October 21, 2008: The 4G silos are crumbling; Live from 4G Executive Summit

"The paradigm is shifting," Yankee Group's Chief Strategy Officer, Berge Ayvazian said on-site at the 4G Executive Summit here at Mobile Internet World in Boston. "We are moving from four major groups of operators with unique, siloed network buildout plans to a converged vision for 4G networks."

For evidence of the silos today, however, we need to look back just a few weeks. One day after Xohm's launch in Baltimore two weeks ago, the GSM Association and 16 partner companies launched what looked to be a counterstrike by announcing plans to brand HSPA and future LTE devices as "Mobile Broadband" devices. That's right: the GSMA has co-opted the entire mobile broadband market for HSPA/LTE devices along with 3 Group, Asus, Dell, ECS, Ericsson, Gemalto, Lenovo, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefónica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba and Vodafone.

According to the GSMA and its partners, more than 55 million people subscribe to Mobile Broadband services in 91 countries. According to the GSMA that makes for an addressable market of 70 Million PC buyers who are interested in notebooks with built-in mobile broadband.

All of the major vendors are trying to determine how they will play in HSPA, Ayvazian said. Of course, they still want to be involved with WiMAX and keep a foot in that industry while it continues to evolve, but their attentions have turned to HSPA and LTE, too.

Another interesting point that came out of today's discussion at the 4G Executive Summit today that helped shed some light on the LTE evolution: Two CDMA operators in Canada--Bell and Telus--decided to go LTE but decided to go HSPA first. Evolution with the new architecture makes this a good option for them, Ayvazian said. You don't have to do straight LTE introductions. "They are hedging the bet that LTE will be ready for them when they need it," Ayvazian noted. "If they want to do HSPA today they can."