IT Expo: Advent Of 4G Will Drive New Mobile Ecosystem

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Fourth generation wireless (4G) will change the business opportunities in the mobile sector for solution providers, vendors and everyone else with a stake in networking. Those who embrace key trends now, argued top executives from Skype, Digium and Verizon Thursday, will be first in line to cash in.

The morning keynote sessions at IT Expo in Miami Beach brought a range of views on the mobile consumer, mobility in enterprises, the opportunities around 3G, and 4G wireless and the importance of rich applications.

All three speakers, however, agreed that the dynamic changes in networking -- especially related to IP communications and wireless -- will be a rising tide for anyone who gets his boat in the water in time.

There's an "incredible amount of opportunity for those who change and develop new business models" around these changes, argued Christopher Dean, chief strategy officer at Skype.

"We believe that the advent of 4G has the opportunity to truly unclog the network and deliver the underlying promise for the fourth-wave mobile consumer," Dean said. "By 2013, more people will access the Internet over a mobile device than a desktop. The advent of 4G is going to be very important to delivering a usable experience to those users."

Dean suggested that Skype, the popular consumer VoIP application slowly making its way into the enterprise and the channel, was a disruptive product, and one of many. The mobile user of the future wants multipurpose devices that connect from anywhere, he said, which is why cloud services are of such increasing importance.

He cited market research that predicts there will be 4 billion mobile subscribers by 2013, that 38 percent of mobile phones sold in 2013 will be smartphones, and that 90 percent of smartphones would have a Wi-Fi attach rate by 2014.

"People aren't simply going to be connected to the 4G network," he said. "They're going to be running smarter applications ... on phones, e-readers, everything."

Congestion on 3G networks was limiting 3G's advance, he argued, citing how AT&T's data traffic increased 5,000 percent in the last six quarters. That won't do, Dean argued, at least for long.

"We believe there is a lot of opportunity for carriers to accelerate 4G deployments and partner with application developers to offer differentiated services," he said. "4G is leading to a collision of the Internet industry and the wireless market. Whether this will be a collision or a convergence is really in our hands. We at Skype have no apologies for being disruptive."

Next: Software As The 4G Driver

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