Mobile operators have a lot of work to do to overcome the negative impression created by poor 3G services and regain consumer confidence in high-speed networks and the advantages they offer.
CSL CEO Tarek Robbiati told an audience of about 150 at the LTE Asia conference in Hong Kong this week that when operators have over-promised and under-delivered in 3G.
“3G became synonymous with poor service. It was slow because the spectrum wasn’t sufficient and the coverage was limited,” he said.
The lack of spectrum, he argued is a major limiting factor for many operators, particularly in India where the government is taking the “dangerous path of wanting to auction off smaller and smaller bits of spectrum that enrich the government but will cripple the development of the wireless infrastructure.”
He explained that the biggest inhibitor to moving to LTE is the embedded cost of legacy infrastructure. He said operators need to move boldly to replace their existing systems, otherwise they are stuck with current problems and higher costs in evolving to LTE.
“There is a tendency to want to protect your legacy infrastructure – it’s a human thing not to want to change. We had a lot of skepticism from our engineers when we did the network swap-out in Hong Kong. But over time they fell in love with what we wanted to do with the all-IP network.”
With the introduction of LTE in the near future, Robbiati said network speeds will have increased 150,000 times since the launch of GPRS 10 years ago.
When networks were slow, he said operators would be forgiven for the shortcomings of their devices as consumers would blame the networks. That’s not the case anymore with high-speed networks.
The devices are the limiting factors in many cases, and he said CSL was in the process of standardizing how it sells devices that can offer users an optimized mobile broadband experience.