Experts believe that the heavy competition between Verizon Wireless and AT&T along with the ever increasing number of users accessing their Facebook accounts, checking their mails and streaming video will soon cause mobile broadband to become a choke-point.
Resolving these issues would not be an easy task according to a recent breakfast panel discussion in Seattle where a wide range of problems including business model queries, the limitations of physics, spectrum availability and regulatory concerns were raised by the panellists.
Ken Denman, the CEO for Openwave said “We have a really tough problem, and it’s not just phones that are the problem, but all things non-phone are going to be driving a ton of usage.”
With many mobile handset makers like Apple driving heavy usage while at the same time taking a 30 percent cut of all apps sold the concerns of how carriers will be able to support data financially has been raised by Hank Skorny of RealNetworks saying “We are depriving operators the ability to invest in their own networks. We have this massive double-edge sword forming here.”
The number of carriers that are claiming they are building both the fastest and the best networks quicker than anyone else is constantly rising, even in light of the issues that have been mentioned. One of the panellists, Neville, the SVP of Engineering at T-Mobile defended the role of the carrier saying that by the end of the year it would be providing 3G services to 200 million users, although compared to Verizon and AT&T this was a much smaller footprint. He also advised that it will be upgrading its services to HSPA 7.2, which most handsets currently on sale now already support, and this would allow it to jump ahead if its competition.
Source – Moco News