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LTE: Huge Technology, Huge ChallengesLong Term Evolution is global 4G. It’s available on 57networks in 34 countries, according to wireless
industry advocate 4G Americas, with 100 networks
in total expected by the end of this year. It’s fast, and it
could help IT fulfill mobility challenges. Too bad it faces
significant obstacles.
By Peter Rysavy
R e p o r t s . I n f o r m a t i o nWe e k . c om
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CONT
ENTS
TABLE OF
3 Author’s Bio
4 Dark Side of Mobility
4 Figure 1: Carriers Selected by IT
5 Why LTE Is Amazing
5 Figure 2: Use of Virtual Desktop
Technologies Via Tablets
6 Figure 3: Access to Cloud Services Via
Mobile Devices
7 Market Developments
7 Figure 4: LTE Features (Including
LTE-Advanced)
8 Figure 5: Mobile Technology Impact on
Productivity
8 Challenges
9 No Moore’s Law Here
10 Figure 6: Lack of Access to Mobile
Productivity Activities: Impact on Employees
11 State of Global Confusion
12 Figure 7: Summary of LTE Challenges
12 Target Applications
14 Related Reports
ABOUT US
InformationWeek Reports’ analysts arm business technology decision-makerswith real-world perspective based onqualitative and quantitative research,business and technology assessment and planning tools, and adoption bestpractices gleaned from experience. Tocontact us, write to managing directorArt Wittmann at [email protected], content director Lorna Garey [email protected], editor-at-largeAndrew Conry-Murray at [email protected], and research managing editor Heather Vallis at [email protected]. Find all of our reports at reports.informationweek.com.
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March 2012 3
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© 2012 InformationWeek, Reproduction Prohibited
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Peter Rysavy has worked since 1993 as a consultant with numerous clients onprojects involving wireless technology. Clients include cellular operators, mo-bile-device companies, communications-software companies, infrastructurevendors, research organizations, government agencies and universities. He alsoteaches seminars, leads interoperability efforts and writes articles on wirelesscommunications.
Peter graduated in 1979 with BSEE and MSEE degrees from Stanford University,where he was involved in university/industry collaborations involving statisticaland digital signal processing. Peter is currently a wireless technology consultantand president of Rysavy Research.
Peter RysavyRysavy Research
Table of Contents
March 2012 4
The mobile broadband industry is becom-ing a victim of its own success. Mobility initia-tives are huge for companies, and that trans-lates to an unprecedented number of bytesflowing through wireless networks. Yet effortsto free up additional spectrum are goingnowhere fast, putting carriers between a dys-functional government and enterprise andconsumer customers who want their enter-tainment, apps and data, now.
Long Term Evolution, with its more efficientuse of spectrum and an impressive road mapof features to increase capacity, is a crucial el-ement in how operators will address demand.By itself, though, it’s not enough. For enter-prise IT teams, that means work in two areas.
First, think carefully about your mobilitypartner. Among respondents to our latestMobile Device Management and SecuritySurvey who have IT-driven device and carrierselection, Verizon (68%) and AT&T (58%) arethe top choices, but neither offers an unlim-ited data plan for new customers. Be sure that
which ever carrier you partner with has a roadmap to blend technology, such as LTE andeventually LTE-Advanced, with efforts to ob-tain more spectrum; pricing policies you canlive with; increases in the number of cell sites,including small cells such as femtocells and
picocells; and data off-load onto Wi-Fi, whichwe discuss in more depth here.
Also keep bandwidth limitations in mindwhen considering new mobility initiatives. Forexample, 68% of respondents to our MDMsurvey say they use or plan to use virtual desk-
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What carrier(s) has IT chosen?
Carriers Selected by IT
Verizon
AT&T
Sprint
T-Mobile
U.S. Cellular
Other
Note: Multiple responses allowedBase: 188 respondents at organizations with standardized mobile platforms and IT-driven device and carrier selectionData: InformationWeek 2011 Mobile Device Management and Security Survey of 323 business technology professionals, August 2011
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68%
58%
27%
15%
2%
9%
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Dark Side of Mobility
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Figure 1
March 2012 5
top technologies (terminal services, VDI, Citrix)via tablets. Fifty-nine percent say the sameabout enabling access to cloud services orSaaS via mobile devices.
Fortunately, LTE can help address not onlycapacity concerns, but quality-of-service con-trol, voice over IP and operation in frag-mented radio bands that are anything butharmonized globally.
Why LTE Is AmazingBefore we confront some harsh mobility re-
alities, let’s take a moment to appreciate LTE.First, it’s blazing fast, with speeds far exceedingany previous wide area wireless technology.Following the “underpromise and over deliver”business plan—and anticipating slowdownsas their networks become saturated—opera-tors quote modest rates. Verizon states an av-erage of 5 to 12 Mbps on the downlink and 2to 5 Mbps on the uplink. But the reality is bet-ter, often much better. Signals Research Group,for example, measured an average 23.6 Mbpson the downlink and an average 15.2 Mbpsuplink speeds on AT&T’s network in Houston.
Metrico Wireless, another company that doesperformance testing, reported a mean down-link speed of 13 Mbps on AT&T’s LTE networkand 10 Mbps on Verizon’s LTE network.
In the future, speeds will go even higher. Current networks use either 5- or 10-MHz
radio channels. LTE, however, actually sup-ports 20-MHz radio channels, which by itself
would double throughputs. Operators wouldlove to deploy in wide radio channels likethis because not only does it boost perform-ance, it doubles capacity for the sameamount of network infrastructure. The prob-lem is, they just don’t have enough availablespectrum.
Speed-boosting innovations are also in the
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16%26%
10%
22%
26%
Do you use or plan to use virtual desktop technologies (terminal services, VDI, Citrix) via tablets?
16%26%
10%
22%
26%
Use of Virtual Desktop Technologies Via Tablets
Yes, primarily as a way to port Windows applications to non-Windows devices
Yes, primarily as a way tosecurely deploy applications
No, and we have no plans to do so
Don’t know
Not yet, but we plan to
Data: InformationWeek 2011 Mobile Device Management and Security Survey of 323 business technology professionals, August 2011
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Figure 2
Related Report: ARMed and Dangerous?
As ARM chips go beyond beingjust the power inside iPads andKindle Fires, Intel and AMD havereason to worry. Enterprise IT, onthe other hand, can expect morechoice and savings in end-usercomputing and data center con-solidation projects, as ARM inno-vation positively affects procure-ment of infrastructure gear andrelated application developmentand migration.
DownloadDownload
March 2012 6
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works, such as higher-order Multiple In -put/Multiple Output radio systems, which relyon multiple simultaneous transmissionsthrough the environment on the same fre-quency. Current networks use 2X2 MIMO onthe downlink (two transmit antennas at thebase station, two receive antennas at the mo-bile device); 4X2 MIMO, with four transmittersat the base station, will further increasethroughput.
Probably the biggest gain, however, willcome through the next major release of LTE,called LTE-Advanced, which will start to seedeployment next year.
LTE-A permits aggregation of radio chan-nels, making it possible for operators to piecetogether 10 MHz here, 10 MHz there; eventu-ally, it adds up, effectively overcoming frag-mentation of the airwaves. AT&T will use ag-gregation to boost LTE performance viaspectrum it acquired from Qualcomm. LTE-A,in fact, allows aggregation of up to 100 MHzof spectrum. Even with only 20 MHz, however,LTE-A, in combination with 8X8 MIMO, can de-liver a blistering 1.2 Gbps of theoretical
throughput. We do have to emphasize theword “theoretical,” since it will be a long timebefore you see rates like that in the real world.Still, speeds will keep increasing.
Latency (delay) is also lessened, with packetround-trip times measured in tens of millisec-onds instead of hundreds, as with previouswireless technologies.
Additional features that excite operators,although they’re probably of less interest toIT, include being able to deploy LTE so that itoperates on a time-division duplex basis andbeing able to use LTE itself for backhaul(base station to core network) connectionsto simplify deployment. Both of these in-crease deployment options for operators
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34%
25%
9%32%
Is your organization enabling access to cloud services or SaaS via mobile devices?
34%
25%
9%32%
Access to Cloud Services Via Mobile Devices
No, and we have no plans to do so
Yes
Don’t know
Not yet, but we plan to
Data: InformationWeek 2011 Mobile Device Management and Security Survey of 323 business technology professionals, August 2011
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Figure 3
March 2012 7
and help ensure that LTE will remain thewireless technology of this decade.
Market DevelopmentsTo gain insight into mobility challenges, we
have to look at mobile broadband market re-ality. First, smartphones are becoming the“typical” phone—there are now more than 1million mobile applications, and networks aregetting faster; they, along with tablets, are re-defining the nature of computing. Eighty-twopercent of respondents to our MDM surveysay smartphones will increase in importanceover the coming 24 months; 79% say thesame about tablets versus just 34% puttingtheir money on laptops.But consumer market developments are
having a progressively bigger impact on mo-bile broadband networks—and thus, enter-prises. With a finite amount of spectrum, youremployees and customers are up against twokiller trends.The first is consumption of Internet-based
shows and movies from a wide array ofsources, including YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Ama-
zon, iTunes and traditional television channels.The NFL even provided a video stream for the2012 Super Bowl via its website. A recentNielsen report, “The Cross-Platform Report,”shows a 37% increase in the number of mo-
bile video users between 2011 and 2010.We’re hearing about more people cutting thecord to their cable providers and consumingentertainment and news only over broad-band connections. Some of this is occurring
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Figure 4
LikeLike
N t
FollowFollow
LTE Features (Including LTE-Advanced)
Data: InformationWeek Reports
Smart off-load
Highest of any wide area wireless technology with users measuring tens of Mbps today andhundreds of Mbps in the pipeline.
Tens of milliseconds
The delay from radio dormant to active is a fraction of a second.
Sophisticated QoS architecture can control throughput/delay/reliability on application-flow basis.
LTE handles all traffic in the IP domain, which will eventually lead to much better integrationamong voice, multimedia and data applications.
Feature Details
With LTE-A, different application flows will be able to go through specific networks; say, generalbrowsing through Wi-Fi but operator VoIP through LTE.
Support for heterogeneous networks in LTE with improved support in LTE-A sets the stage forlarge eventual capacity gains by integrating macrocells (traditional cells) with picocells (city-block size) and femtocells (house/building size).
All-IP architecture
HetNets
Coordinated multipointprocessing
Throughput
Latency
Instant-on
Quality of service
Combining signals from multiple base stations in LTE-Advanced will improve cell-edge performance.
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Follow Us!
March 2012 8
over Wi-Fi, but an increasing amount of videois consumed over mobile broadband connec-tions. That’s the leading reason usageamounts are growing from tens of mega bytesper month to many hundreds of mega bytes,if not gigabytes.
Couple this with another trend, namely cut-ting the phone cord. Close to 30% of U.S.households have wireless phones only, according to government estimates. Howlong before U.S. consumers question theproposition of paying for a fixed broadbandconnection as well as a mobile broadbandconnection?
A lack of unlimited data plans may slowthis trend, but when you run the numbers,paying for extra data on your mobility planis often less than the monthly cost of a fixedconnection.
The net result is more and more contentstreaming over wireless networks—the samenetworks your employees depend on for theincreasing number of business applicationsthat incorporate video, including collabora-tion, telemedicine, field service and training.
In fact, video consumption on wireless net-works is growing tremendously, and it’s un-clear how long operators will be able to keepup. In the absence of new spectrum, whichunfortunately does not seem to be material-izing nearly fast enough (see “Wireless Spec-trum Doomsday Looms”), the result will benetworks running at capacity.
This unfortunately means two things for IT:congestion and prices that aren’t going down.
ChallengesLTE’s most visible benefit is its high data
throughput, on both the downlink and theuplink. IT teams need to have realistic expec-tations, however, because the capacity of the
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36%
35%
1%
1%
12%10%
43%
47%
24%
15%
16%
52%
5%
1%
3%
2%
6%
3%3%
17%
21%
50%
39%
5%
1%
1%
19%
32%
Thinking about the next 24 months, how critical a role will the following mobile technologies play in business productivity at your company?
Increase significantly in importance
Increase somewhat in importance
No change Decrease somewhat in importance
Decrease significantly in importance
No plans for use
Tablets
Smartphones
Laptops
Netbooks
Kiosk-based Web access
Data: InformationWeek 2011 Mobile Device Management and Security Survey of 323 business technology professionals, August 2011
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Mobile Technology Impact on Productivity
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Figure 5
Like This Report?
Rate It!Something we could dobetter? Let us know.
RateRate
March 2012 9
network is highly constrained and thus proneto congestion. It takes only a handful of usersin a coverage area streaming video to con-sume the entire sector capacity.
What does that mean? Let’s look at somenumbers. According to work done by this au-thor for 4G Americas in a joint analysis of op-erators and infrastructure vendors, LTE as cur-rently deployed has a downlink spectralefficiency of 1.4 bps/Hz. Typical deploymentsby AT&T and Verizon use 10-MHz radio chan-
nels for downlink,meaning the aggregatecapacity in a coveragearea is just 14 Mbps—bandwidth that has tobe shared by multipleusers in coverage areasthat might span three
city blocks in urban deployments. With musicstreaming at 100 to 200 Kbps and videostreaming at rates between 200 Kbps and 5Mbps, depending on resolution and quality, ittakes only a small number of users to grindthings to a standstill. That’s one reason Veri-
zon just announced that, without new spec-trum, it will hit LTE capacity limits in 2013 insome markets.
And network loading isn’t the only factor.Modern wireless technologies, especially LTE,are designed to exploit the highest instanta-neous spectral efficiency based on the qualityof the radio signal. What that means is thatusers close to the base station, and especiallywith a line of sight, will get much higherthroughput than those at the edge of the cellor deep inside a building. Thus averagespeeds may be good, but there is uneven dis-tribution of speeds over the coverage area. Asa result, while LTE on average will deliver ex-cellent performance, IT should anticipate asmuch as a 10-to-1 difference between lowestand highest values.
We’ll discuss in more depth what thatmeans for teams designing mobile applica-tions or working on initiatives to stream desk-tops or software-as-a-service on tablets orsmartphones. On the infrastructure side, itmay be time to revisit adding femtocells andupgrading the wireless LAN to handle de-
mand on-site. Mesh networks are also an op-tion for large campuses or when you need tosupport a temporary influx of mobile users, asat a conference or special event.
No Moore’s Law Here Because users will consume every drop of
network capacity, operators have respondedwith tiered pricing plans that average about$10 per gigabyte. AT&T, for example, has asmartphone plan that provides for 3 GB for$30 and then $10 per gigabyte over that.Streaming 720p quality video at 1.5 Mbps(suitable for watching a movie on a laptop forexample) consumes 0.675 GB per hour. Fewpeople will want to watch video at $6.75 perhour. A video-based training session or video-conferencing at 480p resolution using 0.5Mbps, on the other hand, would cost $2.25per hour. IT and business managers need todecide if that’s reasonable.
As for whether prices will go down, histori-cally they have. But with carriers using costas a tool to depress demand, we don’t rec-ommend betting your budget on less-ex-
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Verizon just announced that,
without new spectrum, it will
hit LTE capacity limits in 2013
in some markets.
March 2012 10
pensive plans. AT&T stated in its Jan. 26 earn-ings call that in the absence of new spec-trum, the company would have to increaseprices and impose data-use restrictions. Werecommend that IT do business planningbased on current pricing, develop insightsinto how much data their various applica-tions actually consume and selectively off-load onto Wi-Fi as per our report, “Conver-gence of 3G/4G and Wi-Fi. ”
Battery life is another challenge that LTEfaces. Nokia Siemens Networks documents thisin a preliminary study that shows LTE devicesconsuming 5% to 20% more power than pre-vious-generation phones, depending on appli-cation used. Multiple factors contribute to highpower demand: displays, data consumption,immature chipset designs that aren’t as fully in-tegrated as they will be in the future and mul-tiradio operation. Displays and LTE are actuallyindependent of each other; it’s just that thelargest, most powerful smartphones sportingLTE also are the ones with larger displays—andlarge displays tend to consume more powerthan any other component.
What is specific to LTE, however, is a morecomplex radio, as well as higher rates of dataconsumption. LTE uses two receive radios toenable 2X2 MIMO operation on the down-link. As for data consumption, an LTE smart-phone can chow down data at a typical rateof 10 Mbps, some five to 10 times faster than
3G. It simply takes a certain amount of powerto operate a radio at high data bandwidth.So the more data received, or especiallytransmitted, the shorter the battery life. Metrico Wireless in one test measured onlyabout one-third the battery l i fe whenstreaming video compared with push-based
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If your users were to lose the capability to conduct the following mobile productivity activities, how great an impact would it have on them? Please use a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “they wouldn’t notice” and 5 is “mass insurrection.”
Lack of Access to Mobile Productivity Activities: Impact on Employees
1 They wouldn’t notice Mass insurrection 5
Communicating information by email
Making a remote connection to the organization’s internal network
Storing data on their mobile/portable devices and using the data while in the field
Using a cloud computing or SaaS application
Note: Mean average ratingsBase: 323 respondents in August 2011 and 307 in March 2010Data: InformationWeek Mobile Device Management and Security Survey of business technology professionals
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4.4
3.6
2.9
2.4
4.5
3.7
3.0
2.3
2011 2010
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Figure 6
March 2012 11
email in an idle state. For IT, that means ensuring that smart-
phones and tablets have enough battery lifeto support business-usage scenarios.
State of Global ConfusionIf you support employees who travel exten-
sively, take that into consideration when se-lecting a device to issue or when setting upbring-your-own-device guidelines.
The good news is that 2G/3G service is nowlargely available glob-ally across six fre-quency bands, whichare supported by manyphones. In other words,you can use a multi-band phone (so long asit’s based on Global Sys-
tem for Mobile Communications/High SpeedPacket Access technology) for 2G and 3G ser -vice all over the world. When it comes to LTE,however, roaming is a particularly sad state ofaffairs, with operators using widely differentbands. For example, U.S. carriers are rolling out
LTE in 700 MHz, Europe is likely to use 2.6 GHz,while China is using an entirely different formof LTE, time division duplex, at 2.3 and 2.5 GHz.Japan will use 1.5 GHz and 2.1 GHz. The ThirdGeneration Partnership Project that developsLTE specifications has in fact specified LTE op-eration in more than 30 bands.
Consequently, for the foreseeable future, it’sunlikely that any LTE phone or modem willwork on other than its home network. Instead,for roaming, it will fall back to 3G (or even 2G)operation. This will be fine for email or Webbrowsing, but if your users need those highLTE speeds in China, they’ll be out of luck.
Even in the United States, the situation iscomplicated with incompatibility among op-erator networks. An AT&T LTE device won’twork on Verizon’s network, for example. That’sfor two reasons. One is that AT&T and Verizonuse different 700-MHz frequency bands. Andeven if a device were able to support both setsof LTE bands, AT&T and Verizon also use differ-ent 3G technologies, so falling back to 3G whenoutside of an LTE coverage area would fail.
There’s also voice to consider. In LTE specifi-
cations, voice can be handled either by fallingback to 2G/3G to place a circuit-switched callor by doing a VoIP call over LTE. The VoIP op-tion requires that the LTE network implementVoice over LTE functionality, which requiresadditional infrastructure on the operator side.Given the complexities involved in this ap-proach, VoLTE isn’t expected to become avail-able until 2013. Until then, voice calls will behandled over the underlying 3G network.New LTE smartphones are designed to simul-taneously handle an LTE data session and 3Gvoice call. Running two radios like this at thesame time does, however, increase powerconsumption. Once VoLTE is the norm forvoice calls, this power issue will go away.
Still, how and when operators implementVoLTE will vary, so consider testing LTE smart-phones—especially before making a volumepurchase—to make sure voice operates as ex-pected, especially when moving on a live callbetween LTE and non-LTE coverage areas.
The final area to monitor is quality of service.LTE employs a sophisticated QoS architecturewith which the network can control items such
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For the foreseeable future, it’s
unlikely that any LTE phone
or modem will work on other
than its home network.
March 2012 12
as bit-transfer reliability, throughput rates, pri-ority and latency. This architecture will be pri-marily employed, at least initially, by operatorsthemselves for making their own services, suchas native VoIP, work reliably. Otherwise, largedata downloads could mess up voice calls. Thefirst customer-accessible QoS application willbe Verizon’s “Turbo” function, with which anapplication can make a call to a network-opti-mization API to request higher bandwidth ona fee basis. Details are still sketchy, but accord-ing to PC Magazine, the API will be available inthe third quarter of this year.
We view this as Verizon putting its toe in thewater to see how it might monetize QoS. Ulti-mately, the QoS architecture could let opera-tors offer premium services that make certainapplications function better (say, video in con-gested networks), or even to offer discountedplans in which users opt in for lower prioritytraffic. (See my report to the FCC on this topic.)
Target ApplicationsShould IT teams ramping up mobility be
encouraged or discouraged by the complex-
ities we’ve discussed? Our net recommenda-tion is to be cautiously optimistic. LTE reallydoes work as advertised, providing jaw-drop-ping throughputs. The biggest threat to thisis congestion. But operators realize that poorperformance will discourage use, so expectthem to manage capacity carefully and to do
everything they can to provide reasonableperformance levels.
For IT teams designing mobile applications,make sure they work reasonably well atthroughput rates lower than those advertised.That’s especially true for apps that requireconstant connectivity. As exciting as it may be
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Summary of LTE Challenges
Data: InformationWeek Reports
Item
Throughput
Pricing
Battery life
Roaming
Voice
Quality-of-service control
Explanation
At about $10 per gigabyte, video can get expensive in a hurry. Prices may not come down veryquickly given network capacity constraints.
With different countries using different radio bands for LTE, don’t expect to be able to use LTEaround the world. More likely devices will fall back to 3G.
Implemented as VoIP, an all-new approach for cellular networks. Hiccups may occur.
LTE has it but it will take some time for operators to figure out appropriate business models.
Shorter battery life in early smartphones due to new technology, consumption of more data,and needing both 3G and 4G radio connections.
Blazing fast but vulnerable to network congestion because of growing popularity of mobilebroadband. Also, all modern wireless technologies have performance that varies based onsignal quality.
Figure 7
March 2012 13
to have a Windows 7 desktop appear on aniPad, that kind of application is vulnerable tocongestion and latency. Traditional client-server applications—say, an Outlook emailclient communicating with an Exchangeserver—are less affected by fluctuatingthroughput. Similarly, background cloud syn-chronization is also relatively immune.
What can IT do to compensate for mobileapps that absolutely have to have fast con-nectivity? Using known (enterprise) Wi-Fi con-nections when available is one answer. PublicWi-Fi, however, can suffer from congestionjust as much as cellular. Beyond that, IT shouldlook for usage options that users can select tominimize bandwidth requirements. A video-conferencing application might have an easyfallback to voice-only operation; for example,Skype provides a simple button to turn off itsvideo. It also dynamically adjusts video qualityfor available bandwidth.
As for pricing, since new spectrum is yearsaway, pricing may remain at current levels forsome time. Most IP networking applicationswill work extremely well over LTE. Be careful,
however, about mission-critical applicationswhere consequences of slow connectivitycould spell trouble.
Of course, that’s always been true. Radio hasbeen and always will be a finicky beast; treatit with respect, and it will be kind in return.
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