iPhone and LTE
Convergence will be continuing in a dramatic way over the next few years with television going more and more to IP delivery on demand and telecommunications moving to to Unified Communications using VoIP technologies. Apple is seeing this future with its new FaceTime, wisely pushing it as an open standard and already receiving support from Cisco for this initiative making it all but a done deal. In the mobile arena, the Obama administration is planning to nearly double the wireless spectrum available to promote broadband adoption. Expanded wireless broadband will be the eventual norm and provide an always-on fully unified data and communications experience. This will lead to cellular providers vying to provide the best wireless broadband performance, quality and reliability as customers are no longer tied to a cell provider for both their bandwidth and their phone service. As with web services, you will be free to choose who provides your phone service or provide it yourself and shop around for the best bandwidth for your money.
The beginning of this revolution will be LTE. WiMAX is getting some attention now, but has already been written off as not having in place the technologies to meet the full spectrum of service people will be demanding. High quality voice, audio and video streaming on the same network as standard text and web data with the ability the seamlessly fall back to older protocols as you go out of LTE range is what will make LTE shine.
Verizon will be the first with a major LTE network and Apple will come out with a Verizon iPhone to celebrate this, probably in January to explain Steve's statement that FaceTime will work in WIFI only in 2010. AT&T will follow also in 2011 when it can with its own LTE network and eventually every provider will move to LTE. WiMAX may still have some installations, but the industry will standardize globally on LTE.
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