Is mobile LTE the wrong place to start?
Typing this post from Nowheresville in the middle of the former GDR -- a village outside Dresden -- I'm puzzled by a lot of the debate around LTE in the U.K.
No surprise that the 4G auction is a mess with the network operators playing the role of squabbling, self-destructive children.
What surprises me is the starting point that LTE should be rolled out as a mobile technology. Here in my bit of Saxony we have no quick DSL access. The best Telekom can offer is 2,000 k/Bit download, although the offer is rendered more attractive by the prospect of dirt-cheap ISDN and even cheaper Europe-wide call packages. VDSL is a non-starter here because no-one wants to invest in upgrading the fixed-line network -- unlike the British approach -- when there is a cheaper alternative on the horizon.
And that cheaper alternative is LTE. Next week, thanks to a supplementary aerial, I will be trialling a Vodafone LTE package. My friendly local telephony engineer will source all the equipment, and take care of the installation, so as to get me up and running with 50 M/bit downloads and an Up- and Download allowance of 30 G/bit per month. O.K., so that is not quite unlimited downloading from Piratebay, but that I can do, if I'm so inclined, using the slower DSL line over night.
The networks are in the process of rolling out LTE handsets. Frankly, other than downloading email and checking news websites, I tend to do my surfing at home, so I'm not sure that the ability to play Doom on the move, thanks to LTE's reduced latency times, is much of a help.
Where LTE does help me is in bridging the gap between a cable connection that will never happen, DSL that is frozen in time, and a 21st-century broadband connection.
The trouble is that I don't think this state of affairs could ever exist in the U.K. The kind of installer who will fit aerials to homes tends not to be on the radar; in the U.K. we'd much rather wait for a mast to be built and then complain that the radiation from it has fried the cat.
And the operators, instead of seeing LTE as a way to stuff BT over their historically imperfect access to the fixed-line network, simply see the LTE as a way to act out historical disputes between each other over spectrum allocation.
Hate to say it, but the future is the former GDR.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
