Business life carried on as normal in London last week and especially for Mobile Operators who are feeling better about life after a few years in the financial doldrums (just blame the crisis) and 4G LTE will get us back on track. Certainly, the global stats seem to suggest its full-steam ahead for LTE:

• 395 commercial LTE networks today – growing to 460 by end of 2015
• 500 million LTE subs
• 2,919 LTE devices on the market from 297 different OEMs
• 50% of devices are smartphones and 37% support LTE TDD
• 89% of devices are backward compatible with 3G (98.5% for phones)
• 200 VoLTE smartphones have been announced

So with everything looking rosy for MNOs they can focus on the next big thing, the IoT, and what’s there for them to worry about? Well maybe the Wi-Fi Global Congress held in London last week didn’t register on the MNO Richter scale but those paying closer attention may have noticed a small tremor with its epicentre at the Tower Hotel. Not enough of a shock to reach Paddington maybe but perhaps enough to make me think that MNOs need to be paying closer attention to the emerging Wi-Fi progression from free public hot spot utility to serious player in the IoT eco-system.  (I intentionally leave Enterprise use out of this piece for brevity).

If IoT is the next big driver of revenues in the Telco industry and carriers, integrators and service providers all want to find their position and their slice of the cake in the value chain, then how crucial will wireless be? Are the battle lines being drawn between LTE and 5G, and Wi-Fi? (not to disregard other wireless options in unlicensed spectrum as well).

The Wi-Fi Global Congress made the case for Wi-Fi last week and much of it was compelling. A few factors which caught my attention were:

• 85%-90% of IoT and M2M user cases will be short range
• Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) needs to be ultra-cheap
• Device support needs to plentiful, generic and non-certified
• Wi-Fi in lower frequency bands (900MHz) is on the road map
• Cellular could be a good back haul
• Let’s assume IPv6 is seamless

The route to the technology starting grid has some critical lap times that need to be achieved. The wireless industry in particular is establishing some widely emerging fundamentals needed to support the IoT world:

• Capacity: 1000 fold increase from 7 billion to 7 trillion connections
• Speed: 50MBps (up to 1Gbps for some applications)
• Coverage: truly ubiquitous
• Latency: Zero

Latency? Yes, Latency. I for one do not want to be in a driverless car whilst the control system is buffering incoming data!

As the work hungry SDOs begin to put down on paper the requirements for 5G – doubtless cognisant of all of the above – The Wireless Broadband Alliance are plotting the path forward to make sure Wi-Fi supports all the needs of IoT.

So will battle-lines be drawn, or will peace break out and cellular and Wi-Fi protagonists work together? Some say spectrum may hold the key. Can unlicensed spectrum support the needs and demand of the future? Is this why cellular carriers in the US have just broken all the records in the spectrum auctions earlier in the year? Can Wi-Fi overcome its security doubts? Battery life is another concern. Do these aspects point to an advantage for cellular and macro coverage plays? Perhaps but it’s not all plain sailing either. Is 5G coming to the party too late? Will it be over specified? How important will mobility be? Are device costs too high? Is 5G too complex a technology for what will be largely simple user cases and transactions?

What are the wider implications? If there are indeed going to be 7 trillion connections, then (data) storage is also going to be a big factor and if the preferred method is cloud storage then transport mechanisms will be crucial to shift large volumes of data around the eco system. System Integrators will also be big players, especially where IoT is being used to increase enterprise efficiency. It is obviously a very different model than today’s voice and data bundles for Service Providers to start to understand.

I think we can summarise by saying that we have more questions than answers at the moment but I also wonder if we learnt last week that the Wi-Fi lobby is ahead of the cellular family at the moment, albeit in the early stages of what will be a marathon race. And if the WBA congress last week didn’t quite make the earth move, it did send a shudder and should have sent a wake-up call to MNOs. IoT may well provide the next major shift in revenues but this time round the competition is energetic, strong and able.