EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Christian Salbaing, Deputy Chairman of Hutchison Whampoa (Europe) Ltd – parent company of 3 – has told Mobile World Live that the mobile industry has learnt lessons from previous 3G rollouts and must now ensure that the same mistakes are not made with LTE deployments.  

In an exclusive new video interview, Salbaing states: “The danger with LTE, the opportunity is you’ve got the quantum leap in performance and speed, so logically that would go in the right direction, but the applications have become more and more complicated and so if you don’t follow, if you are hesitant in the adoption of this, or if you tried to go into niche applications of LTE, you will once again find yourself in the same situation that some of us found ourselves in with 3G, where you’re not actually taking [advantage of] the opportunity.”

Salbaing believes that the launch of 3G services ten years ago generated “a major hurdle” for the industry: “Despite the fact that we had 3G handsets and that you had a suite of services, most of them in a walled garden, the perception of the network performance and the handset performance and the speed perception was a major hurdle. This is no longer the case.  People routinely buy smartphones, they don’t think speed, the service is immediately available on the handset, and that’s because of the work that’s been done by the operators in terms of their network rollouts, in terms of the equipment suppliers.”

Elsewhere in the interview Salbaing also comments on the issue of widespread availability of LTE devices, as well as booming demand for data services and the ‘capacity crunch.’

View the full interview here.