Potential Scenarios and Drivers of the 4G Evolution

Nowadays, the mobile Internet communications can play a significant role in the Telecommunications Sector, resolving certain issues and bottlenecks of personal communications, with most European countries close to 100% penetration and a global projection of 4 billion mobile users by 2011. As we are moving to the next generation, we are still lacking the precise definition of the architecture and the successful deployment path of the 4G technology. Several theories have been developed looking at different standards and aiming to select and develop the most promising one. In this paper the authors are introducing and presenting a study that aims to explain a new concept of “4G readiness” revealing long run national strategies for 4G deployment and suggesting some critical metrics that could describe the future of the mobile broadband environment. They describe the methodology, assumptions and discuss the expected results based on similar studies such as the e-readiness study.