LIVE FROM MOBILE ASIA EXPO 2013: Executives from Alcatel Lucent, Huawei and SK Telecom discussed the impact LTE is having on the mobile industry and wider ecosystem in the Mobile World Live keynote session yesterday afternoon, ‘Unleashing the power of LTE’.
Rajeev Singh-Molares, Alcatel-Lucent’s Asia president, said that although “the use of LTE specifically is in its infancy”, Asia could be the region that leads growth of the technology.
The GSMA forecasts there will be a 10-fold growth in LTE connections in Asia by 2017, with the region having half of all global LTE connections.
Singh-Molares added that LTE could see the traditional prepaid/postpaid model replaced by tiered pricing and the adoption of advertising as a revenue channel for operators. “Advertising is going to become part of the acceptable value proposition for carriers whether they like it or not,” he said.
SK Telecom’s EVP and head of ICT and R&D, Alex Jinsong Choi, explained that the reason why LTE has taken off in South Korea is due to the highly urbanised and densely spread population.
He added that the company’s introduction of LTE-Advanced, announced this week, will fulfil the company’s vision of providing mobile services “with a higher data rate than fixed line services,” which will open the door for new service offerings.
Sanqi Li, CTO for carrier networks at Huawei, said that while the evolution of 2G and 3G were technology transformations, 4G is a business transformation. The arrival of LTE will provide an opportunity to generate revenue, especially with the enterprise world becoming interested.
Li also emphasised the need for network intelligence as LTE becomes more widely adopted, to “truly optimise at the spectrum level.”
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