What now 4G

You probably will remember those halcyon days when 3G licenses were awarded right? There were bidding and crazy auctions that stunned governments and people alike. That was Europe then, where 3G licenses went up for a few billion pounds which made governments rich like no business. Alas, 3G came and gone and nothing much happened. In terms of people’s living, not much has improved. Back then, video calling was supposed to make drastic changes to people’s life. Unfortunately, not much has changed because service providers were hampered by the huge bill they had to pay for the 3G licenses. The result was that video calling services had to be priced way too high for mass adoption. You will find it hard to catch any one using video call nowadays. It was so to speak a total failure, partly blamed on cost and partly blamed on insufficient bandwidth. And now, we are taking about going to 4G?

To be certain, there will be bidding all over again. Governments everywhere are a bit addicted to getting easy money. What more when most of them are facing huge budget deficits! Could we all survive another round of expensive telecommunication roll outs? Nevertheless, 4G technology providers are humming with eagerness about the introduction of the new technology. They say that with 4G, people’s life will change for the better. For one thing, with the increased speed of both upload and download, people will find new ways of doing things; like watching videos on their hand-helds all day long. Anyway, if we were to look at Korea and Japan, where they already run their services in their own 4G formats, there don’t seem to be any improvements at all. The only benefit is that people have more access to videos and movies. Certainly, one of the beneficiaries is the porn seller!

Looking at the technology players that are strong at touting 4G, we can see that the same number of providers but with a slight change in their constituents. American companies like Qualcomm and InterDigital are still ruling the roost. The rest of them consist of Nokia and Ericsson. The surprise however is Huawei which shows a strong contender for top system providers. It is a sign that China has arrived at the scene and others will have to take note of. But the way the do it is an example of sleuth and wisdom. Huawei came to the scene by way of supplier for 3G systems. In the short period, they had banked on being a reliable supplier of cheap support systems that the major players could not compete. With some dedicated backdoor research, they have managed to knock out a 4G system that delivers. But there is no telling what they can do in the future. Perhaps one day China might become the chief player for communication equipments in the world, just as they were the chief foundry to the world now!