LTE has always been envisioned by some in the mobile sector not only as a data-only play, but also a potential substitute for fixed-line broadband. However, while most mobile players agree that LTE's promised broadband speeds will leave fixed-line ADSL in the dust, there's far less agreement on how it would fare against fiber-to-the-home.
Yet Japanese cellco eMobile is banking its business model on it.
Eric Gan, president and COO of eMobile, says his company sees mobile broadband "as a continuation of ADSL, not FTTH", and is building its LTE strategy on that premise.
eMobile, which is the mobile arm of broadband operator eAccess, has built a base of 1.8 million subscribers over the last couple of years selling mostly HSPA data-card services rather than voice-centric mobile. The cellco launched HSPA+ services in July, and intends to launch commercial LTE services in September 2010.
Gan said in a keynote speech at an LTE forum in Hong Kong last month that mobile broadband was already a suitable substitute for ADSL services, and that LTE would allow eMobile to compete even against Japan's growing FTTH market.
"We have performed tests with LTE, and the speeds are getting closer to fiber speeds," he said. "That's why we believe LTE will cannibalize the fiber market."
Takehiro Nakamura, director at rival cellco NTT DoCoMo and RAN chairman for the 3GPP, was dismissive of the idea that LTE could compete with FTTH in Japan.
"Optical fiber is already rather widely deployed in Japan, and most people use it and like it," he says.
Whether LTE can hit such lofty heights or not, Ulf Ewaldsson, VP and head of product area radio at Ericsson, is also bullish on mobile broadband as the next major growth market for the overall broadband sector.
"By next year, mobile broadband users will outnumber fixed-line broadband users, and HSPA/LTE will account for 80% of the global broadband market by 2014," Ewaldsson said. "So there will definitely be less need for a wire with broadband services."
However, that's not necessarily a testament to LTE's ability to challenge fiber. For a start, with mobile broadband touted as a viable fixed-broadband substitute in emerging markets with low broadband penetration of any flavor (let alone fixed lines), there may be no fiber to cannibalize in such markets.
Even in urban areas, where FTTH is most common, LTE is unlikely to be a suitable substitute, especially as new bandwidth-intense services start to emerge, says Francesco Masetti-Placci, head of end-to-end LTE and 4G wireless networks at Alcatel-Lucent APAC.
"Fiber gives you enough bandwidth to support services like 3DTV, HDTV and virtual reality games at high quality, which are things we will be seeing in the pipeline," he says.
That said, LTE's viability as a fiber substitute may be only be just another evolution away.
LTE Advanced - which is being developed by the 3GPP to conform with the ITU's IMT Advanced specs tentatively for Release 10 - promises to take LTE's throughput speeds up to 1 Gbps (downstream) and 500 Mbps (upstream), as well as double throughput performance at the cell edge and lower latency on the control plane.
The standard, however, is at least a couple of years away from being finalized in any meaningful form, and commercial deployments after that will depend greatly on LTE's progress. More importantly, as it may rely on carriers as wide as 100 MHz to hit those performance targets, regulators will need to find several hundred MHz worth of spectrum in a harmonized band to set aside for it.