Notes from LTE World Summit in Amsterdam
In the first keynote session this morning at Informa’s LTE World Summit, I was tickled by a presentation from Dr Kim Larsen, who has a lengthy but worthy job title (Senior Vice President Technology Service & International Network Economics, T-Mobile).
Larsen gave his speech on the economics of trying make it in mature markets as a stand alone, green field operator. His chat was that a cable operator, say, in the Netherlands, say, would have gnat’s chance of making it alone, given the economics. They may be able to tinker around a bit with providing some indoor coverage, maybe femtocells sitting on the end of cable broadband. But that’s not really a mobile service, and fairly limiting, he said.
Instead, much their best chance would be to seek a partner, perhaps one with a mobile network already, to work with. Yes, that’s what they should do.
But hang on. What is T-Mobile doing handing out business case advice to greenfield operators, perhaps from the cable industry, perhaps in the Netherlands. That’s unduly nice of it. Oh, wait. Cable operator Ziggo just got a heap of LTE spectrum (40MHz) in the country. New entrant Tele2 also got 40MHz. And T-Mobile got, er, 10MHz. So who needs to partner with whom here?
I’ve used this before recently, but if this were football, and I were writing for a mid-market British newspaper, I’d say T-Mobile just issued a “come and get me plea” to Ziggo.
Also in this morning’s session, and picked up by us in our news report, as well as by others, was TeliaSonera’s Tommy Ljunggren’s claim not to have tested or trialled LTE before launch. “Just get on with it,” he urged. He even explicity said to me in a briefing afterwards that TeliaSonera didn’t do any testing. What’s this then from a TeliaSonera press release from August 2008?
“The 4G network will be rolled out gradually in Sweden. A number of test periods with selected customers will be performed, and TeliaSonera estimates to be able to provide services over the new network to both consumer customers and businesses in 2010.”
Tommy?