Expansion, Poor Choices, and a Revolution in the Works: LTE

I am back one week from my company’s Enterprise Innovation Symposium (EIS 2011) cost hosted by Qwest Government Services, where we were treated to some extraordinary presentations of technology and discussions on a wide range of issues.

This and some public announcements this week spurred some additional thoughts from the WiMAX and LTE discussion of a few weeks ago.   Sometimes the early common wisdom (in this case WiMAX will rule) is incorrect and it is the next wave that captures the world by storm.  Another example (and one that I may take on in a future post) is why Palm was not able to leverage their early success in Personal Digital Assistance (PDAs) and lost the wireless PDA market to RIM (and of course now the rise of iOS and Android-based devices).  But as usual, I digress.

It is amazing that within just a few months, four seemingly separate items clearly identify the trend of wireless communications as well radical changes in usage, deployment, and new business concepts.

U.S. Cellular has announced a rapid deployment of LTE services nationwide.  One that will hit 25% of their customers by the end of the year.  This is another confirmation that major carriers such as Verizon Wireless see LTE as the technology choice.  Even Clearwire (being left in the dust) is now in LTE trials.

Another and less widely known venture, LigthSquared, is deploying a new nationwide LTE infrastructure augmented by a massive satellite (already on-orbit) that services as a big base station in the sky.  The goal is to provide complete nationwide coverage, even when out of range of a terrestrial cell tower.  With a wholesale marking model, I suspect that there will be some interesting mobile application and device vendors that may develop a business model of bundling wireless connectivity (can anyone say Kindle?).

Maybe the death knell for traditional Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems is this article based around the FCC setting LTE as the standard for public safety networks.  A robust system of LTE base stations could provide a much more interoperable set of public safety voice and data networks.  New devices for first responders could integrate significantly more information, providing maps, building layouts, hazardous material identification, an even personal location information.

Finally, a product that got significant attention at EIS 2011 was the lightRadio™ device from Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories.  The device fits in the palm of your hand and is a complete LTE base station.  Connected to an LTE infrastructure control “cloud” via Ethernet and an IP network, these devices can be placed virtually anywhere.  For public safety, they could be placed in buildings.  For neighborhoods, they could be placed in houses and apartments. For business use, they could be placed offices.  For rural connectivity, they could be placed on a farm (of course you got to get a data connection there as well!). 

Combined with WiFi capabilities (because sometimes you really need to have higher speeds) a mass produced version of this device could provide the next revolution in how wireless services are delivered and what it means to be a mobile service provider.  Can a business decide to buy their own lightRadio-like device and the bid-out to different mobile service providers the ability to connect to the company owned LTE wireless infrastructure?  We do that today when we buy our own WiFi devices and then select and Internet provider.  Is this the death knell (apparently I am stuck on this phrase), for hardwired phone services in businesses.  If you can deploy a dozen or so of these small devices in your building, why have desk tethered phones when the same device the employees are using outside of the office is their office phone as well?  This could be a substantial cost savings.

All this is staring to make sense to me.  However, it is going to take a lot (a lot, a lot) thinking to understand how Microsoft is going to get anything valuable out of their $8+ billion purchase of Skype.