Carriers find themselves in an unenviable position, facing soaring data demands driven by consumers using powerful and sophisticated wireless devices such as smartphones and tablets. Preparing to meet these demands requires extensive capital investment in their networks, including the transition to “4G” or 4th generation wireless voice, data and video capabilities.
Witness Verizon’s recent growing pains with 4G. The carrier typically enjoys strong customer satisfaction ratings, but not so this time, having instead earned widespread customer complaints about service outages during the busy holiday season.
AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile ran into a different sort of technical problem, that of the regulatory kind, and the carrier is scrambling to find new ways to acquire spectrum to meet today’s (and tomorrow’s) bandwidth demands.
Then there is the cool factor: Wall Street tends to dislike massive capital investments by carriers. Customers care more about the applications and devices introduced by the other duopoly, Apple and Google, and the social networking opportunities offered by Facebook and Twitter. The network is taken for granted.
Nowhere is this more on display than at the giant Consumer Electronics Show, which will be held this week in Las Vegas. Companies use the event to introduce their latest gee-whiz, interconnected devices that will put even greater burdens on carrier networks.
The carriers this year appear to be reducing their presence at the show, perhaps hoping the problem will just go away. It won’t, not anytime soon.
The show floor itself presents its own sort of future irony of bandwidth exhaust, with attendees all trying to do the same thing on their mobile devices, at the same time. Connectivity seems a dream, and one is lucky to squeeze out a cryptic text message or two.
