Great article about LTE: with respect to being THE technology for mobile broadband (smartphones and tablets). Alex Wanda posits that LTE may replace all other radio technologies. I agree it might for the near term do so from a Major Telco player perspective. However, from hard to reach rural locations where the population density does not support a major player serving the market, I disagree. In these instances, enterprise networks demand service level agreements that either an existing LTE service cannot meet or the LTE service simply does not exist. And a business that is not a telecommunications company does not consider telecommunications an asset but a utility enabling their business. So they will not want to make the considerably larger investment for LTE hardware and spectrum. For businesses with rural assets something that makes more sense is a mix of backhaul technologies (TDD wireless, FDD wireless, unlicensed & licensed, wired – copper, fiber) and a mix of last mile technologies (wired – copper, fiber & WiFi) that provide SLAs and mobile broadband to their workforce. And push-to-talk still rules the day in terms of reach and propagation characteristics that enable it to access hard to reach areas – it’s still the communications method of choice for first responders. There just isn’t a silver bullet.
http://trends-in-telecoms.blogspot.ca/2014/01/could-radio-technologies-be.html