How fast will 4G grow?

As anyone who regularly reads my blog will know I am a fan of the potential of LTE.  In terms of speed of growth, my gut feel tells me that it will move on a much faster curve than 3G - but in reality it couldn't be much slower!  A recent report by Pyramid research tells us that LTE will grow at around 400% between 2010 and 2014 - much faster than 3G.  To date, 27 mobile operators worldwide have publicly committed to deploying LTE, with 12 of them expected to roll out commercial services in 2010 and the remainder during 2011 and 2012.  This continues to be very aggressive.

How the TM Forum addresses the management and monetization challenges of LTE is rapidly moving up our agenda. We are just kicking off a group to address this topic and it is aiming to address topics such as

• whether there are border cell issues in a multi-vendor network environment;
• whether the fact that 4G/LTE pushes a lot intelligence and automonuy to the nodes, will present any special challenges to network management, especially during migration or when 2G/3G/LTE are all present in a single operators environment?
• whether there are things that can be done now to make interaction with the legacy OSS/BSS infrastructure easier? 

I suspect that the wide range of TM Forum network operators, network equipment vendors and software vendor will begin to line up to prioritize and address these issues.