LTE will not be a competitive differentiator, says NSN exec

Consumers are unlikely to buy 4G mobile services based on speed of throughput and operators’ LTE deployments will even out so quickly that LTE in itself will not be an effective competitive differentiator, according to Mark Neild, head of business transformation, Western Europe, at Nokia Siemens Networks.

Neild’s views run contrary to those held by some operators, including LTE pioneer TeliaSonera and Australian incumbent Telstra, which position their networks squarely as competitive cornerstones.

“Personally I’m not convinced that LTE is a major differentiator,” Neild told telecoms.com. “What LTE does is it makes mobile broadband more affordable because it reduces the cost per delivered megabyte. I don’t think that having the fastest network around is actually going to attract a lot of customers; I’m not convinced that people buy on speed.”

In any case, Neild argued, the capacity and efficiency gains afforded by LTE are likely  simply to generate a lot more mobile broadband traffic. “And with more traffic,” he said, “people don’t necessarily go any faster.” This chimes with an increasingly widely held view that LTE won’t actually solve the capacity crunch because the demand for mobile broadband will fill whatever capacity is made available to it.

If there were to be an advantage it would only fall to those operators that were the earliest to deploy the 4G technology, Neild said, drawing comparisons with carriers that won exclusive iPhone distribution deals with Apple. But he added that deployments will “even out relatively quickly” negating any benefits enjoyed by the earliest adopters.