The need for strategic planning and new services has urged the need for new studies that could give an idea of the current 4G status of the countries and their move towards the future 4G deployment.
The new 4G readiness concept could be defined as "state of play" of a country's mobile wireless 4G preparation status, and the ability of its potential and existing consumers, businesses and governments to use in the future the mobile wireless and broadband to their benefit. Based on the 4G readiness criteria we will rank the countries as a first step in estimating how soon they will close the gap to new 4G technological environment.
To measure each country's innovation using the Motivation/Ability framework (Figure 1). In this framework, we are describing the 4 different quadrants and how they are adjusted into our problem. The Motivation means that the 4G including the digital convergence should be the "pot of gold" and the new opportunity awaiting for the winners that most likely would be the first movers. The Ability describes the resources needed to develop 4G and craft them into business models for new products and services.
In the "Looking for a target" section, the operators are still undecided regarding the more beneficial choice or are lacking the spectrum to develop a new market. This hesitation also can derive from the "Looking for the Money" section, since the players are still expecting the 3G to pay off before they move into a new investment or wait for the LTE, in order to upgrade the GSM networks that might also include lower cost, much less than developing a WiMAX solution. "The Dilemma" is what we can quantify using our 4G readiness metrics and estimate per country, assuming basic innovation and ability. Finally "The Hotbed" is addressing all the innovative countries that feel confident and in the right path for the 4G adoption in the near future.
Other important non-market factors for 4G based on the framework development are:
- Industry standards
- Cultural norms
- State of technological development
- Government regulation
- Country's intellectual property infrastructure
We are applying non-market metrics and factors, because there are no markets structured shaped yet and the current 3G markets provide very little knowledge to support the new landscape for 10 years from today.
More specifically we will rank the following list of countries that are included in the top 20 of the referred study: Canada, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Switzerland UK, Denmark, Germany, USA, Japan, Sweden and Finland.
Also, some other countries will be added, such as China due to the China Mobile 4G activity and trials as mentioned before. Other strategic countries added in the sample: India, Russia, Brazil due to the following facts or figures:
- Almost represent half of the world's population
- Showing record in wireless adoption in the last few years
In our methodology we are using as input countries with the most efficient digital users, assuming they are more technologically innovative, demanding more advanced services than the rest of the world. The suggested categories and the data collected will be similar to the e-readiness study, adjusted more specifically when needed into the mobile wireless dataset, trying to include important non-market factors as already described. We assume in most cases that the 4G evolution can be considered as a digital subcategory developing similar categories and criteria.
