4G: A Wireless Broadband Future Not Far Off

It’s safe to say that a good portion of the world resides in a 3G era. It's here in North America. It's over there in Europe, and Asia. And in numerous pockets elsewhere. Wireless broadband, though short of being a quantitatively “mainstream” convenience (in the way, say, domestic DSL and cable Internet services are today), is all over the globe. And if it's not everywhere, it soon will be. Looking at where we've come from, it's reasonable to think that it's “where things are headed.” (For lack of a better phrase.)

That means in several years the mobile space in the tech industry (which now supposedly calculates 3.3 billion subscribers/users worldwide) is going to carry with it far more importance than it does even now. Business, consumerism, and even cultural exchanges will all more or less center around the devices that live within our pockets. International exchanges will no longer have substantial (cost-specific) barriers to supplant. Transactions will be conducted wirelessly. (Some nations do allow for such things already, but when the practice goes global is when we can sensibly call it “commonplace”.) The list goes on and on.

And all such communications will be done via the Web. Voice. Data. All that stuff.

Sure, that may mean we’ll think of the Web somewhat differently as time passes. We may not necessarily perform average tasks and interact with “cloud”-based applications and services via shrunken Internet browsers as we do today. We may instead focus our interests on specialized widgets and things, designed to operate as Google Maps Mobile and like-minded concepts do. What’s certain, however, is that we’ll have further advanced networks to enjoy those mobile offerings with. 4G networks. Networks proven to be similarly powerful to the modern fiber channels through which a select number of businesses and consumers in the developed world (and very few in regions still developing) function.

And if recent projections are at all accurate, we in the US won’t have to wait very long to stroll those greener pastures ourselves.

Most all of you are well aware of Sprint’s American WiMAX initiative. In essence, the company’s plan is to deploy the 4G technology to a dozen or so cities across the nation by 2009, and if successful, subsequently add to the infrastructure many more metropolitan areas, eventually spreading the web to a point mirroring its current cellular system. Quite an exciting prospect, yes?

There are certainly significant hurdles that the company has had to - and continues - to face. The most recent one being its loss of Clearwire as a partner. But if the project’s backers at Sprint find a way to proceed as planned, the company will roll out its multi-billion-dollar WiMAX wager somewhere within the timeframe it originally set its sights on.

Verizon Wireless is a company looking forward to a transition to 4G, too. It’s chosen a technology dubbed Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, as the platform it thinks best suits its interests down the road. Indeed, the wireless network operator said yesterday that it projects it will trial LTE with hardware supplied by Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Nokia, and Ericsson sometime in 2008. It will do so in conjunction with LTE experiments performed by one of its chief foreign investors, Vodafone.

Looking at the post-3G vision now being sketched, one can see that the close of the decade and the start of the next will be quite captivating for sure. There’s no doubt that the transition to the new will be a gradual one. Great changes are almost never abrupt. But it’s logical, studying the rough drafts highlighted above, to reasonably assume that public distribution will come about in a few years’ time.

As I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s an unquestionably alluring prospect.