We have the roadmap
I remember all the US telcos saying over a decade ago they'd skip consumer copper upgrades and go straight to fiber optics. Well, half of that plan was implemented flawlessly.
Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that as Turkey doesn’t have 4G yet, the country might as well wait a couple of years and go straight to 5G. This is a pretty bold move given that we don’t even know what 5G is yet – although there are expected to be some announcements from the ITU in June. Most countries are …
and raise you 6G.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan: The numbers all go to five. Look, right across the board, five, five, five and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most mobiles go up to four?
Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not four. You see, most blokes, you know, will be talking at four. You're on four here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on four on your mobile. Where can you go from there? Where?
Sounds like common sense to me. For crying out loud - its only 5 years to 2020.
If Turkey's anything like the UK 2G will be patchy at best in the sticks (of course it's S_U _P_E_R_B in the cities as any fule kno...[joke alert]) and as for 3G - no hope of reliable coverage for yonks yet. So the UK's answer - sell off loads of spectrum and waste it on an obsolescent system, which will have to be kept going for ages for legacy users. So we will have both 3G and 4G with lousy coverage and throughput, and the punter paying for the wasted deployment, auction tax and new shiny.
Of course there's plenty of spectrum available for all this - grows on trees you know.
Yes, indeed. There is certainly plenty of room to grow in terms of LTE air interfaces (I think it is scoped up to 300mbps?) and I would expect that most operators probably struggle to even get a single 300mbps backbone pipe to each 4G base station, let alone 10Gbps.
Really.. if the networks there have enough 3G capacity to keep speeds up and the 3G is running well, then skipping 4G would in fact make sense. T-Mo here in the US never got around to upgrading a lot of their rural network from 2G (often even GPRS rather than at least EDGE) and now are directly overlaying 4G LTE in these areas (so they will be 2G+LTE, no 3G), skipping a gen does make sense at times.