“If you build it, they will come” was the dominant view of fiber deployments back in the 20th century.

 

Along the way, the build-out featured booms, busts and, in the end, a very different market.

 

AT&T came back together, the Internet became a commercial platform and cable operators learned to provide two-way communications – just as wireless operators emerged as an alternative to the landline. On the telecom side of the business, the build-out seemed to maintain the status quo, while the applications that came of age changed the model of communications forever.

 

One possible technology we will discuss during day three of the 4GWE Conference – an event colocated with the ITEXPO West 2009, to be held Sept. 1 to 3 in Los Angeles – that could change communication is the use of “White Space,” which will not only enable alternative spectrum, but also create the possibility of product-oriented models such as what has happened with WiFi.

 

As the government awaits the proposals for new services in unserved and underserved locations, questions arise about how this will impact the applications of the future.

 

Our experts represent many different strategies in providing these new services. Many of the proposals are looking to link statewide backbones in a manner that connects the citizens with services. Obviously e-government may be one of the applications in the future. Other applicants are expanding the services directly to the end user, but does that mean it’s an alternative loop to the home, or smartphones? We will be looking at the stimulus and also the history of Muni Wireless and what went wrong.

 

Which is why this day includes wireless backhaul and the concerns that carriers have in expanding the network operations to support and any to any world. How do you expand the network in a manner that delivers everywhere? However, as you enable ubiquity with a 4G network, the opportunity expands to support smart products having nothing to do with phones. Wireless solutions that address smart energy, personal health and fitness, smart home and Machine to Machine, or “M2M” apps are likely to expand the traffic on the network.

 

All of these moves into 4G wireless broadband services are going to represent issues with implementation that require testing for the new world of application intensive wireless. While for some larger carriers the expansion of the data network is segmented from the voice, but for the great majority of carriers wireless IP will include voice, video, data and text. Combined traffic adds to the complexities of testing plans and the use of 4G technologies such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing and Multiple Input Multiple Output add new aspects to managing the traffic.

 

4G Wireless Evolution Day 3 is for the folks in the trenches building the services of the future. I hope you join us there.