The Future of 4G: A View of WiMAX and LTE and What They Mean for MSM

In the first half of 2010, a great deal of attention was focused on the future of 4G, and the battle between WiMAX and LTE (News - Alert) for consumer adoption. Both WiMAX and LTE represent an important shift for the market as 4G technology is all about truly enabling the next evolution in computing — mobility. In this new world, efficient Mobile Software Management (MSM) solutions — the ability to manage software, applications and devices over the air — are extremely relevant.

Driving the need for 4G networks is the uptake of mobile broadband and ever-smarter mobile devices. These smart devices, whether they be mobile broadband dongles or the latest smartphones, must be configured to work correctly on these emerging 4G networks while relying upon increasing amounts of software to enable a rich user experience. This software must be managed to ensure people receive the best user experience with timely delivery of new functionality and performance improvements to their devices.

The wireless world used to focus predominantly on voice as its primary application. However, in recent years with the uptake of mobile broadband and the popularity of new connected devices such as the iPhone (News - Alert) and the Kindle, this world now revolves around data. Data is fast becoming the most important application on the wireless network. On March 24, 2010, the Financial Times (News - Alert) reported that, “data traffic has exceeded the volume of voice calls across the world’s wireless networks for the first time.” Smart devices drive up data usage because consumers are constantly browsing the Web or downloading videos and all types of applications.

The increasing exposure of smart devices to rapidly evolving Web services, such as social networking sites and video sharing sites, drives a need for the software in the devices to be updated as the services evolve. Being able to manage the lifecycle of applications and runtimes (e.g., Web runtimes and virtual machines) independently will become even more important as the cadence of releases is very different compared to other software assets on the device (e.g., an operating system kernel). This release cadence also is affected by the increasing use of open source in devices that will attach to 4G networks. More frequent releases will require more frequent updates of software assets, and thus efficient delivery of those updates will become even more important than it is today.

The current 3G networks have to deal with more data than ever before and are suffering from serious capacity constraints. 4G enables the necessary data support for devices and is much better equipped to handle the way smart devices communicate in small bursts. Therefore, even with 4G networks we must pay attention to the way applications consume data. An efficient way of reducing the bandwidth requirements of 4G devices, from how applications communicate with their back-end services to software management operations, must be implemented to ensure we don’t quickly run into the same constraints the industry is seeing today on 3G networks. Bandwidth is not free and is not limitless.

The standards used in 4G networks are evolving rapidly, meaning there is still uncertainty over some key enablers in the 4G world. For example, there are currently two proposals as to how voice should be transmitted over a network using the all-IP LTE standard. In the past, for example the migration from GSM to UMTS mobile networks, we have seen that these changing standards and immaturity of the networks introduce instability in the radio software used by devices to communicate with the cellular network. Therefore, all 4G devices should be updateable over the air to properly maintain the radio software as well as the application stack, so that devices can keep up with how the cellular networks evolve while interoperability issues are ironed out.