Potential Scenarios and Drivers of the 4G Evolution

In a world of increasing technological needs, the mobile Internet can play a significant role, meeting user's capacity and connectivity needs. There is a good deal of research around the 4G concept, where vendors and operators are trying to define it based on their preferred technology and strategic planning.

At the end of 2007, the global mobile subscribers reached 3 billion, with GSM based users accounting for over 2 billion. Several research reports have been predicting that WiMAX will be commercially deployed by 2009 and LTE (Long Term Evolution) by 2011. However, the debate on the standards for 4G continues and is a major concern. International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and other similar associations and committees are working on securing a smooth transition to the new technology.

The 4G evolution as described in Figure 1, started in early 1990s transitioning into different stages, such 3.5G and 3.75G, ending to the 4G, meeting the market needs in most of the cases. The most recent transition that is expected is the migration from High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) to the 4G standard, which could be the WiMAX or the LTE or the combination of both.

 
Figure 1: 4G evolution into convergence 

In order to describe the market needs and behavior towards the 4G evolution, it deemed necessary to assess several countries' current readiness to deploy the 4G technology. Supporting the opinion that the LTE evolution will be the winning 4G, we have defined several metrics from different perspectives such as technology, business, and consumer spending to rank each market's 4G readiness in 16 countries. Our main objective is to use a ranking approach to shed light into the factors that are driving countries' progress in deployment of 4G, be able to estimate the deployment speed, and create future scenarios. We create three groups of countries ‘established leaders’, ‘rapid adopters’ and ‘late entrants’. We also want to be able to compare 4G readiness results with existing similar studies for the same countries to provide observations and derive useful conclusions.