Over the next few years we’ll start to see LTE move into the mainstream. It will not, however, be the immediate panacea for all of the bandwidth and spectrum issues as it will take some time to roll out. It will however start to get us moving in the right direction and combining with HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) which is getting faster, we should start to see new services that will be available to us on our mobile devices. 

What will these services be and will it be the services that drive LTE adoption at a faster rate, or will we be pushed towards it by the operators?  We’ve discussed this here and we feel that it will be a combination of both. Operators have committed to LTE and need to honour this commitment and once available they will want to drive a return on that investment as soon as possible.  Consumers like you and me want to know what is in it for them.  Not everyone jumped from 2G to 3G for the sake of it, but moved for particular benefit, service or access to the latest device.

Will it be mobile video services and capabilities that drive the adoption of LTE? Certainly content owners and distributors hope it will, as on-demand delivery to mobile devices is being seen as a route to market supporting extra revenue streams for the content as well as providing further monetisation through advertising. The operators are the ones who need to ensure they are in the value add chain here to get the percentage of the extra revenue above the simple bandwidth billing.

In any case, I’m a technology dabbler and will be looking forward to the next latest and greatest handsets giving me access to higher speeds and cool services I can show off. And yes I expect video to be one of the services – given the right screen to watch it on.