As the first week of the New Year comes to an end, it’s time to assess that annual shindig known as CES. The show isn’t over yet – the exhibit hall is open through Sunday and there’s a session later today titled: “Gadgets Everywhere and the Role of Wireless” – but as for the big news, that seems to have happened by now. Aside from the giant TVs at CES, it was all about wireless, right?
Right, and one only needs to look at the cadre of tablet announcements that were promised and delivered. Well, not all of them are actually delivered quite yet; most of the announcements are about tablets that are coming, and in many cases, we don’t have any firm dates. The BlackBerry Playbook will hit Sprint sometime this summer. Verizon Wireless will have a couple LTE tablets, but again, no date deliverable. Then again, if vendors and carriers were to promise dates, all the fun of guessing would be out the window. Even if they wanted to give dates, I’m not sure how accurate they could get if the devices are technically still in the testing/certification/acceptance pipeline.
The tablet avalanche was very much expected. Somewhat less expected but not too surprising was this ongoing desire by the carriers to slap the 4G moniker on their flavor of next-gen technology. When AT&T announced on Wednesday that it’s deployed HSPA+ to virtually 100 percent of its broadband network, enabling “4G speeds” when combined with backhaul, that pretty much put the sealed the deal. It’s similar to T-Mobile USA putting the 4G label on its HSPA+. I guess we can blame Sprint for getting the party started by advertising WiMAX as 4G.
Now everyone’s got a “4G” service to sell, and the more engineer-ish of the bunch are probably thanking the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for pretty much handing them the keys. The ITU back in December loosened its definition of 4G to include LTE, WiMAX and other evolved 3G technologies that provide a “substantial level of improvement in performance and capabilities with respect to the initial third-generation systems now deployed.”
It still seems as though there ought to be definitive parameters for what we call 4G, but I’m also reminded of a conversation I had last year with a T-Mobile USA executive who explained T-Mo’s use of the term. This was before the ITU issued its decision, but basically he was saying HSPA+ was offering “substantial levels of improvement” over the previous technology, so when customers use the service, they immediately see it’s a generation better.
Going back a few or more years, I quite frankly was surprised when 3G crept into carriers’ marketing when that technology was first introduced. I recall some conversations, before the marketing began, about how carriers would market 3G – we speculated about what terms they’d use to get it across to consumers. Then low and behold, they actually used the 3G term, just as they are doing now with 4G. Do consumers know what 4G is, from a technical standpoint? Do they know it when they see it, experience it?
The Nielsen Company surveyed more than 2,100 U.S. adults to gauge consumer awareness and perceptions of 4G, as well as intent to purchase. When asked to define 4G, 54 percent selected what was the original ITU definition – mobile data speeds of more than 100 MBits/second, even though, as Nielsen points out, no carrier worldwide currently reaches those speeds. Regardless of the definition, almost three in 10 consumers surveyed said they were planning to buy a 4G device within the next 12 months.
And you saw this coming, right? Twenty-seven percent of respondents in the Nielsen survey thought the iPhone 4 was a 4G device as opposed to seeing it as a number delineating the fourth iteration of the iPhone.
Maybe it’s been a long week, but I’m just about ready to throw in the towel on this whole 4G debate. They’re going to market it as 4G, and if people who sign up for 4G don’t feel they are getting a significantly better experience, well, thank goodness for device return policies.
As for Verizon and LTE, Chief Technology Officer Tony Melone said during a press conference at CES yesterday that when Verizon publicly states people can expect 5 to 12 megabits per second, Verizon is thinking about a network that is fully loaded. Customers today using the service might see rates at the high end of the range and above – Melone himself said he was getting 16 megabits per second on the 16th floor of his hotel.
They didn’t talk about this at the press conference, but what happens if Verizon gets the iPhone? If it’s an LTE-capable model and people use it like crazy as they have on AT&T’s network, we have to assume Verizon built that into its model, and therefore people will get those promised speeds. Then again, Melone said that 5 to 12 megabit range can be expected for people using the devices and services “talked about here.” They didn’t talk about the iPhone. So who knows, maybe they’ll build a whole new separate network just for Apple. You know, that company that wasn’t actually at CES but after which all those manufacturers of tablets are chasing.