Zweig, whose firm has predicted that global wireless giant Vodafone won't make a return on its 3G investment (including spectrum) until 2013, sees 4G as a replay of 3G: a long, painful slog that will take many years to get up and running–and many more after that to produce financial gains for the carriers.
"Let's replay 3G," she says. "Where are the devices? What is it that people are going to do? How much is the build out going cost? What's the resturn on investment. Is this a vendor dream or a carrier's nightmare?"
The carriers' 3G experience in the U.S. and abroad certainly offer clues as to how long it will take for 4G to become pervasive (and useful) to consumers.
When carriers started rolling out 3G systems in the early part of the decade–Japan's NTT DoCoMo (DCM) in 2001 became the first operator of a 3G network; Verizon followed two years later as the first major carrier in the U.S. to offer 3G–there was a lot of excitement (ample press releases, white papers and briefings by breathless executives) but not a lot for consumers to do with the network.
Some road warriors procured wireless data cards to hook their laptops up to the new network, but the first wave of 3G phones didn't offer much of a multimedia experience.
If you build it…
A few executives at U.S. wireless operators admitted at the time that 3G mainly allowed them to handle high volumes of voice calls at peak times. Not exactly what the futuristic data network was intended for.
【[科技前沿]4G热潮:看一眼现实吧】相关文章:
最新
2017-05-08
2017-02-10
2017-02-10
2016-11-03
2016-11-03
2016-11-03