Game Changing LTE

DoCoMo have announced their LTE launch plans - 2010.  Interesting their comment that they feel they suffered from being an early adopter of 3G and essentially were too far ahead of the mass market.  If they hit their 2010 dates, they will be in good company - not too early, not too late - right alongside Verizon and multiple other major players!  Also interesting was their statement about viewing LTE as a solution built on top of and co-existing with 3G, rather than an instant replacement.  But the most interesting comment was that through LTE they would like to be know as 'Douga not DoCoMo'.  Apparently 'Douga' means Movie DoCoMo, and this lets us clearly see where they see the mobile market in Japan going over the coming years.  Personally, I think this 'Douga not DoCoMo' vision is way too narrow - LTE is alot more important than simply being a new way to deliver movies.

In the TM Forum we seem to spend alot of time talking about leading edge topics such as Transformation and 4G Wireless and Cloud Computing, etc.... The penny only dropped with me a few days ago that these are all simply different faces of the same coin.  If LTE delivers anything close to the potential it boasts then it will single-handedly become the greatest transformation engine we have seen in the past decade  (although Cloud may rival it!!).  For those of you old enough it reminds me of the time when optical fibers killed the waveguide business.  Waveguides were beautifully engineered metal pipes for propagating microwaves.... but along came optical fibers and within months a complete mature technology crumbled.  The game changing bandwidth that LTE will offer, will force all fixed players to fundamentally re-examine business models for a wide range of their broadband products.  It will cause mobile players to fundamentally address once and for all how they charge for data - rather than the crude but effective all-u-can-eat current model. And it will open up a completely new genre of services.

The problem is that nobody knows what these new services will be.  But we'll recognise them when we see them!