Why is 3g not good enough? What are the technology drivers that will give the
demand for 4G technology. Because if there is not the demand then the mobile network
operators will not invest, and we will not get 4G. Gartner put forward 5 technologies
that require 4G networks to make them work and in doing so change modern society.
- Video / TV There has been a long held dream
to have live TV on a mobile
phone. This in addition to have off-air TV and videos services that should be
available on a mobile phone via the mobile network. The demand is for
standard definition TV or Video to be available on a mobile device attached to
a mobile network.
- Office Anywhere For small organisations the
provision of fixed office
space and facilities can be costly, and indeed within larger firms much of the
office space is not occupied 9 to 5. Add this to the need to work away from
base for many individuals provides a requirement to allow mobile office
software. The mobile networks need to be able to support disk storage such
as Dropbox, Onedrive etc. Additionally the 4G mobile network should support
online office software such as Google Docs.
- Music in the cloud There is a revolution in
music, away from physical
items such as CDs or vinyl to streaming. The 4G mobile network will support
the streaming of music from organisations such as Spotify, or Apple Music.
- IoT. The growth and rollout of IoT requires
network capacity to upload and download data. This network anywhere can be provided
by the 4G mobile networks. In addition many of these IoT networks will have an
associated mobile application.
Health or Fitness Apps have a large mobile upload requirement.
- Social Multimedia Facbook Twitter, Instagram and
other social media
platforms are with us all the time and everywhere. Many users wish up upload
antime and anyplace. The 4G network needs to support this demand.