile data.
The pace of technological developments, however, soon rendered the very idea of having a separate BWA license redundant. Technologies like Voice-overLTE and Circuit Switched Fall Back attracted growing interest from operators worldwide, which helped LTE make rapid gains over competing BWA technology WiMAX. It is now a universally accepted next network for operators globally.
Today, it is no longer just fashionable for service providers to have LTE in their mobile broadband portfolios. Rather, it has the potential to create a differentiating advantage for operators. At the same time, a challenge for incumbent operators in India has been that they have already invested huge amounts in 3G spectrum and subsequent rollouts. Much of these investments are yet to be recovered. As such, they are faced with the possibility that a full-blown LTE rollout could lead to the cannibalization of their existing 3G offerings, much before the RoI on 3G investments has been realized.
That’s indeed a big inhibitor for incumbents to move on to LTE. But then, how about the real possibility of a greenfield LTE operator disrupting the 3G-centric mobile broadband market and becoming a threat for the incumbents? If the argument is that it won’t happen overnight and the greenfield operator would be able to pose any real threat only after achieving a certain threshold in terms of number of subscribers, among various other things, then yes, the point is very much valid. Incumbents do have some time at hand.
Yet, that time may end sooner than they would like it to. An accelerated development of the device and digitized media ecosystem around 4G LTE implies that the cost of network infrastructure deployment is coming down quite fast, which in turn, gives greenfield operators the economy of scale they have been looking for. They could potentially gain LTE subscribers much faster than possibly a year ago.
LTE investments also have the potential to be recouped much faster than 3G. Moreover, if well complemented with technologies like VoLTE, the services also have a lesser risk of getting commoditized in the near future. The range of high-definition media and infotainment services that VoLTE could enable is vast, and offers operators the opportunity to engage their customers in differentiated ways.
LTE-Advanced would make even greater sense in the Indian context, given the technology’s ability to do carrier aggregation across diverse frequency sets, say 1800 MHz and 2300 MHz, which are otherwise FD-LTE and TD-LTE frequencies, respectively. Carrier aggregation could effectively address the problem of spectrum fragmentation and enable operators to optimize their precious spectrum resources to achieve quicker RoIs.